590 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT 



A few bones of the dog and some teeth of the horse were found 

 in some of the interments, but not in such numbers or positions as 

 to make it at all probable that the former were the relics of a 

 favourite animal interred with its master, or that the latter were 

 remains which, in like manner, had been buried from similar, or 

 from superstitious notions, or which had been the leavings of the 

 practice of eating horseflesh which we know existed in those days 

 in spite of the efibrts of the Christian priests i. 



Fragments of carbonaceous matter are to be found in Romano- 

 British as also in Anglo-Saxon and undoubtedly Pagan interments. 

 It is a little hazardous to pronounce quite positively as to a piece of 

 black woody tissue that it was put into the grave as charcoal ; and 

 that its blackness is not due to the * eremacausis,' which it has 

 been exposed to for so many hundreds of years. If, however, such 

 matter be in masses of considerable size, which possess on fracture 

 the peculiar lustre of charcoal, and if it have not been impregnated 



funeral feast being abused by the Christians into an occasion of great licence. I do 

 not happen to have met with any evidence to show that food or drink was put into 

 the graves of the early Christians from any influence which any pre-Christian belief 

 may have had upon them as to its possibly being of some use to the departed in the 

 new world. This superstition was of course operative in the case of heathens, and 

 amongst certain of the Scandinavian races (see Lubbock's ' Prehistoric Times,' p. 89) 

 it has lasted even down to our own times. Weinhold tells us (* Altnordisches Leben,' 

 p. 493) that the tobacco-pipe, pocket-knife, and fiUed brandy flask were placed 

 in Swedish graves (it is to be supposed only in remote districts), if not up to the 

 present time, at all events up to the beginning of the present generation. Heathen 

 customs, however, and customs as markedly heathen as cremation, retained their 

 vitality to a very late period in the Baltic regions. (See for this Grimm, loc. cit. ; 

 Wylie, * Archaeologia,' xxxvii. 467 ; and Lindenschmit, * Alterth. heidnisch. Vorzeit,' 

 Heft ii. Bd. ii. ad Taf. vi., for long persistence of heathen customs amongst the Ale- 

 manni. See also Wylie, ' Graves of Alemanni.') 



* For the interment of favourite animals with their masters, see Von Sack en, 

 'Heidnisches Alterthum,' 1865, p. 155; Weinhold, ' Sitzungsberichte Phil. Hist. 

 Klass. Akad. Wien,' Bd. 29, p. 203, 1859. The bones of a large dog were found at 

 Long Wittenham in a Romano-British interment so near to certain human remains 

 as to make it seem possible that the animal had been purposely so placed. For the 

 burial of the horse {Das Trauer-Pferd) in Teutonic graves, and those of other races, 

 see Keysler, ' Antiq. Select.' 1720, p. 168 ; Wylie, ' Graves of the Alemanni,' Archaeo- 

 logia, vol. xxxvi, ibique citata ; Cochet, * Normandie Souterraine,' p. 298. For the 

 suspension of the skull of the horse over graves, see 'Pagan Saxondom,' p. 23. For 

 the practice of eating horse-flesh, see ' Confessional of Archbishop Ecgbert,' c. 38 ; 

 the Decrees of Council held a.d. 785, under the presidency of Gregory, Bishop of 

 Ostia; and ' Penitential of Theodore,' c. xxx. s. 17. See also Lubbock, 'Prehistoric 

 Times,' p. 115; Keysler, 1. c, pp. 322, 340; and Pearson, 'History of England,' 

 i. 138. 



