602 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT 



urn found Sept. 1867, in which a few pieces of glass were found 

 together with the bones, and in that of the small unpatterned urn 

 found Jan. 1867, in which the incisor of a hare or rabbit was 

 also found in company with the human remains^ and like them had 

 been subjected to the fire. 



The urns were in most instances at but a very short distance 

 from the surface of the ground, and, shallow as the furrows are 

 (some five inches or so) which it is usual to make in this soil, the 

 upper rims of the urns have in several instances received injury 

 from the plough-share. This superficial position of cremation urns 

 enables us to understand how the many superstitions^ as to their 

 pullulation in the spring, &c. arose, and it is paralleled, we may re- 

 mark,, by the shallowness of the inhumations of the same race, to 

 the consideration of which I now proceed. 



IV. Of Anglo-Saxon Interments in the way of inhumation without 

 orientation^ hut with insignia and in shallow graves. 



The Anglo-Saxons appear to have discontinued cremation, prob- 

 ably at the urgent request of the Christian missionaries, without at 

 the same time adopting the direction of the grave which the usage 

 of their teachers, as well as of their predecessors, would have led 

 them to adopt. The shallowness ^ of many graves containing 

 skeletons extended at full length and adorned with Anglo-Saxon 

 insignia may again be referred to the retention by half-converted 

 proselytes of some of that carelessness as to the disposal of the 

 corpse which marked many heathen races then, as, indeed, it does 

 now. The now well-known insignia of the male and female Anglo- 

 Saxon respectively — to wit, the umbo, the spear, the buckle, and 

 the knife ; the fibulae, the perforated beads, the similarly per- 

 forated glass ornaments ; the ear and tooth picks, the scoops, the 



^ For the belief as to urns being ' natural productions pullulating from the earth 

 like bulbous roots/ see ' Horae Ferales,' p. 86,; For other superstitious relating 

 to them, see Cochet, 'Normandie Souterraine,' p. 124; Wylie, ' Archaeologia,' 

 xxxvii. 46. 



^ For the shallowness of Anglo-Saxon and other Teutonic interments, see Cochet, 

 • Tombeau de Childeric,' p. 41 ; Bloxam, ' Fragmenta Sepulchralia,' p. 47 ; Engelhardt, 

 ' Denmark in the Early Iron Age,' p. 9 ; Akerman, * Archaeologia,' vol. xxxviii, 

 Long Wittenham ; Kemble, Ibid. vol. xxxvii. 1856 ; Wanner, ' Alemannische Todten- 

 feld bei Schleitheim,' pp. 10, 20. 



