CEMETERY AT FRILFOKD. 609 



been elsewhere. But I am not aware that we have any reason for 

 thinking that the Anglo-Saxons, who, rather more than a century ^ 

 after the first invasion, drove the ' Southern Belgae or Firbolgi ' out 

 of Berkshire into Wales and Damnonia, received any accessions to 

 their numbers from regions so far south as Andernach and Cob- 

 lentz 2, where such interments could be easily, and were frequently 

 made ; and it is more probable that a fragment of lava may have 

 been put into a grave in its aspect of a fragment of a millstone, an 

 implement of daily life, than in its aspect of a fragment of the 

 same material as that out of which entire cofiins or the entire 

 ' setting ' of a grave had been made elsewhere. 



On the whole, I am inclined to regard these interments as be- 

 longing to a period of transition from the comparative if not total 

 heathenism of shallower interments without orientation, and with- 

 out the decent regard for the dead which the setting of stones 

 round the graves indicates, to the more distinctively Christian 

 mode of burial without insignia and in cofiins. The greater depth 

 and the direction of the graves I should regard as due to the teach- 

 ing of the Christian missionaries ; the adoption of the very graves 

 used by the Bomano-Britons may have been due merely to the 

 imitative tendencies of the conquering races, or it may be ascribed 

 to the influence of some remnants of the conquered Christians, who 

 may have maintained their religion on suflferance, and their tradi- 

 tions as to the tombs of their fathers during the dark period which 

 intervened between the invasion of Cerdic and the preaching of 

 Birinus. The tricking out of a corpse with insignia of sex, or rank, 

 or employment, seems half heathen to us who have the great truth 

 that we can take nothing out of the world with us impressed upon 

 us at times when we are most open to impressions ; still it is just 

 such a custom as a missionary with the proper amount of the 

 wisdom of the serpent would acquiesce in. Time, such a teacher 

 would know, was on his side, and he would feel that he could afibrd 

 to wait. 



It is possible that the difibrences between these two kinds of 

 Anglo-Saxon inhumation may have been due to some social dif- 

 ferences between the persons severally practising them, and that 



^ See Beale Poste, * Celtic Inscriptions,' 1861, p. 71. 

 2 



the local names near Heidelberg correspond to local names in Kent. 



R r 



Leo, however, in his ' Ortsnamen,* pp. 100-104, has tried to show that most of 



