610 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT 



the deeper graves may have been dug for richer, and the shallower 

 for poorer, persons. But the insignia in both alike are very closely 

 similar, and I incline, therefore, to ascribe the greater care bestowed 

 upon the latter class of interment not to any sense of the favours 

 which a richer person had conferred in times past, but to the 

 greater care which Christianity would teach ought to be bestowed 

 upon the burial of the body. 



The resemblance of the Anglo-Saxon manners and customs to 

 those of the kindred but hostile race of the Franks is very familiar 

 to the English explorer of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, if he be ac- 

 quainted either with Lindenschmit's work, * Das Germanische Tod- 

 tenlager beim Selzen,' or with the works of the Abbe Cochet so 

 often referred to in this paper. The Merovingian ^ and the Anglo- 

 Saxon resembled each other in their abhorrence of city life ; and 

 also in the melancholy point of their short-livedness which has 

 already been alluded to, and which appears to be explicable by the 

 fact that in the times we have been dealing with these races pre- 

 ferred a country life, it is true, to a town life, but a country life in 

 a camp, not a country life in a village. As Temple (cit. Rapin, p. i6i) 

 and Leibnitz long ago remarked, there are other points which serve 

 to show the community of origin of the Frank and the Saxon, such 

 are their reckoning time by the nights, as the ' fortnight,' to say 

 nothing of their closely allied languages. A minor point of com- 

 munity is furnished by their common employment of the Roman 

 tiling to set round their graves. On the other hand, the Saxons 

 retained the custom of cremation a century and a half longer than 

 the Merovingians, and their urns were not lathe-turned, whilst 

 those of the Selzen Teutons were. (See Lindenschmit, 1. c, p. 15.) 

 Holy-water vessels have not been so constantly found at Frilford 

 as they appear to have been at Selzen, from the beautiful figures 

 given in the monograph referred to, or as they are expressly stated 

 to have been by the Abbe Cochet in the Merovingian interments 2. 



^ Gibbon, vi. 336, chap, xxxviii. for Merovingians ; Tacitus, * Germania,' chap. 16, 

 for Germans generally; Coote's ' Neglected Fact in English History,' p. 123 ; Ammi- 

 anus Marcellinus, xvi. 2-12; Pearson, op. cit. i. 264. Augustine brought Frank 

 interpreters with him into Kent, Bede, ' H. E.' i. 25, and the Welsh poems sometimes 

 speak of the Saxon enemy as a ' Frank ; ' see Skene, * Four Ancient Books,' i. 460. 



* See 'Archdologie Ceramique,' pp. 11, 13. 



