CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 613 



* frames ' of coins bearing such names as those of Gratian tempts us 

 to explain the phenomenon bj the hypothesis of the young men 

 having been taken away to fight and die in distant countries under 

 such commanders as Magnus Maximus. Persons who some years 

 ago had the opportunity of seeing village after village on the 

 continent of Europe inhabited by forms like that of Tithonus, will 

 be ready to accept this explanation as sufficient to account for the 

 fact. Till I came to add up the various individual identifications 

 of the two sexes which I had made from time to time, and without 

 any reference to any historical relations which the skeletons or 

 their owners might have possessed during life, I held this hypothesis 

 myself. But on adding up the numbers of males and females 

 severally, I find that I have assigned no less than 48 of the 123 

 bodies to the male sex, and only 34 to the female. Even if we add 

 to the female series the 11 individuals as to whose sex I have felt 

 myself unable to pronounce, the force of this arithmetic is but little 

 impaired, or, indeed, not at alP. The fact of the great pre- 

 ponderance in number of aged remains may be explained by a 

 reference to the present condition of the population on the spot. 

 Frilford is renowned for its salubrity and the longevity of its 

 inhabitants at the present day. The fact of the great preponderance 

 of male skeletons is not so easy of explanation, and it is especially 

 difficult of solution when we note that more than half of these male 

 skeletons are aged ones. Barracks and prisons furnish an excess of 

 male skeletons in their burial-grounds, I apprehend, but not an 

 excess of aged male skeletons. I am not aware that the monks of 

 the west had established themselves among the Atrebates before 

 the time of Cerdic ^. And the only hypothesis which has suggested 



* It has been suggested to me that the soldiers, who, on the hypothesis before 

 us, are supposed to have left their bones in foreign lands, may have taken wives 

 with them. But it could not have been often in days of such difficulty in travelling 

 that Lycoris 



'Perque nives alium perque horrida castra secuta est.* 

 The soldiers of Gustavus Adolphus were, very many of them, married men, but I do 

 not know that their wives accompanied them to his famous battle-fields. Tlie men, 

 too, who fought and won at Liitzen had very different motives and incentives from 

 those of the recruits who followed the standards of the various * tyrants ' and pre- 

 tenders of the later Roman Empire, and it is only by means of such motives and 

 incentives that men can be got in any large numbers to break away from family ties 

 and join distant military expeditions. 



' See, however, 'Hist. Mon. de Abingdon,' i. pp. 2, 3. 



