658 FURTHER RESEARCHES IN AN 



neighbours.' Without raising any objection to the view which 

 would assign the tendency to attack one's neighbours en masse to 

 the religion which is ordinarily said, and by members of the Society 

 of Friends believed, to teach lessons of peace, I would remark, that 

 history does not seem to me to bear out Mr. Kemble's view, and 

 that the finds in many unmistakeably Teutonic burials by inter- 

 ment seem to me to suggest the idea of heathendom by their 

 shallowness, their want of orientation, their possession of secular 

 relics, and by the frequency, especially in the north, with which 

 the skeleton is discovered to be in the contracted position. In the 

 case of Kent, the great salient facts recorded by the historians as 

 to the conversion of -^thelberht are almost or even quite as in- 

 disputable as the facts of the ' Inventorium Sepulchrale ' with 

 regard to the comparative rarity of cremation urns in that earliest 

 to be founded of Saxon kingdoms. It is true, as Mr. Kemble him- 

 self has shown (* Horae Ferales,' p.* 91), that cremation urns are 

 not entirely unknown in Teutonic cemeteries in Kent; but no 

 one can doubt that this comparative rarity in that locality, when 

 coupled with the facts that Kent was sufficiently powerful and 

 thickly peopled for the Frankish King Charibert to give his 

 daughter to the King of Kent, and that this King ^thelberht, 

 and, by consequence, most of his Court, were nevertheless heathen, 

 shows that a Saxon population, at all events when firmly estab- 

 lished in a country, could give up cremation before taking up 

 with the teaching of the missionaries. 



The drawings which I lay before the Society^ represent a num- 

 ber of urns from a Saxon cemetery at Sancton, co, York, a village 

 a little south of Market Weighton, and the once better known 

 Goodmanham. These urns, the acquisition of which I owe to the 

 kindness of Charles Langdale, Esq., of Houghton Hall, mark, as 

 I believe, and as far as is known, the northern limit of cremation 

 as practised to any considerable extent by Teutons in the north of 

 England. But, little ^ as we do know of the history of the Con- 

 quest of Northumbria, we have some reason for believing that 

 -^thilfrith was an unbeliever, and that by his great victory at 

 Dsegsastan in 603 a Pagan Saxondom was established under his 



* These drawings were reproduced in the ♦ Archaeologia,' plate xxxiii, 1879, vol. xlv. 

 ^ For Ptateraeuts as to this littleness, see Stubbs, ' Constitutional History,' p. 61; 

 iFreeman, 'Norman Conquest,' i. 25, 26. 



