OF THE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST OF ENGLAND.^ 683 



recognised by virtue of their insignia ; and mixed up with their 

 bones may be found the bones of the Romano-Briton who occupied 

 the grave before them. But further, in some such cases it is pos- 

 sible to be nearly sure that we have to deal with an Anglo-Saxon, 

 even though there be no arms or insignia in the grave. These 

 cases are those in which we have evidence from the presence of 

 stones under the skull that no coffin was employed in the burial, 

 and in which stones are set alongside of the grave as if vicariously. 

 In many such cases the craniological character of the occupant of 

 such a grave lends some colour to this supposition. But upon such 

 identifications as had been come to in the absence of arms and 

 insignia I have based no statistics. The results of the statistics of 

 the cemetery which I have explored, as stated above, when brought 

 to bear upon the large questions alluded to at the beginning of the 

 paper, would lead us to think that the Anglo-Saxons conquered, 

 firstly and most forcibly on account of the shorter lives they led. 

 An old Anglo-Saxon male skeleton was a rarity, an old Romano- 

 British one a very common ' find ' in my excavations. Nothing 

 however in this life is, from the natural history point of view, more 

 characteristic of real civilisation or real savagery than this point 

 of the duration of life. The Merovingian Franks had, like the 

 followers of Cerdic, been observed to have led short lives, merry — as 

 the Capitularies of Charlemagne teach us of their kinsmen — with 

 those kinds of mirth the end of which is heaviness. The next 

 question which suggests itself upon the mastery of these facts and 

 figures is. Were not these men merely soldiers encamped ? are not 

 these statistics just such as a cemetery similarly explored now-a-days, 

 say at Peshawur or Samarcand, would yield ? Not altogether such ; 

 for, however improbable it may seem, it is nevertheless true that 

 the Anglo-Saxons, at all events in Berkshire, appear to have brought 

 their own wives with them, and not to have provided themselves 

 with wives from the families of the conquered previous inhabitants. 

 The figures of the crania of females interred with Anglo-Saxon 

 insignia, when compared with figures of the crania of Romano- 

 British women, show a very great difference, to the disadvantage of 

 the former of the two sets of females. The soldiers of Cerdic, who 

 conquered this part of Berkshire about half a century or so after 

 the time of the first invasion, resembled the soldiers of Gustavus 

 Adolphus in very little else, but they appear to have resembled 



