April 28, 1870] 
NA TOLLE 
661 
ON THE CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 
LHE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST OF ENG- 
LAND, AS ILLUSTRATED BY ARCHAZO- 
LOGICAL RESEARCH* 
THERE are numerous pomts of general and living interest re- 
lating to the Anglo-Saxon conquest of this country which are 
yery largely dependent upon archeological research for their 
elucidation. Amongst these may be mentioned the question of 
the extent to which the Romano-British population previously 
in occupation was extirpated; the question of the relative 
position, in the scale of civilization, held by victors and van- 
quished ; and the question of the extent of our indebtedness as to 
language and laws to one or other of the two nationalities. 
Light is thrown even upon points apparently of the most purely 
archzeological character from such literary sources as histories 
of the nomenclature of localities ; as the records of monasteries ; 
as illustrations in manuscripts ; and as laws. But the graves of 
the Anglo-Saxons and their contents have been for the present 
investigator the primary ; and such literary works as those alluded 
to, and such as many of those published under the direction of the 
Master of the Rolls and by the Early English Society, have 
been only a secondary source of information. They have how- 
ever, been by no means neglected by him. 
It may be well to begin by stating how an Anglo-Saxon is to be 
distinguished froma Romano British interment. Anglo Saxons, dur- 
ing the period of their heathendom, which may be spoken of rough- 
ly as corresponding in England to a period of some 200 or 230 
years onwards from their first invasion of the country in force, were 
interred in the way of cremation, and in ums of the pattern so 
common in the parts of North Germany and of Denmark 
whence they are supposed on all hands to have come. A refer- 
ence to any manual of archze@logy, or an inspection of any such 
series as that figured by Mr. Kemble in the Hore Ferales from 
the Museum in Hanover, will show the unmistakable identity of 
the pattern, fashion, and moulding of such urns as these, and 
these which I have had figured after digging them up in Berkshire. 
The Romans and Romano-Britons had given up the practice 
of burning the dead long before the time of Hengist and Horsa. 
When they practised it in England, their urns were of a very dif- 
ferent kind, being well burnt and lathe-turned. All the Ro- 
mano-Britons I have exhumed in the particular cemetery which 
has furnished me with the tolerably wide basis of something ap- 
proaching to 200 interments of all kinds, were interred much as 
we inter our dead now. They were oriented, though by the aid 
of the sun and not by that of a compass ; and, dying in greater 
numbers in the winter quarters of the years, had the bearings of 
their graves, as has been observed by the Abbé Cochet, point- 
ing a little South of east. Now a Romano-British interment in 
this way of burial has to be distinguished from an Anglo-Saxon 
one in the same way of non-cremation ; and this may be done 
thus. The Romano-Britons never buried arms nor any other 
implements which could be of use in this, and might be supposed 
to be of similar use in the next world, together with a corpse. 
Funeral ware, such as lacrymatories, I have not found in com- 
pany with coins of the Christian Emperors ; but such articles 
stand in relation to quite a different idea from that which caused 
the Teuton to inter the dead with spear, shield, and knife ; to 
say nothing of the less common sitw/a and sword. 
The Anglo-Saxons are supposed by Kemble to have relin- 
quished cremation only when they assumed Christianity ; it is a 
little difficult to be quite sure of this ; at any rate, when we find, 
as we often do, an Anglo-Saxon in a very shallow grave, which 
may point to any one point of the compass, and in the arms 
or other insignia which it contains, gives us such clear proof 
that its tenant thought that whatever he may zo¢ have 
brought with him into the world, at all events he could 
take so hing out, we are tempted to differ even from such 
authority 1s Mr. Kemble’s. But I am inclined to think that in 
some cases it is possible to identify the tenant of a properly 
oriented grave as having been an Anglo-Saxon. In many such 
graves Anglo-Saxons are to be 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 possible 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 
* A paper read at the Royal Institution on Friday evening, March 25, 1870, 
was employed in the burial ; and in which stones are set alongside 
of the grave as if vicariously. In many such cases the cranio- 
logical 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 were in a considerably 
lower grade of civilisation than the people they 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 matter 
of the duration of iife. 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 con- 
quered 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 
them in being accompanied by their wives. Whether this was 
the case elsewhere in England, I do not know ; I am inclined to 
think that savagery was no great recommendation, nor heathendom 
either, to a Christianised female population in those days ; and 
that the reluctance which would on these grounds interpose itself 
to prevent inter-marriage between Romano-Britons and Saxons, 
sets up as great an @ fier? improbability against the theory which 
assumes that such inter-marriages did take place, as the difficulty 
of bringing wives over in the ships in those days sets up in its 
favour. _ 
Indeed, on the hypothesis of much inter-marriage the actu- 
ality of our Anglo-Saxon language is a very great difficulty. We 
do speak a language which, though containing much Celtic and 
a good deal of Norman-French, is nevertheless ‘‘ English.” 
Now we know, from finding cremation urns of the Anglo- 
Saxon type all over England nearly, that the whole of the 
country was overrun by a heathen population ; to thus overrun it, 
this population must have been (relatively at least) numerous : 
add to the two conditions of heathendom and multitude which 
may be considered as proved, the third condition of isolation which 
may be considered as matter for dispute ; and then the 
fourth of this heathendom and isolation lasting from the time of 
Hengist to that of Augustine; and the present fact of our 
language being what it is is explained. 
For proving anything as to the period of which I have been 
speaking, a period which is rendered Pre-historic, not so much 
by conditions of time as by conditions of space, the absence of 
contemporary historians having been entailed by geographical 
and political isolation, arguments of two kinds, literary 
arguments and natural history arguments, must be employed. 
Neither the one kind nor the other is sufficient by itself. 
The empires of the natural sciences and of literature touch at 
many isolated points, and here and there they lie alongside 
of each other along lengthy boundary lines. But empires need 
not be hostile though they be conterminous ; and that the 
empires of which we haye just spoken may be united 
happily and in a most efficient alliance for work in 
common, may be seen from the title-page of that most 
excellent German periodical, the ‘Archiv fir Anthropologie,’ 
where we have the name of the Physiologist Ecker coupled in 
editorship with that of the Antiquarian Lindenschmit. The 
necessity for a combination of the two lines of evidence and 
argument is as obvious when we have to controvert, as when we 
have to establish a conclusion. If you have to attack or resist a 
force comprising both cayalry and infantry, you must have both 
