Rev. Wm. Greenwell on Two Ancient Interments. 417 



The Cist, which lay nearly due east and west, was formed 

 of four side stones, with two covers ; it was 4J feet long, 3± 

 feet wide at the east, and %\ feet wide at the west end, and 

 2 feet deep. The body had been laid on the left side, the 

 most frequent, with the head to the east ; the position of the 

 hands was not observed, but they usually are found placed 

 in front of the chest, or up towards the face. This contracted 

 form of interring the body is one almost universal in pre- 

 Roman burials in Britain ; and, indeed, prevails over a great 

 part of the world in old interments, as also in those of modern 

 savages. It is certainly not due to the requirements of space, 

 for I have frequently met with bodies deposited in graves of 

 from 7 feet to 10 feet in diameter, and where the contracted 

 body occupies but a very small space of the area of the grave. 

 I am inclined to refer it to the way in which people with 

 scanty covering during the hours of rest were accustomed to 

 sleep, a position in which, such being the case, they would 

 most frequently die. It has been suggested that this mode of 

 placing the corpse in the grave was due to a fancied resemb- 

 lance to the position the foetus occupied in the womb, and 

 that it was sought to lay the dead to rest in mother earth 

 after the fashion they had once occupied before birth ; the 

 suggestion does not, however, for many reasons, appear to 

 me to be a plausible one. 



The button is conical- shaped, £| inches in diameter, 

 and pierced on the back with two holes, which join about the 

 centre, but do not come through the front ; through this 

 perforation a thong would be passed, thus constituting a very 

 serviceable dress-fastener. Buttons of a similar kind have 

 been found throughout Great Britain; in Northumberland, 

 two were met with in a cist near Tosson, in Coquetdale. I 

 have discovered several on the Yorkshire wolds, in some 

 cases highly ornamented, and to the number of six in one 

 grave ; there placed in front of the chest of the man whose 

 dress they had once fastened, and whose body was accom- 

 panied by several implements of bronze. There can be no 

 doubt that these articles served the purposes of buttons, and 

 their occurrence in graves and cists would seem to imply 

 that the habit was to bury the dead, at all events in some 

 cases, in the clothes they wore when alive : this appears to 

 be evidenced by the finding of pins and other fasteners in 

 association with the body, though it must be admitted that 



