120 Anglo-Saxon Pottery. 



of tlie island. Somewhat more than twenty years ago, early 

 cemeteries were accidentally discovered in some of the Midland 

 counties, such as Warwickshire, Derbyshire, Nottingham, 

 and Leicestershire, filled with cinerary urns presenting great 

 novelty of character, but which were at first hastily set down 

 as British, though a little consideration was sufficient to throw 

 doubt on the correctness of this appropriation. I believe that 

 Mr. Roach Smith and myself were the first to insist on the 

 Anglo-Saxon character of this pottery, and to point out the 

 evidence that the Angles in Britain usually burned their dead, 

 while the Jutes and Saxons buried the bodies entire. Further 

 discoveries, and a comparison of the various objects found in 

 the urns and in close relationship with them, confirmed the 

 opinion that these urns were purely Teutonic, and that we had 

 thus a pottery presenting its own peculiar characteristics and 

 belonging to our Teutonic forefathers. Our knowledge of this 

 type of pottery was considerably extended by the extensive 

 excavations in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk made by the late 

 Lord Braybrooke, then the Hon. Mr. Neville, whose interest- 

 ing museum at Audley End contains an extensive collection 

 of the finest specimens of the East Anglian urn-ware. It is 

 to these urns that antiquaries now chiefly refer as Anglo- 

 Saxon pottery, and I have given in the accompanying plate 

 six examples from the Audley End Museum, copied from 

 Mr. Neville's handsome volume, entitled Saxon Obsequies, pub- 

 lished in 1852. 



The pottery is usually made of a rather dark clay, 

 coloured outside brown or dark slate colour, which has some- 

 times a tint of green, and is sometimes black. These urns 

 appear often to have been made with the hand, without 

 the employment of the lathe ; the texture of the clay is 

 rather coarse, and they are rarely well baked. The more 

 characteristic forms of the urns are represented in our plate, 

 but they vary in some degree both in form and ornament. 

 The favourite ornaments are bands of parallel fines encircling 

 the vessel, or vertical, and zigzags, sometimes arranged in small 

 bands, and sometimes on a larger scale covering half the 

 elevation of the urn ; and in this latter case the spaces are filled 

 up with small circles and crosses, and other marks, stamped 

 or painted in white. These circles, and some of the other 

 ornamental marks, appear to have been impressed with the end 

 of a stick, cut at right angles and notched. Other ornaments 

 are met with, some of which are evidently unskilful attempts 

 at imitating the well-known egg-and-tonguo and other orna- 

 ments of the Roman Samiau ware, which, from the specimens, 

 and even fragments, found in their graves, appears to have 

 been much admired and valued by the Anglo-Saxons. But a 



