480 
on another elevated part of the same field, very close to this 
mound, a large number of general household implements. 
The whole of them are remarkably well formed, and appear to 
have been constantly in use for a long time, and their adapta- 
tion to the trades are so perfect, that a cooper could use them 
without difficulty at the present time. They consisted of small 
axes fit for cutting willows, small scrapers for stripping them, 
hand-instruments for forcing the willows into place in the 
reeds ; their fences and fortifications were living trees with intertwisted branches ; 
their boats, or coracles, were baskets covered with skins ; their domestic fur- 
niture, defensive armour, even their images employed in their erroneous religion, 
were of basket-work. . . . The monastic historians of the succeeding ages continue 
to mention wicker-work as the principal architectural material used in Britain 
and Ireland, not only for the rude dwellings of the inhabitants, but also for their 
more important public edifices and churches." Glastonbury, supposed to have 
been the earliest Christian church iu England, was, on the authority of William 
of Maimesbury, "a mean structure of wattte-work.* 1 A manufacture which was 
probably progressing for many centuries before the Romans invaded Britain 
must necessarily have acquired a certain amount of refined ornament, as a result 
of so much experience and practice. We have, indeed, indirect evidence that 
the Romans greatly admired the ornamental baskets of the British, which were 
exported in large quantities to Rome, and became fashionable appendages among 
the extravagantly luxurious furniture of the imperial city. Juvenal, writing 
about a.d. 120, mentions the popularity of these baskets: " Adde et bascaudas 
et mxlle escaria" {Juvenal, Sat. xii. v. 46). And that they were productions of the 
British islanders is distinctly stated by Martial— 
"Barbara de pictis veni bascauda Britannis, 
Sed me jam mavult dicere Roma suam." — Martial, lib. xiv. Epig. 99. 
Mr. French also believes that the earliest symbols of the Christian faith — crosses, 
erected by the first Christian missionaries— were constructed of basket-work, 
which was closely connected with tbe earlier pagan or Druidical religion. C«sar, 
writing of the Druids, states that ' ; they have images of enormous size, the 
limbs of which, formed of wicker-work, they fill with living men, which being 
set on fire the men perish enveloped in flames" {De Bell. Gal., lib. vi.). Again, 
Mr. Bateman, in his Ten Years' 1 Diggings* found at Throwley " a deposit of large 
pieces of calcined human bones, which lay within a circular hole in the natural 
soil, about a foot deep, of well-defined shape, resulting from contact with a wooden 
or wncker-ivork vessel, in which the bones were placed when buried, the vestiges of 
which, in the form of impalpable black powder, intervened between the bones 
and the earth " (p. 130). — H. Denny. 
