Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 3.djvu/128

106 The venerable church of Pytchley having become much dilapidated, has within the last few years been undergoing extensive repairs; in the course of which numerous kistvaens, or rough stone coffins, situated in general G or 8 feet below the present surface of the churchyard, have been brought to light. Unconnected as they are with the modern interments, which are seldom above 4 or 5 feet deep, I have ventured to consider the place that they occupy as an ancient cemetery, which but for the recent excavation of new and deeper foundations for some of the church walls, might have remained a second thousand years unknown.

I have called them kistvaens: this word has been much restricted in archæology to something nearly synonymous with cromlech, but has been also used to signify those coffins or rather tombs which consist of four stones, three being placed upright on their edges, and the fourth as a covering slab on the top. The poetry called Ossian's, says, in addressing a deceased warrior, "Four stones with their heads of moss are the only memorials of thee." When these stones are large and above ground, as in Kits Cotty House in Kent, they are not graves but tombs: sometimes however they are small, under cairns or heaps of stones, and barrows or mounds of earth, and these probably are the only true kistvaens among them; nor does any reason appear why the name should be confined, as it has sometimes been, to that class which are constructed of only four stones. Like cairns and barrows, the larger kind were designed for memorials or sepulchres,—to be seen; and it is of this kind only that the Gaelic poem speaks, for such only as were above ground would be moss grown: but the kistvaen is properly the receptacle for the body, and is not intended to be seen. Some northern writers have stated that the kistvaen of a man had three principal or upright stones, and that of a woman only two. May not this be part of an ancient northern custom, which in the church of Icolmkill was kept up nearly to the end of last century, of burying males and females in different parts of the churchyard?

The word kist (spelt cist and cista) is found in Welch, Irish, and Gaelic, in Suiogothic and Saxon, as well as in Latin, Greek, and other languages of the same great western family of mankind. Its meaning is nearly identical in all except the Greek; and whilst in general it is pronounced kist,