Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 5.djvu/385

 BERKSHIRE ANTIQUITIES. 289 tliat the simplicity of their mode of interment was the fashion or habit of the tribe. I'or, as Britain in the early times was the ])rey of many bodies of invaders from the continent, there is no donbt that some of them remained and settled, retaining their pecnliar habits and cnstoms, which wonld appear in nothing more distinctly than in their funeral ceremonies. So that in barrows we have a great variety of shapes, contents, and dates ; one is British, and another Roman, a third Saxon, a fourtli a cenotaph, a fifth a l)omidary, &c., while the whole number in the kingdom put together wonld supply graves only for an inconsiderable ])ortion of the population, even in Ca3sar's time, when, however, it is reported by him to have been great. It has been affirmed to me by a gentleman, a native of Germany, that in the isle of Rngen, which is understood to have been the great seat and focus of Teutonic superstition', the barrows are always found in groups of eleven in number, a singularity for which no reason is known. And upon looking through the pages of the history of Ancient Wilts'' the same thing may be observed on Salisbury plain. We find there described at Winterbourne Stoke, a group of barrows eleven in number, three of which turn out to be mere cenotaphs, surrounded and separated from all others, as it were, by an oval bank and ditch of slight elevation. Sir R. C. Hoare remarks upon them, that there is something in this case altogether peculiar. AVell indeed might he say so ; but assisted by a knowledge of the fact above mentioned, we seem to gain a clue to the mystery ; and it surely is not an unfair inference to suppose that either some wanderers from the shores of the Baltic, oi' others who acknowledged the su})erstitions pre- valent in the isle of Rngen, may have seized upon and consecrated this spot for their own use, by drawing a line around it, and withinthrowing up the invariable eleven barrows, although three of them as yet were not wanted. And with regard to the poverty of the barroAVS at Churn, compared with the barbaric wealth of many of those investigated by Mr. Douglas in Kent, or Sir Richard C. Hoare on the downs of Wiltshire, believing as I do, for the reasons already hinted, that it arose rather from a custom of burying nothing, than the having nothing to bury, it may not be uninteresting to illustrate this idea, by the record of an ancient people, among whom the practice actually prevailed, in committing the bodies of their friends to the ' See Cluvef'.s Germaiiia, p. 60(j. '" Southern part, p. 115.