Page:The Ancient Stone Implements (1897).djvu/419

Rh seems little doubt that this wearing away has been effected during their sojourn in the gizzards of bustards.

Having now described the principal types of arrow-heads found in Britain, it will be well to notice some of the circumstances of their discovery in barrows and with interments, which throw light on the manners and the stage of civilization of those who used them.

I am not aware of any well-established discovery of flint arrow-heads in this country in association with iron weapons, and certainly such a mixture of materials would require careful sifting of evidence to establish it. And yet we can readily conceive conditions under which flint arrow-heads might be present in Saxon graves, either from their having been dug in barrows of an earlier period, in which case a flint arrow-head might already exist in the soil with which the grave was filled; or from the occupant of the tomb having carried an "elf-bolt" as a charm, or even as the flint for his briquet à feu. In the Frankish cemetery of Samson, near Namur, a broken flint arrow-head, almost of a lozenge form, accompanied a human skeleton with an iron sword and a lance; and another stemmed arrow-head (now in the Namur Museum) was found in the soil. At Sablonnières (Aisne) flint arrow-heads were associated with Merovingian remains, and numerous instances of such associations have been adduced by the Baron de Baye. Even in modern times flint arrow-heads have served for this fire-producing purpose. The late Earl of Enniskillen informed me that with flint-guns and muskets in Ireland the gun-flint was frequently neither more nor less than an "elf-bolt" often but slightly modified in form.

The occurrence in Northern Italy of a flint arrow-head, in company with ten of the degenerate imitations of the gold coin of Philip II. of Macedon, known by the Germans as Regenbogen-schüsseln, recorded by Promis, may also have been accidental. I have in my own collection a stone celt which is said to have been found with a hoard of Anglo-Saxon coins of the tenth century in Ireland, but which can hardly be regarded as contemporaneous with them. There are, however, as I have already observed, many well-attested instances in which flint arrow-heads have been discovered in this and other countries in true association with weapons of bronze. Sir R. Colt Hoare records several such in his