Page:VCH Bedfordshire 1.djvu/238

 A HISTORY OF BEDFORDSHIRE open question, towards the solution of which the common bronze brooch and small crystal bead, found at the same time, contribute little. It will thus be seen that, apart from the discoveries at Kempston, there is as yet little material for a history of the district now known as Bedfordshire before the Chronicles become explicit and trustworthy. It is the province of archaeology to supply the links that are missing in the written records, and at the same time to test the remainder ; and enough has perhaps been recovered from its soil to show that before the county was constituted there were Anglo-Saxon settlers of at least two branches of the race, who may have approached their future homes from opposite directions. It may be safely laid down as a general rule that in this country cremation was an essentially Anglian rite, as it is almost con- fined to the districts known to have been occupied by the people to whom we owe the name of England. Not that unburnt burials are by any means unknown in those districts ; they are in fact very plentiful, and in some parts of Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire and East Anglia both rites were practised almost to the same extent. But in the centre and south of England cremation is certainly the exception, and is very rarely met with south of the Thames. The presumption is therefore that the Saxons of Essex, Sussex and Wessex, as well as the Jutes of Kent and south Hampshire, preferred to bury their dead in the extended position generally noticed in their districts. Where both methods of interment were adopted in the same cemetery, as at Kempston, the question arises whether the two classes of burials were contemporary, and if contem- porary whether they indicate difference of blood among the inhabitants at that time. Brief and spasmodic as are the early entries in the Chronicle, they do at any rate give some clue to the solution of the question. Authen- tic English history may be said to begin with the supremacy of Kent under Ethelbert in the closing years of the sixth century. Wessex was meanwhile extending her borders, and as the power of the iEscings declined, Northumbria came to the front and was the leading kingdom among the Anglo-Saxons, till the Anglians of Mercia, under the redoubt- able Penda, threatened the northern frontier of the West Saxons in the second quarter of the seventh century. In spite of sundry reverses Mercia maintained her role as the great midland power through this and the following century, but it was not apparently till the year 779 that Wessex ceased to hold territory north of the Thames, and it has yet to be determined how far her dominion extended along the Chilterns and the Cotswolds before expansion was checked by the advance of the Mer- cian southward from the Trent. It is possible that cinerary urns, which occur in some numbers even at Long Wittenham and Frilford in Berkshire, mark in Bedfordshire an Anglian element in the population, before the general acceptance of Christianity rendered uniform the burial customs throughout English territory. If on the other hand cremation had here been the universal heathen rite, it is to be expected that the reformed burials would all be 188