Page:VCH Northamptonshire 1.djvu/302

 A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE centres of activity. The supply of such perishable objects as personal ornaments would soon run short, and there appear to have been in the western half of the county several rude attempts to imitate the brooches which form such a conspicuous feature in West-Saxon interments. These home-made articles found on the outskirts of a tribal district point not only to an absence of facilities for trading, but to the stagnation and poverty which must have become fairly general after the retirement of the legions from the shores of Britain. Of the seven interments in which weapons were discovered with the skeleton, two deserve special notice, as examples of a practice which may hereafter be found characteristic of a particular rank, tribe or period. There was a close resemblance between graves Nos. 29 and 30, which were about fourteen feet apart and may have been covered by large mounds of earth. Each contained a skeleton face upwards, with a shield placed flat on the floor of the grave ; the body was stretched out in such a manner that part of the remnants of the shield-handle were found under the hip-bones, and the boss with the point upwards was just between the thigh-bones. Two spearheads were found close together on the right side of the head parallel to the body, and in one case an arrowhead lay at the feet. The iron shield-boss was half full of burnt vegetable matter resembling heath or fern-stems ; and the handle of the shield found in grave No. 30 had had a wooden grip riveted to the curved part of the centre, and itself extended right across the shield, being riveted at both ends to the wooden or leather disc which was about five- sixteenths of an inch thick. The spearheads which were attached to staves of a man's height are of common types, with the exception of one the blades of which are in different planes ' to give a spinning motion.* Of the three undoubted instances of cremation in the cemetery^ it is difficult to speak, as the distribution of urn-burials in this country has not been thoroughly investigated, though attention has in recent years been called to the practice by Kemble, Rolleston and Wylie. Urns containing burnt human bones are however mainly confined to Anglian districts, and skeletons to Saxon and Jutish cemeteries, though there are several localities where both rites were practised. The view taken by that zealous antiquary, Charles Roach Smith, was that in cases where cremated remains and skeletons were found in the same cemetery, the urns belonged to prior interments which were disturbed when the graves were dug and afterwards carefully replaced. ' This explanation,' he says, ' will not be at variance with the belief that when cremation had ceased as a general custom, it may in exceptional instances have been used over a considerable period of time. Wherever found, these mortuary urns must be ascribed to the earliest Teutonic tribes which settled in Britain ; for the urns resemble Roman forms and may (in some cases) be of Roman fabric.'* There is no reason to suppose however that urn- 2 Comp.-ire Baron de Baye's Industrial Arts of the Anglo-Saxons, p. 22, pi. i, figs. 4, 6, from Harnham Hill, Wilts. 3 Archtcologta, vol. xxxvii. p. 471. * Collectanea Antijua, vol. v. p. 119. 232
 * Anhtrohgia, vol. xlviii. pi. xxv. grave 1 6.