Page:VCH Northamptonshire 1.djvu/322

 A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE Anglians of Northampton, were freed from the supremacy of Mercia.' The death of Penda was the signal for the disintegration of Mercia, and though the revival was not long delayed, it was under a Christian prince that the kingdom of Mercia, which as early as 628 had apparently extended as far south as Cirencester, recovered prestige that was to reach a climax under Offa at the close of the succeeding century. The altered circumstances in which Mercia emerged from her eclipse are reflected in the domain of archeology, where the new religion left its mark in the gradual abolition of the funeral rites of paganism. There is some historical warrant therefore for assigning those cemeteries in Northamp- tonshire where urn-burial occurs side by side with inhumation to the period of Mercian supremacy. It is interesting to notice that, so far as information is available, the skeletons that are found in the neighbourhood of urn-burials are, in this county at least, oriented in the Christian manner ; and the three instances of cremation at Marston Hill are not sufficient to invalidate the rule that in the cemeteries of the south the skeletons were deposited in the earth unburnt. Anglian influence in these sites is plainly discernible, and many of the relics point to a connection with Warwickshire and Leicestershire, which were no doubt colonized from the Trent valley. It is hazardous to draw a distinction within such narrow limits of space and time, but there are grounds for believing the region north of the lower Nene to have passed into Anglian hands at a somewhat later date than the west, seeing that the district in question, known to this day as Rockingham Forest, was not sufficiently fertile to encourage cultivation. That the Romanized Britons found here seclusion from the Teutonic intruders is more than probable ; and geographical considerations rather countenance the hypothesis that the Rockingham area was eventually entered by Anglians from the fen country bordering on the Wash. It has already been noticed that the Teutonic settlers eastward of Northampton seem to have practised crema- tion exclusively till the introduction of Christian burial ; and it is in East Anglia that cremation seems to have been most uniformly in vogue. Between Norfolk and Peterborough however was the territory of the some- what mysterious people called Gyrvii or Gyrwa. They were recognized as a political unit, if not as a distinct race, as late as the time of Bede, who mentions them more than once in his Ecclesiastical History, but very little is known of their affinities. There is no reason to doubt his explicit state- ment ' that Peterborough was included in their country, nor is it likely that their attachment to the Fens would keep them from following the line of the Nene, which at that period can have been little better than a swamp, but gave access to a strip of valley that must have been thickly populated in the Roman period. Along this waterway there would be no natural obstacle to an advance, and it will be noticed that the Anglo- Saxon sites in Northamptonshire where urn-burial has been traced are all similarly situated on the banks of the Nene or its tributaries, where the upper-lias clay exposed by the action of the stream is surrounded at 250
 * Bk. iv. chap. vi.