The Hall of Waltheof/Chapter I

HERE was once a hermit called Guthlac whose life was written by one Felix. This writer wanted his readers to think that the matter of his book was put in proper order, so he said in his preface "the beginning I have put at the beginning and the end at the end." Now I wish I could be so orderly as this old writer, because it is not easy to make either a beginning or an end of a subject when the facts which are known to us are very few, and the time is very far off.

In seeking for the origins of our local history the first thing we have to do is to look about and see whether we cannot find a few scratchings on the soil, a few old bones, pots, earth-works or stone-works which will tell us something of that far-off time, and of men and women whose ways were very unlike ours, but from whom, with an intermixture of races, we are descended. And in examining any English parish, township, or large district such as Hallamshire, we shall see that little else of a tangible or visible kind has come down to us from primitive times. When history is silent and almost every other record is gone we cannot do more than argue from such scanty remains and from analog. We can reason from survivals in folklore, in village communities, and in architecture, and though we may learn little we shall assuredly learn something worth knowing about the far-off past. The history of a parish may be as interesting as the history of a nation. In the history of a nation we see things, as it were, through a telescope; in local history we see them through a microscope. And the objects that we can see in the field of the smaller instrument may be quite as instructive and interesting as those which we can see in the field of the larger one. The value of the objects seen will depend firstly upon the things which we are fortunate enough to catch and bring into view, and secondly upon the efficiency of the instrument.

I will begin with a burial urn, not because it is absolutely the oldest relic of antiquity in Hallamshire, but because it is one of those interesting objects which appeal at once to our senses and take us at a bound into the prehistoric past.

In the spring of 1887 a baked cinerary urn containing human bones, a small cup, and a damaged bronze knife was found at Crookes. The urn is figured in the engraving. These ancient remains were discovered, as is usual in such cases, on the highest point of a hill. They were not covered by a mound, and they lay from six to eight inches below the natural surface, or what appeared to be the natural surface, of the ground. The remains lay within two feet of the boundary of an old lane called Tinker lane or Cocked Hat lane leading at right angles from the top of the village street at Crookes and pointing towards the Rivelin valley. The position of this burial by the road side is well worthy of note. In Sweden and Denmark, according to Vigfusson, monumental stones called bauta-steinar (road-side monuments) "used to be placed along the high road, like the sepulchral monuments of old Rome." Amongst the Romans, says Becker in his "Gallus," "whoever could afford it, selected a spot outside the city, in the most frequented situation, as on high-ways, and here a family sepulchre was erected." It is, of course, impossible to say positively whether the urn at Crookes was purposely deposited by the side of the highway, or whether the highway existed so long ago. But it is remarkable that it should have been found within two feet of its boundary, and there can be no doubt that, as I shall show in a subsequent chapter, Tinker lane is an old highway.

The urn which is 9½ inches in height and measures 26 inches round its largest circumference is a vessel baked of rather coarse clay, and of a reddish, brown, or earthy colour. It is now deposited in the Weston Park Museum, where it can be compared with many other urns of the same kind discovered by Thomas Bateman in Derbyshire. At the museum I had the contents of the urn turned out upon a large sheet of paper, very much to the disgust of an old gentleman who regarded my conduct as worse than sacrilege. They consisted almost entirely of fragments of human bones of a grey or dirty white colour, some of them, however, being blackened by the fire to which they had been subjected. I could make out one or two pieces of vertebras, and a considerable piece of the skull, showing the sutures. A part of the jaw—the lower one, I think—is particularly well preserved, for the sockets into which the teeth fitted, with their thin divisions, are wonderfully perfect. From the smallness of the jaw I should say that the remains were those of a person of small size, but I must not pretend to give opinions on points of anatomy. The urn had been enclosed within another urn which was made of a coarser clay than the one which held the bones collected from the pyre, and a few fragments of this outer urn are amongst the ashes in the urn deposited in the museum. Mr. Watkinson who found the remains tells me that the inner urn was placed upside down within the outer and coarser vessel. The urns, he says, lay so near to the surface that roots of grass clung to the outer one when it was removed from the ground. The urns were surrounded by a deposit of charcoal. At the bottom of the inverted urn were a bronze knife or "knife dagger" and a small cup of the kind which antiquaries provisionally call the "incense cup," having two small holes in one side. This smaller vessel is made of finer clay than the urns and is lighter in colour. Mr. Watkinson told me that the knife was bent in two or three places when he found it. Mr. Watkinson also spoke of "the bead or drop" at the end of the knife, and, as the edges are yet quite sharp it appeared to me that the point was always blunt, and that the instrument was intended to be used not as a poniard to stab with, but as an instrument to cut with; that it was an instrument of peace, not of war. Unfortunately it was accidentally broken into several pieces before it was deposited in the museum. The knife must have been an object of value to its owner. According to Caesar the Britons used imported bronze, from which we may perhaps infer that they did not in his time make bronze weapons themselves. To its owner it may have been as precious as a handsome Sheffield knife would be to a modern savage. Posidonius the Stoic, with whom Cicero studied at Rhodes, has left a description of a Gaulish banquet, which is, of course, applicable to the British, as well as to the Continental, Gauls. At these banquets, he informs us, "there was always plenty of meat, both roast and boiled, of which they partook 'rather after the fashion of lions,' for they would take up the joint and knaw at it; but if a man could not get the meat off, he would use his little bronze knife, which he kept in a separate sheath by the side of his sword or dagger." We are reminded of Chaucer's description of the miller who bore a Sheffield thwitel, or, as one might call it, a portable table knife, in his hose. The miller too, like the ancient Gaul, carried a "long panade" or two-edged knife, and a sword, in addition to his thwitel. The miller's accoutrements seem like an exacl parallel to the accoutrements of the Gaul as described by Posidonius, and the thwitel seems to be the direct descendant of the bronze knife with the blunt point which this inhabitant of Crookes carried about with him in the dawn of our local history, and probably before the Roman had set foot on our shores.

But what is most remarkable about this bronze knife is that it was purposely damaged before it was put into the urn. Its appearance when found is represented in the drawing, Mr. Keeling having fitted the broken pieces together on sawdust so as to get the actual shape which it bore when first laid in the urn. This could be well done as the parts fit accurately together and the bronze is bright at the points of fracture. Recent investigations amongst the natives of Central Africa, and in the burial mounds of the Northmen in Sweden and Norway, will enable us to see, firstly, that the religious practice of purposely damaging the articles which were buried with the dead still exists in the world, and, secondly, that it was common at a certain period amongst the Northmen. The Rev. Duff Macdonald in a book called Africans, has recently described the rites and customs of tribes inhabiting the centre of Africa. In an account of a native funeral he says:—

"Along with the deceased is buried a considerable part of his property. We have already seen that his bed is buried with him, so also are all his clothes. If he possesses several tusks of ivory one tusk or more is ground to a powder between two stones and put beside him. Beads are also ground down in the same way. These precautions are taken to prevent the witch from making any use of the ivory or beads.

"If the deceased owned several slaves an enormous hole is dug for a grave. The slaves that were caught immediately on his death are now brought forward. They may be either cast into the pit alive, or the undertakers may cut all their throats. The body of their master or their mistress is then laid down to rest above theirs, and the grave is covered in.

"After this the women come forward with the offerings of food, and place them at the head of the grave. The dishes in which the food was brought are left behind. The pot that held the drinking water of the deceased and his drinking cup are also left with him. These, too, might be coveted by the witch, but a holt is pierced in the pot, and the drinking calabash is broken."

Now it is certain that the inhabitants of England at a remote period were accustomed to bury cups containing food and drink, as well as articles of value, such as weapons and jewels, with their dead. Of this practice the numerous English barrows which have been opened supply the fullest proof. If then the funeral rites of these modern Africans are found to resemble the rites of the old inhabitants of Great Britain in other respects is it not likely that the comparison will also hold with regard to the damaged poniard or "the hole pierced in the pot"? Is it not likely that the same religious custom of breaking the goods deposited with the dead once existed in England and for the same purpose ? In Africa the avowed object, at this very day, of breaking and damaging the cups and other offerings or goods buried with a dead man is to prevent "the witch," who is supposed to be answerable for his death, from coveting or using them. It would seem that in the popular belief the dead, as well as the living, had their crosses and vexations.

That the ancient Northmen, like the modern Africans, were accustomed at one stage of their history, to break, twist, pierce, or otherwise damage the articles which they buried with their dead is apparent from great numbers of purposely damaged objects which are constantly being found in Scandinavian grave mounds. Mr. Du Chaillu has given illustrations of great numbers of purposely damaged weapons in his recent book called "The Viking Age." He says:—

"Connected with the burning of the dead was the intentional damage done to objecls which were exposed to the heat of the funeral pyre. Special care seems to have been taken to render swords and other weapons thoroughly useless. Swords are cut on the edges, bent and twisted; shield bosses are dented or flattened; and jewels and other objects are entirely ruined, and the illustrations seen in these volumes will show how thorough the destruction was. Bent swords and shield bosses, etc., were sometimes placed over the cinerary urn, at other times they were put on their side."

In a footnote he says, "In an urn in a mound near Veile, Jutland, was found a bent bronze poniard; and in another mound at Mors, Jutland, an urn containing burnt bones, and a bent bronze poniard."

Objects intentionally damaged are also found in the bogs of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. " Here also," says Mr. Du Chaillu, "as in the graves where the bodies were burnt, we find objects intentionally damaged. This bending, twisting, and hacking of weapons seems to have been a religious custom." As the Romans did not bury weapons with their dead this urn burial at Crookes cannot, for this reason alone, be ascribed to that people. Nor can it be ascribed to the long-headed inhabitants of these islands who buried their dead in long chambered barrows and to whom the use of bronze and other metals was unknown.

I think we may say that the inhabitants of Hallamshire who burnt their dead on the funeral pyre, who pierced the cup, and twisted the poniard were of the same race as those dwellers in Scandinavia, or on the shores of the Baltic, who, in obedience to religious custom damaged the weapons and broke the cups which they laid in the grave mound. In Scandinavia these broken chattels are found along with splendid remains of northern art—remains which show that side by side with fantastic burial customs and creeds there existed a high degree of civilization. We are not to suppose that the old inhabitants of Hallamshire who buried their dead in urns on the hills were absolute barbarians. They must have been more or less acquainted with agriculture and with the arts known to their northern kinsmen beyond the sea.

The evidence shows that the interment at Crookes took place in the early Bronze Age. As showing the degree of civilization to which the people of that period had attained I may mention that they were familiar with the surgical operation of trepanning or trephining the skull. A single example of a trepanned skull was found a few years ago in the Island of Bute along with an urn decorated like the one found at Crookes and a small piece of thin bronze, but in France the fact has been established from a great number of cases. "Trepanning the human skull for therapeutic purposes," says Dr. Munro, "was not an uncommon surgical operation among the neolithic inhabitants of Europe long prior to the introduction among them of the metals from which the implements, so essential to the modern surgeon, are now made." The operation was performed with a flint knife or scraper. Dr. Broca believed that in the main the operation was intended "to relieve mental disorders, as epilepsy, convulsions, lunacy, etc.," and it is supposed that people then regarded such diseases as due to the attacks of a demon or evil spirit. "What could be more natural," says Dr. Munro, "than to suppose that by boring a hole in the prison walls the escape of the evil spirit would be facilitated?"

Portions of trepanned skulls of various forms were worn as amulets or charms against evil, and in connection with this subject I may say that a piece of bone taken from a sheep's tongue and called the "lucky bone" is still worn in the neighbourhood of Sheffield as an amulet. One of these bones, scientifically known as the cornua, is figured in the drawing below. Here we have an example of the well-known principle of survival. What the amulet made from a bit of human skull was to the prehistoric man that the amulet from a sheep's head is to the modern Hallamshire peasant. The later superstition is a lineal descendant of the older superstition. As man became less barbarous he modified his old belief in the efficacy of the charm, as he could not wholly cast it off.