Page:VCH Northamptonshire 1.djvu/180

A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE These bronze-using people, of finer physique and possessing better weapons than their predecessors, probably came into the country from Gaul, and drove the small, long-headed people before them to the west and north, where at the present day the inhabitants show their descent, though now of course in a modified form. Northamptonshire in the Bronze age, as in the preceding one of polished stone, was still largely covered with forest ; and here again the remains are scanty as compared with those counties so rich in the external evidences of early man in the shape of his burial mounds, as Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Wiltshire, etc. The chief discovery of this period in our county was made in some ironstone diggings near Corby in 1890. At a spot where the two parishes of Great Weldon and Corby join, the men came upon the site of a burial, from which remains of six cinerary urns of the characteristic shape and ornamentation of this age were obtained ; with them a skeleton was found in a sitting position, and associated with this find was a bronze weapon with three rivet holes. This kind of weapon is called by Sir John Evans a knife dagger, and is considered by him to belong to the early part of the Bronze age. There was no indication of any tumulus over these remains. Those urns which were found in Weldon Lordship were on the pro- perty of the late Lord Winchelsea, who kindly presented them to the Northampton Museum. The knife dagger and the skeleton with the remains of the other urns were found in Corby parish on the glebe belonging to the rectory. The skeleton was re-interred in the church- yard at Corby before any measurements of the skull or limbs could be taken. The locality of this find was adjoining the valley of a small brook which, on a plan of the Hatton property drawn for Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chancellor in the sixteenth century, shows a clearing in what was a part of Rockingham Forest ; and one may well imagine this clearing to have existed in those early times, an ideal spot for encampment or for a temporary resting-place for a few wandering members of the Bronze age. A smaller cinerary urn devoid of any decoration, and a vessel of the kind classed as incense cups, were found in other workings adjoining the site of this clearing. Two cinerary urns have been found at Brixworth ; one was a plain one, and the other decorated with herring-bone work made by some sharp-pointed instru- ment. Both were about 5I inches high. At Desborough in 1826 a small urn also ornamented with a herring-bone pattern was obtained with osseous remains, and with this were remnants of a larger urn, of which only a fragment was preserved. In the British Museum are two vessels found when opening a barrow near Oundle, and a cinerary urn with zig-zag marking on the top part found at Cransley. Near Wansford paper mills about 1836 was discovered a cist made of four upright large stones covered with a rough slab, in which were a quantity of partially burnt bones and an urn with some remains of bones inside. This is now in the museum attached to the Stamford Institute. Brixworth, which has proved to 142