DESCRIPTION OF AN ANCIENT TUMULAR CEMETERY. 135 along with those of animals commonly used for food, were found. The flesh of the horse was, however, eaten by the Anglo-Saxons and other northern nations long after their conversion to Cliristianity. In an ecclesiastical council held before Alfwood, King of Northumbria, in 785, the following prohibition on this subject was made : — " Many among you eat horse-flesh, which is not done by any Christians in the East. Avoid this." The evidence, then, if not jDcrfectly decisive, is, I think, very strong in favour of the opinion that the cemetery of Lamel-hill is to be attributed to the Anglo-Saxons of the seventh or eighth century. The conversion of the Northum- brian Saxons, as is well known, took place under Edwin, in the year 627, and more permanently in 635 ; and it is therefore between this period and 742, or a date not much subsequent, when the first appropriation of burial-places adjoining churches was made within towns, and before which we may presume that there was no churchyard within the walls of York, that I think we must look for the date of this cemetery. In the early Christian cemetery of the Saxon period, at Hartlepool,^ already referred to, it is a remarkable circum- stance that the bodies were deposited south and north.® In one case only was the skeleton found placed from west to east. The almost uniform practice, amongst Christians, of depositing the body with the face to the east, seems to have been unknown to these early Northumbrian Christians, or, in an age when a partiality for symbolism was so general, it would hardly have been disregarded. At Lamel-hill, as we have
- That this cemetery was really of the tions are to be desirod in reference to the
Christian period, is proved by the head- custom both of the early and Romanised stones with Christian symbols and inscrip- Britons in this particular. In two early tions, in Runic and Roman characters. British tumuli examined a few years ago, ^ Both the early Britons and Anf;lo- the one at Scarborough, and the other at Saxons, in pagan times, appear to have Gristhorpe, also on the east coast of York- had the custom of interring the dead from shire, the skeleton, in addition to being south to north ; the feet, and consequently placed from south to north, had in both the face, being to the north. Amongst instances been laid on the right side, so the Anglo-Saxons this practice appears to that the face was directed to the east. have been a general one; it was not, how- In the Romano-British interments disco- ever, without exceptions, as tumuli have vercd at Yoi"k, I do not find that any been examined, in which no rule whatever fixed rule had been followed. It may seems to have been followed, and others have been a casual circimistance that in the have been found, covering several skele- lai'ge stone tomb of this period, lately de- tons, — probably those of persons who had posited in the York collection, and figured fallen together in battle — in which the in the proceedings of the Yorkshire Philo- bodies had been arranged in a radiating sophical Society, the head had been depo- manner, with the feet directed towards the sited to the north, and the feet to the centre of the tumulus. Further observa- south.
