barrow at Angrowse[1] Mullion, Cornwall. In a barrow at Brigmilston,[2] between Everley and Amesbury, Sir R. Colt Hoare found, with an urn containing ashes, "the fragment of a bone article like a whetstone, some chipped flints prepared for arrow-heads, a long piece of flint and a pyrites, both evidently smoothed by usage."
A piece of iron pyrites with a groove worn in it and a peculiarly shaped implement of flint with evident marks of use at the larger end were found with an interment near Basingstoke Station.[3] Flint arrow-heads and flakes were also present.
Nodules of pyrites occurred in such numbers in a barrow on Broad Down,[4] near Honiton, as to suggest the idea of their having been placed there designedly, but none of them are described as abraded.
We have here, at all events, instances of the association of lumps of iron pyrites with circular-ended flint instruments in ancient interments. Can they have been in use together for producing fire? In order to judge of this our best guide will probably be, so far at all events as the flints are concerned, those in use for the same purpose in later times, and even at the present day.
In the Abbé Hamard's researches at Hermes[5] (Oise), two flint scrapers mounted in wooden handles round which were iron ferrules are said to have been discovered in Merovingian graves.
Fig. 222.—French "Strike-a-Light."
The Abbé Cochet[6] describes some of the flints found with Merovingian interments as resembling gun-flints; one of these was apparently carried at the waist, in a purse with money and other necessaries. A steel and a small piece of flint were found in a Saxon grave at High Down, Ferring,[7] Sussex. A similar practice of carrying in the pocket a piece of flint and some prepared tinder prevails in some parts of Europe to the present day; and, as I have before remarked, flints for this purpose are articles of sale. Fig. 222 shows one of these modern "strike-a-lights" which I purchased some years ago at Pontlevoy, in France. It is made of a segment of a flake, one edge and the sides of which have been trimmed to a scraper-like edge, and the other merely made straight. The resemblance between this and
