the leaders, if not the hosts, of Teutonic blood who made the Thames their highway to the interior, and buried some of their greatest in ground they had won in its vicinity at Faversham, at Broomfield, and at Taplow.
In the British Museum are a sword and shield-boss from a warrior's grave in Windmill Field, Hitcham, near Taplow ; and at Newport Pag- nel, in the northern angle of the county, about midway between the county towns of Buckingham and Bedford, there seems to have been a West Saxon settlement, which was no doubt in touch with both those centres during the early period. An Anglo-Saxon cemetery at the east end of the town has not been systematically examined, but has yielded interesting relics from time to time.[1] The first discoveries were made early in 1900 while gravel was being dug in a field on the Tickford Park Estate, and remains of unburnt burials were brought to light. By the side of male skeletons, placed on the gravel about 3 feet from the surface, three iron swords of the usual double-edged type were dis- covered, while an iron spearhead was generally found beside the skull. In what must have been the grave of a man was found a cup of amber glass, while in that of a woman was found a larger number of articles. At the head had been placed a small bucket, the bronze hoops of which had been forced on to the skull and were mistaken for part of a head-dress ; besides this was a bronze hair-pin, and a small iron knife, such as is found in nearly all unburnt burials of this period, lay across the breast. The arms had been encircled by strings of variously coloured beads of glass, as was the case at Kempston only 10 miles distant to the east, in the neighbouring county of Bedford ; while the bronze brooches met with all seem to have belonged to a very common type, with a flat circular face ornamented by incised rings in a very simple style. Pieces of charred wood and bones of the ox, horse, or sheep were considered with some reason to have been the remains of the funeral feast at the grave-side ; and a remarkable feature in at least one part of the cemetery was the arrangement of the graves in two concentric circles, with the feet all pointing to the centre, where some person of importance is supposed to have been interred. A similar grouping of the graves has been observed at Cuddesdon, Ox- fordshire ; at Shoeburyness, Essex ; and at Vendhuile, a Frankish site in the department of Aisne, France.
Once a footing was gained in this desirable region, the West Saxon never retired till driven southward of the river for half a century or more by his Anglian rivals, who, presumably, came down from the Trent valley. It is possible that from the accession of Penda in 626 the Anglians of Mercia gradually penetrated into Buckinghamshire, per- haps along the Watling Street through what is now Northampton- shire ; and it is generally supposed that Archbishop Theodore, who reorganized the English Church, turned Dorchester-on-Thames into a
- ↑ A brief description was furnished to the Bucks Standard of 24. February 1900, by Mr. Alfred Bullard. See also the Antiquary, April 1900, p. 97.
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