Mercian see about the year 679. Whether the districts of Ayles- bury and Buckingham had by this time passed under the rule of the Mercian ./Ethelred cannot now be determined ; but Caedwalla of Wessex recovered territory north of the Thames after his accession in 686, so that the Mercian see of Dorchester had only a few years of existence.
The next century however saw the rapid expansion of the Anglian dominion of the Midlands ; and though the West Saxon defeat in 733 at Somerton (perhaps in Oxfordshire) was retrieved by Cuthred in 752 at Burford, the battle of Bensington in 777 (779) was a crushing blow to Wessex, and everything north of the Thames was thenceforth in Mercian hands till the revival of Wessex under Egbert fifty years later, and the consolidation of the English kingdom. A coin of Offa (757-96) found at Mentmore[1] may be looked upon as a souvenir of the final Mercian occupation of Buckinghamshire.
It will thus be seen that there is good reason for the scarcity of Anglian relics in Buckinghamshire ; and at least before the general acceptance of Christianity, there was a marked difference in the orna- ments worn by the two peoples as well as in their funeral customs. Not a single specimen of the distinctive long brooch of the Eastern counties and the north, where the Anglians mostly settled, has been recorded from the county, and only two instances of the Anglian rite of cremation have come to light within its borders. Two urns of the ordinary type of dark pottery, rudely ornamented and made without the wheel, were found in 1859 near Tythrop House, at the extreme west end of Kingsey village.[2] Both were filled with human bones in a frag- mentary condition, and in one of them was also a coin of the em- peror Hadrian, who died in 138 another instance of imperial money continuing in circulation for centuries. An iron spearhead of an ordinary Anglo-Saxon type illustrated from the same site may have belonged to either of these or to an unburnt burial.
The later history of Anglo-Saxon Buckinghamshire, subsequent to the spread of Christianity in this district about the middle of the seventh century, seems to be represented by a solitary relic in the museum at Aylesbury. It is a stirrup of iron, with a rectangular loop, belonging to a type usually associated with the Danish invaders of the ninth and tenth centuries ; and a certain number inlaid with brass may be seen in the British Museum, chiefly from the Thames and the Witham. Another is preserved at Canterbury and was found in the neighbourhood, while one with inlaid decoration of interlaced animals has been illustrated [3] from Mottisfont near Romsey, Hants.
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