Page:VCH Leicestershire 1.djvu/309

ANGLO-SAXON REMAINS have been given to several of the finds, which for the sake of convenience have been described in geographical order ; but a few lines may now be devoted to the task of arranging them in chronological sequence. Before doing so it may be remarked that cremation seems to have been the common practice in Britain from the time of the Roman conquest till about 250 A.D., and in the south-east even before the time of Claudius. After the middle of the third century, many years before the official recognition of Christianity as the religion of the empire, the dead were buried unburnt, usually in stone cists or coffins, and it seems necessary therefore to assign cremated burials in mixed cemeteries, even when Roman cinerary urns were used, to Teutonic immigrants and not to the Romanized natives. There were probably numerous exceptions to all these rules, but in Leicestershire the above theory finds some confirmation. Thus Rothley was evidently occupied in Roman times and yielded brooches of the sixth and seventh centuries. Some of the pottery is Roman, some Anglo-Saxon (as at West Cotes), and may have been used to hold the ashes of the dead. From Leicester there is a well-made cinerary urn with narrow mouth, incised round the shoulder in Anglo-Saxon style, and again near Bensford Bridge was found a well-made vessel of similar form, highly ornamented, that may have been a cinerary urn, a spear-head being found across the mouth. On this site, however, there were certainly several skeletons, and with the important exception of Saxby, inhumation seems to have been the rule in the county, at least during the sixth and early seventh centuries. Only a few graves of women have been distinguished, but the shield and spear are present in nearly all the graves of men, and the other grave furniture is remarkably uniform. As to the orientation of the graves little can be said, and the presence of arms negatives the idea of Christian burial, even when the head lay at the west end, as at Melton Mowbray. The opposite was the case at Saxby, and north-and-south burials are recorded at West Cotes and Glen Parva. It may therefore be concluded that all the burials described in this chapter were of the heathen period, and this is also clearly indicated by the history of the time. Christianity was introduced, or perhaps re-introduced, after a wave of barbarism had swept the country, in the year 597, and reached Leicestershire in 653, on the marriage of Peada, ruler of the Middle Angles, with the daughter of Oswy, king of Northumbria. Wulfhere, who succeeded after a short interval (658) to the throne of Mercia, was supported by the pagan population, but Christianity was again encouraged by his successor Ethelred, who came to the throne in 675. Further than this it is unnecessary to follow the course of events, as the practice of burying weapons, ornaments, and utensils with the dead would soon cease under the influence of the new religion, and burial in the open country soon went out of favour as cemeteries under the protection of the Church were provided adjoining the sacred buildings ; and the bones of converts are therefore not so liable to disturbance and discovery in the course of agricultural or building operations. The antiquities described above may therefore be considered as the relics of an Anglian population dominated early in the seventh century by Northumbria before being welded into a kingdom by Penda (626-55), anc ^ possibly forming part of the East Anglian kingdom under Redwald before the rise of Northumbria. Still earlier the Middle-English who settled in the i 241 31