Page:VCH Worcestershire 1.djvu/294

A HISTORY OF WORCESTERSHIRE place called Faehhaleah in king Offa's time, and that the many towns which the victors spoiled were located between the Avon and the forests of Wyre and Arden. The bounds of Bosel's diocese may or may not have coincided with those which survived till the Reformation, but it is necessarily with an earlier period than his that the present chapter principally deals. The advent of the Christian missionary tended to restrict and transform the funeral rites of paganism, and the scanty remains from Anglo-Saxon graves in the county must belong to a time when the heathen custom of burying the dead in full dress, with arms, utensils and ornaments, had not died out under the influence of the Church. From the date of the first bishop's consecration and from a comparison with the other kingdoms of Saxons, Jutes or Angles, the time of whose conversion is recorded, it may be reasonably inferred that Christianity became a living force along the lower Severn valley in the third quarter of the seventh century. It is therefore allowable to fix this as the latest probable date for the interments that have come to light, though it is not by any means certain that various objects were not interred with the dead up to the time when the pagan tombs were abandoned in favour of the consecrated churchyard about the middle of the eighth century. That pagan practices were easily and quickly stamped out is in itself improbable. Proofs are not wanting of heathen survivals in late burials that have come to light in England, but perhaps the most striking instance is the dis- covery at Worms, on the Rhine, of a bronze bowl filled with hazel nuts in a grave marked by a Christian tombstone. Inscribed memorial stones of this period occur for the most part within a limited area on the con- tinent, but a bowl of the same kind also filled with nuts is preserved in the national collection and was found in a Kentish grave, which differed in no other way from many others in that part of England. Again, if credence be given to the annal of 577, it is possible to limit the date of the Worcestershire burials in the other direction, and thus to confine them within about a century and a half. Their scarcity alone would point to some such conclusion, though it would be unwise in such a case as this to argue from mere numbers, for narrow limits can also be assigned to the area in which such finds are to be expected. In fact it is only about one-fifth of the county that is here concerned, and if the remainder had yielded relics in the same proportion, Worcester- shire would indeed be well represented for purposes of archaeology. As it is, the spade has revealed what history would lead us to expect, and that in the only part of the county where the population can have been at all concentrated in the early pagan days. In the absence of systematic drainage the natural moisture of our climate would render a forest tract no small impediment to progress by producing a thick and tangled under- growth ^ that would fail to attract any but the fugitive and outlaw. It is true that Roman engineers cut a road through the heart of Arden and the Sussex Weald, but their successors preferred an isolated life amid ' Pitt-Rivers, Excavations in Boier/y, etc. iii. 9. 226