The Arts in Early England; Saxon Art and Industry in the Pagan Period Volume 4 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ...also represented in every district though not on every site, and here, at any rate in Northants and Derbyshire, cemeteries are found in which cremation appears the only method in use for the disposal of the corpse. The same appearances meet us in Yorkshire, where there are purely cremation cemeteries as well as those in which the two rites are coexistent, and those where inhumation only is found, and it is worth noting that the most northerly of all the cemeteries of ancient Northumbria, that at Darlington, a little north of the Tees, showed no signs that bodies had been burned. In the Maps, v to vm, that give a conspectus of 1 For the examples quoted from Coombe by Sandwich and Folkestone see (pp. 222, 696); for (non-Jutish) cremation in North Kent (p. 627 f.) and for the discovery of supposed cinerary urns at Hollingbourne and Maidstone (P-740 2 The examples are noticed (p. 677 f.). See Chapter xm (pp. 627, 631, 634, 642, 646, 659, etc.). the more important Anglo-Saxon finds in different parts of England the cemeteries where the use of cremation has been established are underlined. As regards the comparative chronology of the two rites, what was said in the IntroductoryChapter (p. 147) may be recalled. Though on the whole cremation is the earlier rite, this is by no means a hard and fast rule, for, if we take what seem to be the two earliest finds in the country, we note that one, at Great Addington, Northants, was of a cremation urn (p. 508), the other, at Dorchester-on-Thames (p. 557 f), perhaps the earliest of all, was a find of objects accompanying inhumed skeletons. It is undoubtedly a hard matter to reconcile this irregular and not always early use of the rite of cremation in our own country with the almost universal employment of it...