. The arts in early England. enin the west and south-west of Britain German kings and eorlstook to themselves integral estates the boundaries and agrarianarrangements whereof had been drawn by Romans or rather byCelts. The special conditions of settlement in the Westcannot here be discussed, but taking the country as a wholecontinuity of habitation must be denied. Two chapters of arecent work on our national antiquities3 are devoted to theevidences all over the land of such continuity, but the instances 1 Vict. Hist., Warwick, i, 251. 2 Cambridge, 1897, p. 351. 3 Byways in British Archaeology,
. The arts in early England. enin the west and south-west of Britain German kings and eorlstook to themselves integral estates the boundaries and agrarianarrangements whereof had been drawn by Romans or rather byCelts. The special conditions of settlement in the Westcannot here be discussed, but taking the country as a wholecontinuity of habitation must be denied. Two chapters of arecent work on our national antiquities3 are devoted to theevidences all over the land of such continuity, but the instances 1 Vict. Hist., Warwick, i, 251. 2 Cambridge, 1897, p. 351. 3 Byways in British Archaeology, by Walter Johnson, , Cambridge,1912. SITES OF THE SETTLEMENTS [41 of this where they occur strike one as accidents or coincidencesinevitable in a small and well-peopled country rather than asillustrations of a general rule. On the whole the impressionleft on the mind of any one who with antiquarian predilectionspasses up and down through rural England is that the firstfounders of the ings and hams and tons had settled. Fig. 4.—Site of Cemetery on Down above Folkestone, Kent. down, as Tacitus phrases it,1 in detached bodies apart from eachother, just as spring or field or grove offered attractions, andthat it was only by some chance contingency that they pitchedon the site either of a Roman villa or a British hamlet. This independence would not of course preclude the appropriation of older burying grounds where the site of these was convenient. The barrows were themselves generally at some distance from the habitations of the living, and they also 1 T>e Mor. Germ., xvi. I42 THE ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY frequently possessed the characteristic of being on compara-tively elevated ground. This is the case with Bronze Agebarrows on the Sussex Downs by Lewes, with the Wiltshiremounds, the Bronze Age barrows on the Yorkshire Wolds,and the Early Iron Age tumuli at Arras near MarketWeighton, Yorks. Now a predilection for an elevated sitefor the cemetery has been ascribed not only
Size: 1781px × 1403px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksub, booksubjectarchitecture
