Anglo-Saxon Period—Pottery, general characteristics of—Cinerary Urns—Saxon Urn with Roman Inscription—Frankish and other Urns—Cemeteries at King’s Newton, etc.—Mode of Manufacture—Impressed Ornaments.

The pottery of the Anglo-Saxon period, so far as examples have come down to us, are almost, if not entirely, confined to sepulchral urns. We know, from the illuminated MSS. of the period, to which we are accustomed to turn for information upon almost any point, that other vessels—pitchers, dishes, etc.—were made and used, but for those which have come down to us we are indebted to the grave-mounds; and, in these, sepulchral vessels, almost exclusively, are found to occur. Cinerary urns are, therefore, almost the only known productions of the Saxon potteries, and these, like those of the Celtic period, were doubtless, in most cases, made near the spot where the burial took place, and were formed of the clays of the neighbourhood. This is proved, incontestably, in the case of the urns found at King’s Newton, where the bed of clay still exists, and has very recently been used for common pottery purposes.

The shapes of the cinerary urns are somewhat peculiar, and partake largely of the Frankish form. Instead of being wide at the mouth, like the Celtic urns, they are contracted, and have a kind of neck instead of the overhanging lip or rim which characterizes so much of the sepulchral pottery of that period. The urns are formed by hand, not on the wheel, like so many of the Romano-British period, and they are, as a rule, perhaps, more firmly fired than the Celtic ones. They are usually of a dark-coloured clay, sometimes nearly black, at other times they are dark brown, and occasionally of a slate or greenish tint, produced by surface colouring. The general form of these interesting fictile vessels will be best understood by reference to the engravings which follow. One of these (on fig. 326) will be seen to have projecting knobs or bosses, which have been formed by simply pressing out the pliant clay from the inside with the hand. In other examples these raised bosses take the form of ribs gradually swelling out from the bottom, till, at the top they expand into semi-egg-shaped protuberances. The ornamentation on the urns from these cemeteries usually consists of encircling incised lines in bands or otherwise, and vertical or zigzag lines arranged in a variety of ways, and not unfrequently the knobs or protuberances of which I have just spoken. Sometimes, also, they present evident attempts at imitation of the Roman egg-and-tongue ornament. The marked features of the pottery of this period are the frequency of small punctured or impressed ornaments, which are introduced along with the lines or bands with very good effect. These ornaments were evidently produced by the end of a stick cut and notched across in different directions so as to produce crosses and other patterns. In some districts—especially in the East Angles—these vessels are ornamented with simple patterns painted upon their surface in white; but so far as my knowledge goes, no example of this kind of decoration has been found in the Mercian cemeteries.

Of these urns—the East Anglian, etc.—Mr. Wright (to whom, and to Mr. Roach Smith, is mainly due the credit of having correctly appropriated them to the Anglo-Saxon period), thus speaks:—

“The pottery is usually made of a rather dark clay, coloured outside brown or dark slate colour, which has sometimes a tint of green, and is sometimes black. These urns appear often to have been made with the hand, without the employment of the lathe; the texture of the clay is rather coarse, and they are rarely well baked. The favourite ornaments are bands of parallel lines encircling the vessel, or vertical and zigzags, sometimes arranged in small bands, and sometimes on a larger scale covering half the elevation of the urn; and in this latter case the spaces are filled up with small circles and crosses, and other marks, stamped or painted in white. Other ornaments are met with, some of which are evidently unskilful attempts at imitating the well-known egg-and-tongue and other ornaments of the Roman Samian ware, which, from the specimens, and even fragments, found in their graves, appear to have been much admired and valued by the Anglo-Saxons. But a still more characteristic peculiarity of the pottery of the Anglo-Saxon burial urns consists in raised knobs or bosses, arranged symmetrically round them, and sometimes forming a sort of ribs, while in the ruder examples they become mere round lumps, or even present only a slight swelling of the surface of the vessel.

“That these vessels belong to the early Anglo-Saxon period is proved beyond any doubt by the various objects, such as arms, personal ornaments, etc., which are found with them, and they present evident imitations both of Roman forms and of Roman ornamentation. But one of these urns has been found accompanied with remarkable circumstances, which not only show its relative date, but illustrate a fact in the ethnological history of this early period. Among the Faussett collection of Anglo-Saxon antiquities is an urn which Bryan Faussett appears to have obtained from North Elmham, in Norfolk, and which contained the bones of a child. It is represented in the accompanying engraving (fig. 327), and will be seen at once to be perfectly identical in character with the East Anglian sepulchral urns. But Mr. Roach Smith, in examining the various objects in the Faussett collection, preparatory to his edition of Bryan Faussett’s ‘Inventorum Sepulchrale,’ discovered on one side of this urn a Roman sepulchral inscription, which is easily read as follows:—

D. M.	‘To the gods of the shades.
LAELIAE	To LÆlia
RVFINAE	Rufina.
VIXIT·A·XIII	She lived thirteen years,
M·III·D·VI.	three months, and six days.’

To this Roman girl, with a purely Roman name, belonged, no doubt, the few bones which were found in the Anglo-Saxon burial urn when Bryan Faussett received it, and this circumstance illustrates several important as well as interesting questions relating to our early history. It proves, in the first place, what no judicious historian now doubts, that the Roman population remained in the island after the withdrawal of the Roman power, and mixed with the Anglo-Saxon conquerors; that they continued to retain for some time at least their old manners and language, and even their Paganism and their burial ceremonies, for this is the purely Roman form of sepulchral inscriptions; and that, with their own ceremonies, they buried in the common cemetery of the new Anglo-Saxon possessors of the land, for this urn was found in an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. This last circumstance had already been suspected by antiquaries, for traces of Roman interment in the well-known Roman leaden coffins had been found in the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Ozingell, in the Isle of Thanet; and other similar discoveries have, I believe, been made elsewhere. The fact of this Roman inscription on an Anglo-Saxon burial urn, found immediately in the district of the Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, which have produced so many of these East Anglian urns, proves further that these urns belong to a period following immediately upon the close of what we call the Roman period.”

The sepulchral vases found in the district of the middle Angles vary but slightly in form from the East Anglian burial urns. An example is given in fig. 328, from Chestersovers, in Warwickshire, where it was found with an iron sword, a spear-head, and other articles of Anglo-Saxon character.

“If we had not abundant proofs of the Anglo-Saxon character of this pottery at home,” continues Mr. Wright, “we should find sufficient evidences of it among the remains of the kindred tribes on the Continent, the old Germans, or Alemanni, and the Franks. Some years ago an early cemetery, belonging to the Germans, or Alemanni, who then occupied the banks of the Upper Rhine, was discovered near a hamlet called Selzen, on the northern bank of that river, not far above Mayence, and the rather numerous objects found in it are, I believe, preserved in the Mayence Museum. They were communicated to the public by the brothers Lindenschmit, in a well-illustrated volume published in 1848, under the title ‘Das Germanische Todtenlager bei Selzen in der Provinz Reinhessen.’ When this book appeared in England, our antiquaries were astonished to find in the objects discovered in the Alemannic cemeteries of the country bordering on the Rhine a character entirely identical with that of their own Anglo-Saxon antiquities, by which the close affinity of the two races was strikingly illustrated. More recently, the subject has been further illustrated in the description by Ludwig Lindenschmit of the collection of the national antiquities in the Ducal Museum of Hohenzollern, and in other publications. About the same time with the first labours of the Lindenschmits, a French antiquary, Dr. Rigollot, was calling attention in France to similar discoveries in the cemeteries which the Teutonic invaders of Picardy had left behind them, and in which he recognized the same character as that displayed by the similar remains of the Anglo-Saxons in our island. Similar discoveries have been made in Burgundy and in Switzerland, the ancient country of the Helvetii; and it is hardly necessary here to do more than mention the great and valuable researches carried on by the AbbÉ Cochet among the Frankish graves in Normandy. It has thus become an established fact that the varied remains of the tribes, all of Teutonic descent, who settled on the borders of the Roman empire along the whole extent of the country from Great Britain to Switzerland, present the same character and bear a close resemblance.”

A few figures will be sufficient to illustrate this resemblance as far as regards the pottery, and these are here given, in which figs. 330 and 332 are Alemannic vases from the cemetery of Selzen. It will be seen that they resemble exactly in form those East Anglian urns we have given in our plate, and the same ornamentation is also found among our Anglo-Saxon pottery. These urns are described as being usually made of the clay of the neighbourhood, in most cases turned on a lathe, but many of them imperfectly baked. They are found in graves where the body had not undergone cremation, and were used for containing articles of a miscellaneous description. In one grave, at the feet of the skeleton of a gigantic warrior, was found one of these urns, containing two bronze fibulÆ, a comb, a number of beads, a pair of shears, flints and steel, and a bronze ring. Fig. 334 is an urn procured at Cologne, and is slate-coloured, with an ornament of circular stamps.

Figs. 331 and 333 are Frankish urns obtained by the AbbÉ Cochet from LondiniÈres in Normandy, and show at a glance the identity of the Frankish pottery with the Germanic as well as with the Anglo-Saxon. The first of these is surrounded with a row of the well-known bosses, which are equally characteristic of the three divisions of this Teutonic pottery, Anglo-Saxon, Frankish, and Alemannic. Above these bosses is an ornament identical with that of the East Anglian urn with the sepulchral inscription, given on fig. 327. The urn represented in fig. 331 has an ornament which is evidently an imitation of the egg-and-tongue ornament so common on the Roman pottery. The AbbÉ Cochet collected in the course of his excavations in Normandy several hundreds of these Frankish urns, which all present the same general character.

The next four examples are earthen vessels found in the lacustrine habitations of Switzerland, of which so much has been written during the last few years. Figs. 335, 336, and 337, are taken from the plates illustrative of the communications of Dr. Ferdinand Keller to the Transactions of the Antiquarian Society of Zurich, and fig. 338, also from the Zurich Transactions, and found in a Pfahlbau, near Allensbach on the Untersee, on the borders of Switzerland and Germany. A single glance will show a great similarity of form with those of the Anglo-Saxons from our own country.

The following engravings will exhibit a striking variety of cinerary urns of the Anglo-Saxon period, from the Mercian cemetery at King’s Newton. Fig. 339 is six and a quarter inches in height. It is ornamented with encircling bands or lines and impressed ornaments. In the upper band is a series of small circular indentations, with a dot in the centre of each, and in the lower band are three rows of dots. Between these bands is a series of indented crosses, which may be described as in some degree approaching to crosses patÉe in form. At the bottom are also small square indentations, with diagonal lines. Fig. 342 is seven inches in height. It is ornamented with encircling lines, the central band bearing a double row of dots; the band at the bottom of the neck a series of small indented quatre-foil flowers; and the lower one a series of square indentations with diagonal lines. Fig. 341 is one of the most elaborately ornamented urns which has ever been discovered.51 The remainder of the examples vary from these and from each other, in point both of form and decoration. Some of these have herring-bone lines, others simple punctures, and others, again, encircling lines only. The marked features of the pottery of this period is the frequency of small punctured or impressed ornaments, which are introduced along with the lines or bands, with very good effect. These ornaments were evidently produced by the end of a stick, cut and notched across in different directions, so as to produce crosses and other patterns, and by twisted slips of metal, etc. In the annexed woodcut I have endeavoured to show two of the notched stick “punches,” such as I have reason to believe were used for pressing into the soft clay, and also two of the impressed patterns produced by it.

Other varieties of pottery found in the Anglo-Saxon graves are a species of cup, and upright vessels, one of which is shown on fig. 327. Fragments of pitchers have also occasionally been found, as also have portions of coarse dishes. In the Kentish graves, most of the pottery is of the Roman period, and consists of Samian paterÆ and other vessels of that manufacture; and cups, etc., of the Upchurch and Castor wares, etc.