Thomas Batemans Ten Years Diggings :: Archaeology Archaeological Essays

doubting Thomas Batemans Ten Years DiggingsThomas Bateman at Brushfield, Derbyshire, 1850On the 3rd of August, we opened a finely influence barrow near Brushfield, upon Lapwing Hill, overlooking Cressbrook valley, measuring seventeen yards crossways and four feet high in the centre, composed of earth, with a few stones in the middle, where a shallow grave, about a foot deep, was sunk in the rock. In it lay extended the remains of a human dust, so very much decayed as to be almost undistinguishable, barely which we ascertained to have been deposited with the head to the west. Beneath the remnants of bone were many traces of light-coloured hair, as if from a hide, resting upon a considerable quantity of decayed wood, indicating a board of some deepness, or the bottom of a coffin. At the left of the body was a long and broad smoothing iron sword, enclosed in a sheath made of thin wood covered with ornamented leather. Under the hilt of the sword, which like(p) most of ancient da te is very small, was a short iron knife and a little way above the right get up were tow small javelin heads, 4 1/2 inches long, of the same metal, which had lain so near each other as to become united by corrosion. Among the stones which filled the grave, and about a foot from the bottom were many objects of damage iron, including nine loops of hoop iron about an inch broad, which had been fixed to thick wood by long nails eight staples or eyes, which had been driven through plank and clenched and one or two other objects of more than uncertain application, all which were dispersed at intervals round the corpse throughout the length of the grave, and which may therefore have been attached to a bier or coffin in which the deceased was conveyed to the grave, possibly from some distant place. The solitary(prenominal) specimen of a Saxon sword, which was the weapon of the thegn, previously found in this part of Derbyshire, was singularly enough found with the umbo of a shield on the same farm in 1828 thus indication the connection of a noble Saxon family with Brushfield in the age of Heathendom, the name of which is perpetuated in a document of the 16th century, preserved in the British Museum.On the same afternoon, we examined a mutilated barrow nearer Brushfield, called the Gospel