EARLY MAN Bronze Palstave FOUND AT StIBBARD. kind was that of the famous Carlton Rode hoard.^ At this place, situated about three miles south of Attleborough, a labourer employed in digging a ditch in or about the year 1845, turned up a hoard of bronze implements, etc., comprising four gouges, three of which were furnished with sockets and one with a shank to be inserted in a handle. There were also bronze punches, palstaves, a hammer, chisels, celts and portions of celts, and several pieces of metal. The association of celts with so many forms of mechanical tools suggests that the former were not invariably used for fighting purposes, but that they were used in hewing or roughly shaping wood. The hoard indeed may well have comprised the working tools of a carpenter of the Bronze age. The gouge furnished with a shank was doubtless intended to be fixed in a wooden handle and used, as the modern carpenter uses a similar tool, in the hands without the assistance of a mallet. Another remarkable Norfolk hoard was that discovered at Stibbard^ near Fakenham in 1837. This was essentially the hoard of a bronze- merchant or a bronze-worker, as the implements, eighty in all, were fresh from the moulds, many of them still retaining the marks of the seams of the moulds. Seventy of the objects found were palstaves, and although many of them seemed similar in form and size yet when tested it was found that no two were precisely alike. It is evident therefore that new or at any rate different moulds were used for each. Ten of the articles found were spearheads, and one of them now in the British Museum has been described by the late Sir A. Wollaston Franks^ as having been formed in a mould which consisted of four parts besides the core. The methods employed in casting articles in bronze in this early age were very ingenious. In some cases it appears that when a mould of a good pattern was obtained numerous implements were cast, but that in order to preserve the mould from damage by too frequent use a model was sometimes cast in lead, which was then made to serve as the pattern for the making of moulds in clay, which were made in two pieces. Other hoards of bronze found in Norfolk are those ' Evans, Bronze Implements, pp. 78, 94, 113, 119, 121, 122, 133, 167, 171, 173, 175, 178, 424, 467 ; Anhceological 'Journal, ii. p. 80 ; Arch,eo!ogia, Bronzh Spearhead xxxi. p. 494 ; Architological Aisociation Journal, i. p. 59 ; C. R. Smith, Collectanea found at Stibbard. Antiqua, i. p. 105.
- Evans, Bronze Implements, pp. 84, 328, 457, 464; Archaeological Institute
'Norwich Volume' xxvi. ^ Hora Ferales, p. 154, pi. vi. fig. 2Z. 269
