A HISTORY OF NORFOLK ornament, others being plain and all of a blue or yellow colour. No covers were found, and the sizes varied, some holding a quart others twice or three times that quantity. Certain of them were very near the surface, and many were found to contain burnt bones and ashes, some- times with fragments of metal and glass, including a clasp-knife and tweezers. In February, 171 1, thirty urns containing little but dust and ashes were found by labourers, and on another occasion as many as 120 were recovered from a square rood of ground. Two urns from this site were presented to the Royal Society and another to the Society of Antiquaries by Peter le Neve, who communicated a quaint account of the discovery to the Philosophical Transactions} The latter Society also possesses two more from the same site found about 1750. In the larger were found bones, a coin of Vespasian, and ' two pieces of brass such as are sometimes fixed on pommels of saddles.' The smaller is of finer material mixed with mica and glazed (or polished) on the surface : it was carefully guarded by stones ranged about it, and contained bones, a blade of a knife, a spearhead and iron buckle. The many cinerary urns found at Elmham were usually deposited under heaps of stones, and bedded in sand.^ From Elmham also is said to have come a remarkable urn " now in the Mayer Collection at Liverpool, but the feature which distinguishes it from its fellows adds but little to its evidential value. It may however be considered from two points of view, and its claim to have enclosed the cremated remains of a young Roman maiden has already been discredited in the preceding article. Granted that Roach Smith and Thomas Wright* may have been led to welcome the dis- covery perhaps too readily, and to base upon it arguments that still await demonstration, there can be no doubt that the urn is of the Anglo-Saxon period, and unless archeology is totally at fault in East Anglia, once contained the ashes of an Anglian inhabitant. In the Collectanea Antiqua^ it is admitted to be strange that an inscription so clear and prominent should have escaped the eye of an experienced collector like Rev. Bryan Faussett, who makes no mention of it in his records, though the urn is no doubt one of two from Elmham which contained calcined bones, one those of an adult and the other to all appearance of a younger person. In both were a pair of tweezers and small pieces of iron and copper which seemed to be parts of brooches, and while one had also part of an ivory comb the other contained some vitreous beads. Perhaps the safest course is to ignore the lettering and class the urn with others, pre- sumably from Elmham, drawings of which were exhibited to the Archaeological Institute in 1853.* These had been found full of burnt bones in what was evidently an Anglian cemetery, and being near the surface had been broken at the top by the ploughshare. The ornament consisted of impressed devices, vertical ribs and diagonal lines, and ' Abridged by H. Jones, 1700—20, vol. v. part 2, p. 97.
- Albert Way's Catalogue of Antiquities, p. 1 8.
^ Jewitt, Grave-Mounds and their Contents, pp. 217-8, fig. 327.
- Essays on Archeeolopcal Subjects, vol. i. p. 98.
- Vol. V. p. 1 15. s Journal, vol. x. p. 161.
332
