ANGLO-SAXON REMAINS found 10 feet from the surface in a thick, deposit of black mud over- lying a bed of peat, and representing, as Speed's map shows, a wide ditch or creek which joined the Ouse a few yards south of the spot. 1 The more perfect specimen (see fig.) resembles several from sites acces- sible to the Danish freebooters of the ninth and tenth centuries, such as York, the lower Thames and the Witham. It is 6 inches long, and the teeth, in five sections of ten or twelve each, are inserted in a tapering stem of circular section, the thickest end of which forms the handle. Iron rivets are used to keep the teeth in place, but the only ornament consists of wavy lines engraved round the butt and a rude design on one side. The second (see fig.) is a double comb, the teeth in sections as before and fastened with rivets, while the decoration takes the form or slanting lines engraved along the middle. At ShefFord, the name recalling an important West Saxon site in the Lambourn Valley, Berks, two saucer brooches characteristic of that people have been found in an ancient cemetery. 3 The numerous vases and other remains from this site show however that the graves are of Romano-British origin ; and the saucer brooches, which were a pair with gilt faces and iron pins, are perhaps the only traces of early Saxon occupation. That these came from a grave is practically certain, as it is unlikely that two brooches of exactly the same pattern would have been accidently lost on the same spot and have remained together on or near the surface for thirteen centuries. A few relics from Leighton Buzzard 3 were presented to the British Museum by Dr. Edward Lawford, F.S.A. Leighton Heath was brought under cultivation about fifty years ago, and on it at that time, about a mile north of the town, were two conspicuous grave mounds (tumuli), both circular and surrounded with a trench. About a quarter of a mile distant, at a place called Dead-man's Slode (Slade), there appears to have been an Anglo- Saxon cemetery where cremation was exclusively practised. Several burial urns of dark clay, hand-made and imperfectly fired, had been pre- viously discovered, with the usual decoration consisting of rows of bosses, and zig-zags inter- spersed with dots and rings, impressed in the soft clay ; and in 1880 sand was being dug in an adjoining pit when three ornaments were noticed which had no doubt once been interred with their owner. A gilt bronze saucer brooch, just over i| inches in diameter, with a central boss and design consisting of a five-pointed star (see fig.),* points to intercourse with the West Saxons ; though the probability that the burial was by way of cremation leaves the nationality of the original owner an 1 Proc. Soc. Antiq. xii. I I 5. 8 Joum. of Arch. Inst. vii. 71 (fig. p. 79) ; see also a paper on ShefFord by Sir Henry Dryden in Pub. of Camb. Antiq. Soc. 4W, vol. i. (1S45-6). a Proc. Soc. Antiq. ix. 29. 1 Compare one from Fairford, Gloucs., in Akerman's Pagan Sa.xondom, pi. xix. fig. 8. 187 Bronze-gilt Brooch, Leighton Buzzard.
