A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE large cemetery of this period was discovered at King's Newton near Melbourne, in making a branch of the Midland Railway from Derby to Ashby-de-la-Zouch, accounts of which appeared 1 from the pens of Mr. J. J. Briggs, Mr. Massey and Mr. Llewellynn Jewitt, F.S.A. A similar discovery, but of even greater interest, was made in 1881 at Stapenhill near Burton-upon-Trent. This village now forms part of that borough, and belongs to Staffordshire ; but until recently it was part of the county of Derby, and for this reason an account of this cemetery will not be out of place here. The site was a brickfield, and the first interments were discovered while digging for clay. The matter was at once placed in the hands of the Burton-upon-Trent Natural History and Archaeological Society, and a number of careful excavations were made, bringing to light about thirty-one different graves. An excellent report on the whole work was drawn up the following year, which was printed in the first volume of the Society's Transactions in 1889. In 1887 a note appeared in the Reliquary 2 in which the Rev. Charles Kerry described the finding of five skele- tons at Overton Hall near Ashover, which from the mode of burial appear to be of the same period as the Stapenhill burials. In 1886 the skeleton of a young woman was found during the excavation of the site of Duffield Castle, and with it were associated an amber bead and a part of a cruciform brooch of Anglo-Saxon type. This burial had been disturbed by the builders of the Norman keep. 3 Since this date nothing has been discovered in the county to further our knowledge of the period. The remains in Derbyshire which come within our present range are almost exclusively sepulchral. These sepulchral remains differ among themselves quite as much as do the pre-Roman, but the two groups have sufficiently well-marked points of difference to render their separation comparatively easy. It is only when there are no grave goods that difficulty is experienced, and even then the construction of the grave, and of the mound when present, often supplies a clue. It is pos- sible that some of the interments we have classed as pre-historic may really be of this later period, but we are more likely to confuse certain Romano-British burials with them. The post-Roman people, like their predecessors, practised both in- humation and cremation ; but it is clear that in Derbyshire at least these were not as a rule practised side by side. In the former method the body was usually laid at full length on its back in the grave, but occa- sionally it was laid on its side, either at full length as before or with the legs more or less bent, but rarely so much as to resemble the doubled-up attitude commonly seen in the pre-Roman graves. When cremation was practised the burnt remains were either collected into a heap or were placed in urns. These cinerary urns resembled those of the Bronze Age in being of coarse clay modelled by hand instead 1 Relijuary, viii. 2 et seq. * New ser. i. ill. 3 Journ. Derb. Arch, and Nat. Hist. Soc. ix. p. 151. 266
