A HISTORY OF LEICESTERSHIRE and frequently found in localities yielding Anglo-Saxon relics. The original setting of the centre may have been a carbuncle or glass paste, and it should here be mentioned that an oval specimen of the same type, set with marbled glass, was found on the site of the London Road railway station at Leicester, and is now preserved in the Municipal Museum there. This kind of brooch has been found at Canterbury 5 in association with ornaments richly enamelled in the Roman manner, and the national collection includes both round and oval examples from Roman and Anglo-Saxon sites. 8 A similar discovery has been made on the other principal Roman road of Leicestershire. 7 On the eastern side of the Fosse Way opposite West Cotes, near the county town, a burying-place was found in 1897, and attributed to the late Roman and Saxon periods. Some Roman vases were found and several skeletons, lying nearly north and south (position of the head not stated), with brooches, armlet, swords, and coarse pottery, the last being fragments of an urn (possibly cinerary). Whether the Roman vases were found in these graves is uncertain, but there can be no doubt as to the Anglo-Saxon character of three brooches, nor of the swords, as the Romans did not bury weapons with their dead. Two of the brooches are figured, one belonging to the common ' long ' type, the comparatively broad head betokening a late date and the form of the foot proclaiming its home manufacture, as the nostrils of the horse were greatly ex- aggerated in many English examples. The other illustration, though peculiar, bears some resemblance to two of the Bensford Bridge group, and both may be assigned to the late sixth century. Ten miles south of the county border, at Norton in Northamptonshire, a very similar burial-place came to light about 1844, during the excavation of a mound two or three yards wide and about a yard high, which ran by the hedge along this same Watling Street. The level at which the bodies had been deposited was about 6 ft. below the crown of the Roman road, and about 25 ft. from its centre, just outside the original embankment. The graves were in a single line, and contained, besides the skeletons which, it is believed, lay with the heads to the south some formless pieces of metal, and one rude bead of amber. 8 While burials by the side of a great Roman highway may have been due to the same motives that lined the Via Appia near Rome with monuments of a more pretentious kind, burials in the centre of the road show that the traffic along it had declined at the time of the interments, or had perhaps ' Coll. An&q. vii, 202, pi. XT, fig. 3. ' Long Wittenham {V.C.H. Berks, i, 222) and East Shefford, Berks. ; and Haslingfield, Cambs. ' Leu. Tram, vi, 339. " Arch, xli, 479 ; V.C.H. Northants, i, 234. 224 LONG SQUARX-HEADEO BROOCHES, WEST COTES, LEICESTER (|)
