A HISTORY OF LEICESTERSHIRE day use, and occurs frequently in graves of both sexes. These remains are now preserved in the Bede House Museum at Melton Mowbray, which also contains four annular brooches and a bronze pin with faceted head and ring from this site. In the national collection is a patinated bronze brooch (plate I, fig. 3), which recalls the ' long ' brooch of Scandinavia, but has the head bordered in the same style as a larger specimen from the same site just described, and has a spreading foot that is common among English examples of this period, and may have been derived from a Baltic source. More extensive discoveries were made in 1890-1 during the construc- tion of the railway from Saxby to Bourne, in Lincolnshire. The site of what was evidently a mixed cemetery is close to a small pond to the south of the railway line, about 250 yards east of the road that crosses the railway at the new Saxby station. It was visited by Dr. J. C. Cox, who questioned the workmen, and furnished an account, without illustrations or full details of the objects, to the Society of Antiquaries. 37 He exhibited and described the finds of April, 1891, which included six tolerably perfect cinerary urns (plate III), one being of unusually large size, iijin. high. Many others had been broken by the navvies, but the majority of these rough hand-made vessels contained calcined human bones in small pieces closely packed together, and thus agree with a large number found in the Anglian districts of England. Several specimens were decorated with vertical bosses formed by pressure from the inside, and by the impressions of stamps bearing different geometrical designs of simple character ; and all were of coarse dark-coloured paste inter- spersed with particles of white flint and spar. They range between 9 in. and 4 in. in height, and the smaller ones are plain and roughly made in bowl-form, like specimens from Rothley Temple. They were in most cases heaped round with large-sized pebbles at Saxby. The site was one of many north of the Thames in which burnt and unburnt bodies had been buried side by side ; and was a small plot of ground about 30 yards long, situated a few yards north of the find in 1833 already mentioned. A considerable number of skeletons were exposed, lying within a few feet of the urns and at about the same level 15 to 3 6 in. in a light soil resting on a harder gravel ; the males having knives, daggers, and spear- heads or the remains of shields by their side, and the females, brooches, beads, or other ornaments. Several smaller urns, not of cinerary character, were uncovered near the skeletons, apparently at the head, and the bodies had been placed in the graves with the head at the east end. This position is very unusual, the opposite being the rule, but exceptions occur even in Kent, where the burials are uniformly by way of inhumation. The weapons included a fine spear-head of iron and several smaller lance-heads, all but one having the split socket characteristic of the Anglo- Saxon period. One complete shield-boss of iron, 6 in. in diameter, and some fragments of others were found. There were two pierced Roman coins used as pendants, a pair of tweezers, various beads of glass and amber, and a fine series of ' long ' brooches (plate IV), some of which are damaged. Two ornamented fragments belonged to the feet of larger specimens of the same general character. An iron rod 7! in. long with double hook at one end, generally " Proc. Soc. Antiq. xiii, 331 ; repeated in Leu. Tram, viii, 74. 234
