the depth of four feet from the surface, a skeleton appeared in perfect preservation, lying with its head to the North, but so tender, as to crumble into dust with the least pressure; its posture, which was that of a person sleeping on his side, with the feet rather drawn up, one hand resting on its breast, the other on its hip, prevented it from being accurately measured. The account of the people, however, employed in digging, we found afterwards had magnified it to the size of seven, and even of eight feet. But what may be said with certainty is, that the thigh-bone measured twenty inches, which in a well-proportioned man, I find, gives a height of six feet and of about as many inches. One of the Jeg-bones appeared to have been fractured; but whether this had happened by some wound in war, or by some accident at the funeral, or by the weight of the superincumbent earth, it is impossible to determine. On the breast of the skeleton was deposited a rude urn, too much decayed to be handled without falling to pieces, of about the measure of two quarts, but empty of every thing except the same fine mould that covered the skeleton. Near the neck of the latter were found many of the round stones I have before mentioned, but of different sizes, from that of a pigeon's egg down to that of a pea. As they were imperforated, it is not improbable they had once been covered with metal, in which state they might have formed a necklace, or any similar ornament. The substance of the barrow, as high as the site of the body, was formed of flints and stones; into which a shaft was sunk to a considerable depth, but without finding any thing worth notice. The next day, however, the country people, who had witnessed the diligence of our researches, which they conceived must have had an object of greater value in view than bones and earthen vessels, being encouraged moreover by a popular tradition, that a treasure lies hidden in the earth somewhere between Weymouth and Purbeck Island, assembled, and dug to the very bottom of the centre of the barrow, where they found nothing but a large heap of ashes, in all probability the remains of a funeral pile which had been erected on that spot. Another small barrow, that was opened the same day, yielded nothing but bones and broken urns.

Unavoidable business calling me home at the end of the week, my respectable friend communicated to me, by letter, the result of his searches, the ensuing week; of which the following is an extract;

"On the Thursday after you left ns, we pitched our tent near another of those barrows, and set to work upon it.

We discovered, at about the depth of two feet, no less than five distinct skeletons: three of them were in a row, lying on their backs, two of which appeared to be of the common size, but that in the middle was a small one, probably of some young person. The two others were at the distance of a few feet from these, of the ordinary size, with the head of one lying on the breast of the other. Each of the skeletons had an urn upon it; but these were so perished, that upon being touched they fell into earth, except a few pieces near the top rim of one of them, which I have preserved for your inspection. Under the head of one of the three that lay in a row we found a small earthen urn, about the size of the cup part of an ordinary wine glass."

I have only to add to this account, that the small urn just mentioned, which was of the same shape with the rest we found, namely, that of a truncated cone, was about two inches high, and one in diameter, and that, though nicely covered with the shell of a limpet, it was quite empty: likewise that the broken pieces of urn were ornamented by being rudely indented in a zigzag fashion; and that the five skeletons were not all exactly on the same level in the barrow, which appears to have been a family sepulchre, but that the two last mentioned seemed to have been deposited in the side of the barrow without taking it to pieces.

Five or six other barrows in the same neighbourhood have since been opened by the same gentleman; but, as the contents of them all were nearly the same, I shall satisfy myself with giving an account of one of them, which was opened in my presence. It was one out of three which stood in a line at about the distance of one hundred and fifty feet from each other, being about the same number of feet in circumference, and about ten in perpendicular height. On a shaft being cut to the centre of the barrow, we found a kind of rude vault or kistvacn, formed with unhewed stones, inclosing an urn capable of holding about two gallons, and full of burnt human bones, being covered at the top with a thin, flat stone, and having a quantity of the roots of quilchgrass undecayed near it, which also frequently occurred in the other barrows. The urn in question was composed of a coarse black clay, of the shape above described, and did not seem either to have been turned with a lathe, or burnt in a kiln, but merely hardened by fire or the heat of the sun. Of the same substance and form were all the other urns discovered in this neighbourhood: there was this difference, however, in their position, that some of them stood upright, and others were found inverted.

VOL. I.

The uniformity observed in the barrows I have described, in shape, situation, apparent antiquity, and, to a certain degree, in contents, seems to argue that these at least were the work of one and the same people. Who these were, remains now to be considered. I think it is plain they could not have been the Romans; for though these were in the practice both of burying and burning their dead intire, as appears from the Twelve Tables, and from other monuments, yet the rudeness of the present urns, so unlike the neat, polished ones, I discovered last year near this city, together with the true Roman fibulæ, coins, &c. and which have been honoured with a place in the Vetusta Monumenta of the Society of Antiquaries; the situation of these sepulchres on lofty mountains, and sequestered downs, whereas the Romans affected to bury near cities, and close to highways; add to this, there being no sepulchral lamps, lacrymatories, coins, or other tokens of Roman sepulture; all these circumstances, I say, point out Barbarians, and not Romans, as the constructors of these barrows. We must therefore ascribe them to one of the three following nations, viz. the Britons, the Saxons, or the Danes; and we must attribute these works to one of them previously to its conversion to Christianity, as, wherever the Christian religion prevailed, it immediately banished the Pagan rite of burning the dead, as appears from many Canons of Councils to this effect, and introduced the use of common cemeteries consecrated to this purpose. Of the above-mentioned nations, the Danes seem to have the weakest claim to these numerous barrows, as (independently of other arguments that will occur below) they never seem to have been stationary in this part of the kingdom for any considerable time, till their princes and the nation in general professed themselves Christians; whereas in the above-mentioned barrows there is even some appearance of family sepulchres. It remains then to consider whether it is more reasonable to attribute these ancient monuments to the Britons, previously to their adopting the manners of their conquerors the Romans, or to their more fatal enemies, our Saxon ancestors. For my part, I think there are more and stronger arguments for ascribing them to the former than to the latter people. For though both the Celts or Gauls, of whom the Britons were evidently a tribe, as appears from the uniformity of their language and of their civil and religious rites, and the Germans, of whom the Saxons formed an illustrious portion, were both in the practice of at least occasionally using funeral piles, barrows, and urns; as Montfaucon has discovered

in regard to the Gauls, and Gronovius with other German antiquaries, in respect to their forefathers; yet there is this striking difference between the two people, that the former, according to Cæsar, were fond of the pomp of funerals, sacrificing various animals as well as men on the occasion, and burying with the dead whatever they had that was most precious: whereas the latter, according to Tacitus, despised the fruitless ambition, as they considered it, of magnificent funerals; and it was only on some extraordinary occasion that the warrior's horse was buried with his master. Morton adds, that the Saxons had laid aside the custom of burning their dead previously to their invasion of this island; but whether the last-mentioned assertion rests upon sufficient proof, or not, I think the evident consequences to be deduced from what has been alleged above, when considered with respect to the contents of the barrows in question, likewise the very great antiquity of these barrows, manifest by the condition of the metal, bones, and urns, found in them. Again, the coarseness and rudeness of these urns, which, in my opinion, rather bespeak the manufacture of the savage Britons, than of the Saxons, who by their very piracies upon civilized nations were a polished people at their conquest of this island, compared with the former six hundred years before; and, above all, the conformity between these barrows and those opened by Dr. Stukeley and others in the neighbourhood of Stonehenge; all these circumstances, I say, considered together, induce me to attribute the barrows I have described to the Aborigines of this island, the Britons, rather than to the Saxons, or any later people. With respect to the argument I have drawn from the conformity between these barrows and those near Stonehenge, I take it for granted that this stupendous pile of Barbaric magnificence is allowed to have been a Druidical temple; and that the barrows with which it is surrounded had some relation with it, and belonged to the same people by whom it was constructed.

A very great difficulty, however, remains to be explained, which is, that some of these barrows contained nothing but urns full of burnt bones, while others contained entire skeletons, with urns placed upon them, and with burnt human bones, charcoal, and ashes, scattered throughout the tumulus. To account for this, I must refer to the authorities adduced by the learned and ingenious author of the "History of Manchester," to prove that the Ancient Britons were in the habit of using both rites of funeral, that of burning, and that of burying entire. It is probable that, at Hambury Toote,

and such other barrows as contain vestiges of both practices, the captives, slaves, and animals, destined to appease the manes of the deceased chieftain, or to accompany his departed spirit, were killed and burnt on the spot, and that afterwards a barrow was raised over their ashes, near the summit of which the body of the chieftain himself was buried entire. The urn placed on the breast of the corpse probably contained ointments, or valuable articles belonging to the deceased, in conformity with Cæsar's account of the British funerals. This conjecture is confirmed, in my opinion, by the diminutive size of the small urn covered with a limpet shell, mentioned above, as it appears too small to have answered any other purpose we are acquainted with. It is possible that one of those horrid sacrifices, which the author, just quoted, describes, might have made part of the funeral rite performed at some of these barrows, in which a considerable number of human victims were inclosed in a kind of cage made of basket-work, and burnt alive, in order to render propitious the blood-thirsty deities of the Druids. 1790, Oct.

JOHN MILNER,

CXXIII. Parliament Oak in Welbeck Park.

MR. URBAN,

AS, by favour of the excellent author of the work, I am be come possessed of a copy of that elegant tract, Mr. Rooke's "Descriptions and Sketches of some remarkable Oaks in the Park at Welbeck," &c. wherein the drawings by Mr. Rooke, and the engravings by Mr. Ellis, are very fine; beg leave to send you a brief and friendly remark upon one passage in it. He observes, p. 12, "There is a very old oak in Clipston Park, which the common people call the Parliament Oak, from an idea that a parliament was once held under it. I have not found any good authority for this fact; but it is certain that a parliament was held by Edw. I. anno 1290, at Clipston palace," &c. Now, Sir, as there was a palace at this place, and a parliament was held there anno 1290, as here stated, I, for my part, have no objec tion to the vulgar and current opinion, that this oak was the place of the assembly's meeting. There is a hundred in Derbyshire, stiled Appletree hundred, from some large tree of the kind being probably the place of the rendezvous or