When the burial has been by cremation, the ashes, after the burning of the body which is so graphically described in the extract I have given from Beowulf, were collected together and placed in urns. These were usually buried in small graves, and their mouths not unfrequently covered with flat stones. Some very extensive cemeteries where the burials have been by this mode, have been discovered in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Northamptonshire, and other counties. With these it is very unusual to find any remains of personal ornaments or weapons. Two extensive and remarkable cemeteries of this kind have been discovered at Kingston and at King’s Newton, both near Derby. At the first of these places an extensive cemetery was uncovered in 1844, and resulted in the exhumation of a large number of urns--indeed, so large a number that, unfortunately, at least two hundred were totally destroyed by the workmen before the fact of the discovery became known. On the surface no indication of burials existed; but as the ground had, some sixty years before, for a long period been under plough cultivation, and as the mounds would originally have been very low, this is not remarkable. The urns had been placed on the ground in shallow pits or trenches. They were filled with burnt bones, and the mouth of each had been covered with a flat stone. They were, when found, close to the surface, so that the mounds could only have been slightly elevated when first formed. Of the form of the urns I shall have to speak later on. The cemetery at King’s Newton was discovered during the autumn of 1867, and a large number of fragmentary urns were exhumed. The mode of interment was precisely similar to that at Kingston, and the urns were of the same character as those there discovered. There were no traces, in either instance, of mounds having been raised, although most probably they had originally existed. To the pottery found in these cemeteries I shall refer later on. Cremation was the predominating practice among the Angles, including Mercia, and the modes of burning the body, and of interment of the calcined bones in ornamental urns, which I have described in the two cemeteries just spoken of, are characteristic of that kingdom. King’s Newton is within three miles of Repton (Repandune), the capital of the kingdom of Mercia, and the burial place of Mercian kings, and Kingston is also but a few miles distant. In some cases the burial has been without urns--the ashes being simply gathered together in a small heap in the grave, or on the surface, and the mound raised over it. I will now, as in the previous divisions, proceed to speak of the more usual descriptions of relics which are found in the grave-mounds of the Anglo-Saxons, and I will, as in those divisions, commence with the fictile remains. CHAPTER XII.