Women's graves have generally yielded a number of objects of personal use as well as of adornment. Articles of toilet, such as tweezers, etc., are found by the side of the skeleton, and resemble the modern chatelaine. There exist, in addition, curious bronze pendants sometimes shaped like a pot-hook, which, found in pairs near the waists of female skeletons, are known generally as girdle-hangers. Their exact purpose was for a long time a mystery, but archæologists are now mostly of the opinion that they were fastenings for bags or purses suspended from the girdle. With the exception of the brooch-pin, which is always made of iron, Anglo-Saxon jewellery is almost invariably composed of gold, silver, or of some alloy, and is very rarely of iron like the buckles found in the Frankish cemeteries. These iron buckles, owing to the perishable nature of their material are often much disfigured by rust, but many are sufficiently well preserved to exhibit a beautiful and elaborate inlay of silver, sometimes accompanied by gold. Many examples of them are preserved in the museums of France and Germany. Some are of extraordinary size. The buckle and plate alone of one in the museum at Berne measures no less than 8-5/8 by 4½ inches and half an inch in thickness. Buckles of this kind have never been found in England. CHAPTER IX LATE ANGLO-SAXON JEWELLERY (SEVENTH TO NINTH CENTURY) After the landing of St. Augustine in 597 and the baptism of Ethelbert, King of Kent, the conversion of the upper classes in England appears to have been rapid, and by the third decade of the seventh century the greater part of the country had accepted Christianity. Old customs, however, with regard to burial and the adornment of the corpse, were slow in disappearing, and even as late as the time of Charlemagne (742-814) we hear of orders being issued that the Saxons were no longer to follow the pagan mode of burial, but to inter their dead in consecrated ground. The general abandonment of the custom of burying ornaments with the dead is responsible for the small number of the later Anglo-Saxon jewels now extant. But the few examples surviving from the period which terminated at the Norman Conquest are of exceptional merit. There can be no doubt that the introduction of Christianity produced a profound change in the character of personal ornaments. New forms and methods, due to closer association with the Continent, were introduced into the goldsmith's productions by the Church, which at the same time fostered the splendid traditions of the older English jewellers.