THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB.
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cut off from the rest by the Railway, very little is known ; it was dug down from
the top by labourers in want of work, employed by Sir Busick Harwood, to whom
all honour is due as the founder of the School of Anatomy at Cambridge. If he
had been as much of an antiquary as an anatomist, a record would have been made,
but, unhappily, the contents were scattered, three or four specimens only being
preserved in the Walden Museum. It is but an inference that the larger tumuli
are the older ; not a bit of Samian ware or an inscription of any sort was found to
indicate the rank or nationality of the occupant or anything to give a clue to a date
or a name. In these three larger hills there is not a particle of masonry; the
deposits were contained in boxes of a square form, well ironed at corners, and
covered with a thick coat of clay, upon which was heaped the earth which formed
the mound. In the largest of these tumuli was by far the most beautiful vessel
known to have been found in Britain ; it is of bronze, enamelled in green, red,
blue, and gold. On the reverse of a coin of Faustina is a female holding a similar
vessel, from which she is sprinkling incense upon an altar, thus elucidating its use.
In the same deposit was an exquisitely executed figure of a sphinx, on the top of
the handle of a beautifully shaped jug ; by the side of the box stood a vessel of red
earth, too large to be enclosed in it. Of the three smaller of these barrows in
front, two of their deposits were in boxes covered with clay, but the contents of
the centre or largest one suggests an approach to the civilization of the conquerors,
as several vessels of Samian ware, with the potter's name inscribed upon them,
formed part of the deposit. It is an interesting question when this pseudo-Samian
ware first came into Britain ; it was imported at very early date, and in great
quantities. The Samian vessels found at Bartlow are quite plain, but at Chester-
ford, a few miles distant, they are abundant, and richly ornamented, and appear
to have superseded the use of glass. At this latter Roman station Mr. Neville
found part of a rim of a vessel of brown earth, which must have held a gallon or
more ; on it was inscribed, ex ho : amici bibunt, a custom passing down to the
middle ages in the mazer-bowl. The third of these smaller barrows indicates a
still further approach to Roman customs. Instead of a box covered with clay, it
had a well-built bustum of large Roman bricks, and in a large glass vessel was
found a coin of Hadrian, approximating its age to the reign of that Emperor, who
visited Britain A.D. 123. The vessels are also of a late period.
As to the age of the Bartlow Hills, conjecture in the absence of any real data is
useless. A local antiquary, now no more, always insisted that they were pre-
historic British, and that later the Romans had burrowed into them, and so made
them into sepulchres for themselves. He was not at the opening of them, or he
would possibly have altered his opinion; I was, and I am now probably the only
man alive who was there present, as stated above. I agree with the opinion of Mr.
Roach Smith, that the mounds indicate the sepulchres of British Reguli (Reigning
Princes) under the Roman rule, buried at great pains and cost with Roman
funeral observances, but without inscriptions. The princes were not warriors, for
then weapons would have been found, but all indicated peace. Thus the Bartlow
tumuli, which were for centuries set down as Saxo-Danish, for half a century as
Roman, may be British after all. The error of tradition is that the slain in the
battle were buried around the hills, and not in them, for on the line of railway
being cut between them, sixteen skulls were known to have been smashed up, and
perhaps very many others by barbarians, considering the enlightenment of the age,
worse than those whose bones they were crushing. Many flint celts have also at
times been found about the hills.
The Hills having been inspected and the various theories of their origin dis-