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father's sword was put into his grave. It was his and had served him well when his life depended on it; maybe it would not work for anyone else, even his son. Besides, if the son kcpt it, his father might come back looking for it, and for a people who had firm belief in ghosts, this was a hazard not to be riskcd.

But then, why were sonie swords (and spears and helmets, shields and mailshirts, axes and knives) broken to pieces or bent into knots before burial, while others were wrapped care-fully in wool and oiled linen and leather, so that often seventy or a hundred years later they were brought out as good as new, to be used again? We know of no certain answer. Like many other things relating to swords which the reader will meet, we have to admit that we do not know. It must remain a matter for guesses, inspired or absurd, until some piece of hard evi-dence is found, which will provide a clue.

During these centuries of Great Migrations, the hilts of swords fali into four main cate-gories or styles, which I have drawn in Fig. 21. There seem (on the evidence of finds) to have been no particular regional differences; each style evolved from the one preceding it, the earliest ones being directly descended from the Roman hilts of Gladius and Spatha. By the end of the period, the basie style of the sword-hilts of the Vikings had appeared (Fig. 2 ld), from which stemmed all the styles of the high Middle Ages.

Figurę 21: A sequence of migration period sword-hilts, between about A.D. 200 and A.D. 700. These different forms, particularly the first three, were all in use at the same time because swords were handed down from generation to generation; but the sequence, though arbitrary, is roughly in the right order. Only the last form (D) was not in use (as far as we know) earlier than c.600.

I have illustrated a few of these sword-hilts as they are today. Let me end with another, as it is now and as it would have been c. A.D. 600. This was found last century, in a grave in Kent, at a village called Coombe, and for decades it was preserved in the little museum at Saffron Walden in Essex. Early in the 1960s, it was transferred to the British Museum in London, where now the fragments of it rest. In its time it has suffered. It was taken out of the grave carelessly, and most of its fittings were lost; but when it was taken from the museum at Saffron Walden, it suffered an absurd, if dramatic, fate. It was transferred by one of England's most eminent scholars in Anglo-Saxon literaturę and mythology, being handed to her and her husband one wet, dark autumn evening. Taking the precious sword with infinite care out of the museum to her waiting car, where her husband held the boot (trunk) open to receive it, she was knocked flying by a man on a bicycle. The sword fell onto the wet road; shaken and dazed, she and her husband groped about to retrieve it, now in several pieces; what subsequent part the idiot cyclist took in this drama, I do not know, but all of the sword was recovered, and now the British Museum has it in safe keeping and only I, Dr. Davidson, and now you, the reader, know what happened that night. So Fig. 22a shows the hilt as it is (the blade is almost entirely rust-ed away, but the metal of the hilt is of siiver-gilt, and only the ivory parts have perished) and 22b as it would have been when new. I wish I could present a painting ofit in colour which I once did, but you can imagine something of what it would have been like: the warm, creamy polish of the ivory and the soft: glearn of the thick gilding of the decorated metalwork. I offer this as an example of the way that artistic imagination, joined with academic scholarship, can bring life to certain aspeets of the historical past.