Childhood in the Past

An International Journal

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Children's Burials in Fifth-Century Britain and

Connections to the Roman Past

Janet E. Kay

To cite this article: Janet E. Kay (2016) Children's Burials in Fifth-Century Britain and Connections
to the Roman Past, Childhood in the Past, 9:2, 86-108, DOI: 10.1080/17585716.2016.1205340

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childhood in the past: an international journal, Vol. 9 No. 2, September, 2016, 86–108

Children’s Burials in Fifth-Century

Britain and Connections to the Roman
Past
Janet E. Kay
History Department, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA

This paper considers the relationship between child burials and the way burial
parties used them to create connections to the Roman past during Britain’s
long fifth century, AD 350–550. It examines how both children and adults
were buried with late-Roman and early-fifth-century material culture such as
bracelets, coins, repurposed Roman curiosities and disc brooches. During
the fifth century, though these items were buried with individuals of all ages,
the total grave goods assemblage of which they were a part differed for chil-
dren and adults. Children were usually buried only with Roman material
culture, whereas adults were also given items from Anglo-Saxon or other
early medieval material cultures. As the chronological distance between a com-
munity and the Roman past lengthened, the graves of children – the future of
the living community – were used to commemorate or construct connections
to the Roman past.

keywords children, fifth-century, Roman, early medieval, material culture,

grave goods

Introduction
In the early medieval period, a community using the Hallow Hill cist cemetery near
St Andrews, Scotland, singled out two children between the ages of five and eight for
special funerary rites. Of the more than 140 burials in the cemetery, these two were
buried in cists larger and more elaborate than the rest, and were part of two of the
three double burials in the cemetery (Graves 51 and 54; Proudfoot, 1996: 413–14).
These children were also the only two people in the cemetery given grave goods.
Each was buried with a carefully chosen and costly assemblage of Roman-style jew-
ellery and other small objects, which are ‘unusual in quantity, quality and range’
(Proudfoot, 1996: 436).

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis DOI 10.1080/17585716.2016.1205340

Group and the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past
 CHILDREN’S BURIALS IN FIFTH-CENTURY BRITAIN AND CONNECTIONS TO THE ROMAN PAST 87

Radiocarbon results date the period of burial at Hallow Hill from the late fifth to
eighth centuries (Proudfoot, 1996: 423). The presence of these late-Roman items in a
cemetery used several centuries after the withdrawal of the Roman state from Britain
is extraordinary, and the artefacts buried with the children in Graves 51 and 54 are
‘unique in a Scottish context’ (Proudfoot, 1996: 436). Either the community held on
to Roman artefacts for several centuries, or they went to great lengths from Fife to
find them, and scavenged from the ruins of late-Roman sites (Eckardt and Williams,
2003; White, 1990). However they were obtained, the objects were then purpose-
fully laid to rest with the two children, rather than with any of the adults in the cem-
etery. The community at Hallow Hill chose to commemorate these two children in
particular amongst the entire burial population, and did so not only by constructing
larger graves for them, but also by burying them with Roman grave goods.
This paper studies how practices of including such Roman objects in burials
changed during Britain’s long fifth century, c. AD 350–550. In particular, it examines
how Roman artefacts were buried according to the age of the deceased. It looks at
three artefact categories: Roman coins; the simple punch-and-dot disc brooches that
developed in the early fifth century from Romano-British artwork; and an assort-
ment of Roman jewellery, curios and miscellanies referred to here as the Roman
Assemblage. This latter category includes primarily dress accessories and Roman
material culture, particularly that from the fourth century AD: copper alloy, bone
or ivory bracelets, rings and earrings (Swift, 2010, 2012); small objects made of
jet and shale such as bracelets or pins (Crummy, 2010; Eckardt, 2014); crossbow
brooches (Collins, 2010); amulets or trinkets such as millefiori seals or intaglios
(Meaney, 1981); or reworked items such as spindle whorls made from Roman
pottery (Swift, 2014). These three artefact categories are found in cemeteries
across the whole of Britain, regardless of whether their dominant material culture
is thought to be indigenous, ‘Romano-British’, ‘post-Roman’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’.
This includes still-used late-Roman cemeteries (e.g. Lankhills, Hampshire, and Cat-
terick, north Yorkshire; Booth et al., 2010; Wilson, 2002a), newly formed ceme-
teries with Germanic material culture (e.g. Saltwood Tunnel, Kent, and Barrington
A, Edix Hill, Cambridgeshire; Booth et al., 2011; Malim and Hines, 1998) and
cemeteries that were used throughout the fifth century (e.g. Wasperton, Warwick-
shire, and Berinsfield, Oxfordshire; Carver et al., 2009; Jennings et al., 1995).
The uses of Roman objects in the fifth century and early medieval period as grave
goods has been a popular research topic in the last few decades (Gowland, 2006;
Stoodley, 2000; Swift, 2014). White (1990) proposed that they were most likely
used as substitutions for early medieval items when contemporary objects could
not be found, while Meaney (1981) considered them to have been used as apotro-
paic or magical items from the past. Eckardt and Williams (2003) argue that
Roman objects – which were most likely scavenged from abandoned settlements
or by grave robbing – were used in Anglo-Saxon graves specifically because the
items had no known history; the discovery and the reburial of the item therefore
gave communities a chance to create new social memories with these objects from
the past. All of these approaches, however, consider the objects themselves and
the meanings and biographies they might have carried (or lost) (Kopytoff, 1986).
This paper does not specifically examine the biographies of these items – or the
88 JANET E. KAY

creation of new ones for them by early medieval communities – but rather how
age-related burial practices involving these objects changed over the fifth century.

Materials and Methods

This article analyses 7,424 burials in eighty-seven inhumation cemeteries and burial
populations across Britain (Figure 1; Table 1). All of these cemeteries were in use at
some point during the long fifth century. Information was gathered from published
and unpublished site reports, as well as grey and secondary literature. Sites with
associated radiocarbon dates were preferred, and the original published dates
were recalibrated according to the most recent curve (IntCal13, OxCal 4.2;
Reimer et al., 2013). Many cemeteries, however, have not been radiocarbon-dated;
dates for these cemeteries relied upon artefacts (Hines and Bayliss, 2013). The data
set for this paper are therefore skewed slightly towards cemeteries with grave goods,
a methodological problem that will be remedied in the future when radiocarbon
dating becomes less expensive, and therefore a viable option for many more exca-
vations (Gerrard, 2015).
The varying historiographical approaches to the fifth century, as well as different
methods of archaeological excavation, recording and interpretation of burial prac-
tices at different sites, also required a standardized approach to counting and ana-
lysing the information from all sites (Kay, forthcoming). Each burial was recorded
in an Excel spreadsheet in order better to correlate patterns within and between sep-
arate populations. The number of burials in each population is counted by each indi-
vidual burial, rather than by the number of graves. A double inhumation in a single
grave is therefore counted as two burials. Features that did not have conclusive evi-
dence to prove their use as graves were not included in the data set. The population
count for each cemetery may therefore differ slightly in the data set for this paper
compared to in the original excavation report and secondary sources. The counts
that may vary the most from the original report to this data set, however, are the
quantities of grave goods. In order to be consistent across the data sample, artefacts
counted as ‘grave goods’ included all those laid next to the body, as well as those in
the fill, even if the original excavator did not identify these latter objects as such.
Items or burials that were discovered by antiquarians or in amateur digging
before the official excavation period were not included.
Burial populations were divided into three broad chronological phases based
upon artefact and radiocarbon dating to track how funerary practices changed
over time (see Figure 1; Appendix) (Kay, forthcoming). Period I includes sites used
for burial during the later-third and fourth centuries, particularly those lasting
into the first half of the fifth century (ending c. AD 425–450). Period II consists of
‘transition’ cemeteries, those sites that began between AD 350 and 400, and were
used throughout the fifth century or into the early sixth century. Finally, the early
medieval Period III cemeteries were used for burial starting in the late fifth
century c. AD 450–475, and continued through the sixth and seventh centuries or
later. In some cases, dating methods enabled the excavators to discern different
phases of burial at the same cemetery, such as at the late-Roman Butt Road cemetery
 CHILDREN’S BURIALS IN FIFTH-CENTURY BRITAIN AND CONNECTIONS TO THE ROMAN PAST 89

figure 1 Map of all sites included in the paper, divided according to the study’s chronologi-
cal periods (I, II, III). Those specifically mentioned in the text are numbered and identified in
the key.
90 JANET E. KAY

TABLE 1
TOTAL BURIAL POPULATION FOR EACH PERIOD, AND THE NUMBER AND PERCENTAGE OF EACH AGE GROUP
AS PART OF THAT TOTAL POPULATION.

Burial Population Infants Juveniles Adults

Period I 3,530 401 (11.4%) 536 (15.2%) 2,593 (73.5%)

Period II 1,813 133 (7.3%) 292 (16.1%) 1,388 (76.6%)
Period III 2,081 64 (3.1%) 365 (17.5%) 1,652 (79.4%)

in Colchester (Crummy and Crossan, 1993). These different phases were counted as
individual burial populations. Occasionally, a cemetery was in use long enough that
different phases of burial fell into two different chronological phases (e.g. Canning-
ton and Bradley Hill in Somerset, and Wasperton; Leech et al., 1981; Rahtz et al.,
2000; Carver et al., 2009). Where this occurred, and when dating techniques per-
mitted, the different burial populations were separated into their respective
periods for analysis. Each burial was then placed into one of three age categories:
infant, juvenile or adult.
One of the problems for studies of childhood in the fourth through sixth centuries
is that there is no consistent definition for ‘children’ across disciplinary and meth-
odological approaches (Crawford, 1999: 21–4). This is further complicated by the
fact that the historiographies of childhood in the late Roman and early medieval
periods, with few exceptions (e.g. Gowland, 2002), have been treated separately.
Understanding how age-related burial practices changed during Britain’s fifth
century therefore requires a standard definition used across all sites. This article
uses a biocultural approach to create an effective and widely applicable framework
for all burials across the long fifth century, and its age categories reflect not only bio-
logical developments, but also their corresponding effects upon sociocultural roles
(Gowland and Redfern, 2010: 17; Halcrow and Tayles, 2008: 197). In order to
account more clearly for and incorporate variability between communities in differ-
ent time periods and with different material and lived cultures, the age parameters
for children were based upon stages in the development of sub-adults that are bio-
logical and therefore similar across the data set.
An ‘infant’, here, is classified as any individual aged eighteen months or younger
(Wiley and Pike, 1998), rather than the bioarchaeological standard of one year
(Scheuer and Black, 2000). This is based not solely on the skeletal or biological
development of the individual, but rather the effects that this development has
upon the individual’s life and social relationships (Wiley and Pike, 1998: 315–22).
At eighteen months humans are capable of moving on their own and forming
simple sentences (Lewis, 2007: 6). This is a social threshold at which individuals
in late-Roman and Anglo-Saxon contexts may have left infancy and been ascribed
‘true personhood’ (Crawford, 1999: 32; Gowland, 2002: 295). Though the age of
weaning has been suggested elsewhere as marking an important biocultural and
social threshold (De Lucia, 2010: 613; Wiley and Pike, 1998: 322), it is highly vari-
able between cultures, communities and individuals (Kamp, 2001: 11) and therefore
cannot provide a common developmental standard across the entire fifth-century
 CHILDREN’S BURIALS IN FIFTH-CENTURY BRITAIN AND CONNECTIONS TO THE ROMAN PAST 91

population. ‘Juveniles’ in this study are defined as individuals between the ages of
eighteen months and fifteen years. This ends the period of ‘childhood’ with the
onset of puberty, which is commonly used as an important sociocultural life stage
(Perry, 2006: 45; Stoodley, 2000: 469). The age of fifteen was chosen in an effort
to combine a number of different age delineations within bioarchaeology
(Halcrow and Tayles, 2008: 195) and from studies of child burials in the late
Roman (e.g. Gowland, 2002, 2006; Gowland and Redfern, 2010; Redfern, 2007)
and early medieval periods (e.g. Crawford, 2000 and Stoodley, 2000).
‘Infants’ and ‘juveniles’ were treated separately as initial categories of analysis,
but are referred to as ‘children’ when a similarity in patterns allows them to be dis-
cussed as a single category. Burials were distributed across these age groups accord-
ing to the age of the skeleton as determined by the bioarchaeologist(s) who analysed
the material from each site. The resulting number of infants and juveniles buried
within each cemetery may therefore vary from the age categories given in the exca-
vation report, as many different reports use different age criteria for sub-adults. On
rare occasions, the age of the person buried was estimated by the size of the grave in
relation to scant or absent skeletal remains. Individuals that could not be aged more
specifically than as ‘sub-adults’ or ‘infant/juvenile’ within the excavation reports
were counted as part of the juvenile population. Similarly, the adult counts here
include those few graves for which neither the excavators nor the osteologists
could determine the age of the individual, but which were long enough to contain
an adult burial rather than a child burial.

Artefacts and Age-related Burial Practices

Across all three periods, the relative percentages of adult, juvenile and infant burials
remain consistent: roughly three-quarters of all burials are of adults, while juveniles
represent fifteen per cent of the population, and infants between eleven and three per
cent (see Table 1). The similar proportions of adult burials to juvenile burials allows
a clearer analysis of how burial patterns change through time, as the proportion of
each age group remains relatively consistent. Infant burials, however, grow increas-
ingly rare with time, and neither infant nor juvenile burials occur in nearly the
number that archaeologists or historians would expect from the early medieval
period (Crawford, 1993). The children chosen for burial in their cemeteries are
therefore already special, at least archaeologically. Their burial with the artefacts
that follow, therefore, represent not only the specific choice to include these children
in the cemetery, but even more specific choice by their communities to lay these arte-
facts to rest with them.

Roman Assemblage
The Roman Assemblage studied here consists of a myriad of items that were popular
choices as grave goods during the fourth and early fifth centuries – unlike other
items, such as hobnail footwear, which were popular as grave goods in the fourth
century but were not used in the fifth (Crummy, 2011: 49–50). The Roman Assem-
blage includes bracelets and finger-rings made of copper alloy, ivory, bone or jet, as
92 JANET E. KAY

well as jet beads and crossbow brooches. It also includes objects that were already
old when they were buried in the late Roman period; examples include the Roman
cosmetic spoon buried with an adult at the eastern cemetery of Saltwood Tunnel
(Grave W1453; Riddler et al., 2006: 8), as well as the millefiori seal box found
with one of the two children at Hallow Hill (Proudfoot, 1996: 436). Many of
these Roman items, by the time they were buried in the fifth or early sixth centuries,
had been repurposed, such as the spindle whorl made from a piece of Roman wheel-
turned pottery found in the burial of a woman at Fordcroft, Orpington (Grave 35;
Tester, 1968: 141). Graves counted as containing artefacts from the Roman Assem-
blage needed to include only one item from the category, but could (and often do)
include more than one of the items, as well as Roman coins or disc brooches.
This artefact category has much in common with Cool’s (2000: 51) late-Roman
assemblage of dress items, especially the presence of copper bracelets in large quan-
tities and the introduction of bone bracelets, as well as jet or black finger-rings and
jewellery. It does not, however, include the presence of beads, which both Cool and
Ellen Swift have discussed as being popular in late-Roman jewellery, predominantly
with women and children (Cool, 2000: 51; Swift, 2003: 342). Their continued popu-
larity throughout the fifth century, and their widespread use within other early med-
ieval material cultures, particularly Anglo-Saxon inhumations, means that their
Roman association – if they had one – might have ‘diminished to the point where
they were no longer recognised’ (Swift, 2003: 347). Similarly, penannular brooches,
despite being an attribute of Cool’s late-Roman finds (2000: 51) and a main focus of
White’s study (1990), are not included in the Roman Assemblage here. Though they
were a popular brooch type in Roman Britain, they continued to be produced and
worn well into the medieval period. Such a widespread and continuous popularity
means that considering them as evidence of Roman culture – whatever that meant
to different people and communities (Swift, 2003: 347) – is problematic at best
(Cool and Baxter, 2016: 4).
The percentage of burials containing the Roman Assemblage decreased steadily
over time (Figure 2; Table 2), and burials in Periods II and III were only two-thirds
as likely (2.9%; 52/1,813 and 2.8%; 59/2,081) to receive one or more of these items
as burials in Period I (4.3%; 151/3,530). In each period, however, the Roman
Assemblage was buried disproportionally more with infants and children than
with adults. In the fourth and very early fifth centuries of Period I, 11.0% (59/
536) of juveniles were buried with the Roman Assemblage, as were 1.5% (6/401)
of infants, in contrast to only 3.3% (86/2,593) of adults. For late-Roman commu-
nities, these objects must have been considered particularly appropriate for those
between eighteen months and fifteen years. This proportion was reversed in
Period II burials, where 1.4% (4/292) of juveniles were buried with the Roman
Assemblage compared to 3% (4/133) of infants, though the proportion of adults
buried with the Roman Assemblage was roughly the same in Period II (3.2%; 44/
1388) as in Period I. The four infants in Period II, however, came from the single
cemetery of Great Chesterford, Cambridgeshire (Evison, 1994).
In Period III, a larger percentage of juveniles were once again buried with the
Roman Assemblage (3.6%; 13/365) than adults (2.7%; 44/1,652) (see Table 2).
Though only two infants were buried with the Roman Assemblage – one at Apple
 CHILDREN’S BURIALS IN FIFTH-CENTURY BRITAIN AND CONNECTIONS TO THE ROMAN PAST 93

figure 2 Percentage of each age population buried with the Roman Assemblage.

TABLE 2
NUMBER OF BURIALS WITH EACH ARTEFACT TYPE, AS A PERCENTAGE OF THE TOTAL POPULATION IN EACH
AGE GROUP.

Infants Juveniles Adults Total

Period I
Age group population 401 536 2,593 3,530
with Roman Assemblage 6 (1.5%) 59 (11.0%) 86 (3.3%) 151 (4.3%)
with Roman coins 9 (2.2%) 20 (3.7%) 128 (4.9%) 157 (4.4%)
with pierced coins 1 (0.2%) 3 (0.6%) 2 (0.08%) 6 (0.2%)
with disc brooches 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%)
Period II
Age group population 133 292 1,388 1,813
with Roman Assemblage 4 (3.0%) 4 (1.4%) 44 (3.2%) 52 (2.9%)
with Roman coins 6 (4.5%) 8 (2.7%) 61 (4.4%) 75 (4.1%)
with pierced coins 3 (2.3%) 3 (1%) 7 (0.5%) 13 (0.7%)
with disc brooches 0 (0%) 4 (1.4%) 19 (1.4%) 23 (1.3%)
Period III
Age group population 64 365 1,652 2,081
with Roman Assemblage 2 (3.1%) 13 (3.6%) 44 (2.7%) 59 (2.8%)
with Roman coins 1 (1.6%) 15 (4.1%) 37 (2.2%) 53 (2.5%)
with pierced coins 1 (1.6%) 10 (2.7%) 15 (0.9%) 26 (1.2%)
with disc brooches 0 (0%) 6 (1.6%) 43 (2.6%) 49 (2.4%)
94 JANET E. KAY

Down, West Sussex, and one at Droxford, Hampshire – these two represent 3.1% of
the infant population (n = 2/64) (Aldsworth, 1979; Down and Welch, 1990). Despite
the rarity of infant and juvenile burials during the early medieval period (Crawford,
1999: 24–5) and in this study, children throughout all three periods were dispropor-
tionally buried with items from the Roman Assemblage in comparison with adults.
Chi-square tests (Cool and Baxter, 2005) confirm that burial with the Roman
Assemblage was related to age in each period (Table 3). During Period I, the
p-value at one degree of freedom is ,0.001, contradicting the null hypothesis that
age is not related to this category of grave goods and confirming the initial obser-
vation that such items were overwhelmingly considered appropriate for children
rather than adults. The same tests for Periods II and III, in contrast, do not have
p-values small enough to contradict the null hypothesis that burial with these
items was not related to age (p = 0.164 and p = 0.354, respectively). However, the
question most intriguing for Periods II and III is not whether children or adults
were most likely to be buried with the Roman Assemblage, but rather how age
was related to whether or not burials with the Roman Assemblage also included
other material cultures.
The majority of adults given Roman items as grave goods in Periods II and III were
also given items that are part of early medieval material cultures. These include
weapons such as swords, spears or knives; saucer, cruciform, small-long, square-
headed and button brooches; and jewellery or other metalwork that is decorated
with Germanic artistic motifs. Of the forty-four adults buried with the Roman
Assemblage in Period II, forty were also buried with one or more of these early med-
ieval objects (90.1%), while these items were buried with only one of the eight

TABLE 3
CHI-SQUARE TESTS RELATING BURIAL WITH THE ROMAN ASSEMBLAGE TO AGE. THE NULL HYPOTHESIS IS
THAT AGE IS NOT A FACTOR IN INCLUDING THESE ITEMS IN BURIALS.

Period I Period II
W/RA W/O RA Total W/ RA W/O RA Total

Child 65 872 937 Child 8 417 425

Adult 86 2,507 2,593 Adult 44 1,344 1,388

Total 151 3,379 3,530 Total 52 1,761 1,813

p , 0.001, null hypothesis is rejected (age is related to p = 0.164, null hypothesis is not rejected (age is not
burial with the Roman Assemblage) related to burial with the Roman Assemblage)
Period III
W/ RA W/O RA Total

Child 15 414 429

Adult 44 1,608 1,652

Total 59 2,022 2,081

p = 0.354, null hypothesis is not rejected (age is not

related to burial with the Roman Assemblage)
 CHILDREN’S BURIALS IN FIFTH-CENTURY BRITAIN AND CONNECTIONS TO THE ROMAN PAST 95

children with the Roman Assemblage in the same period (12.5%). Similarly, these
additional items were given to 86.4% (38/44) of adults in Period III, but only to
33% (5/15) of the children. There is therefore a significant division according to
age in the manner in which individuals were buried with the Roman Assemblage.
Children were more likely to be given only Roman objects as grave goods during
the fifth century, and adults were more likely to be given Anglo-Saxon objects in
addition to the Roman ones (Table 4).

Roman Coins
Roman coins were included in the grave in a number of ways. In the late fourth
and early fifth centuries, they were often placed in the mouth or hand, or closely
associated with the body (Philpott, 1991: 212). As the fifth century progressed,
they were increasingly thrown into the grave fill, pierced and worn as jewellery,
or collected in a box or bag of trinkets (Meaney, 1981; White, 1990). Though the
number of burials containing Roman coins decreased during the course of the
fifth century, it did so in relative proportion to the declining burial population.
Less than five per cent of all graves in each period included coins, and the relative
proportion of each age group with coins was roughly similar in each period
(Figure 3; see Table 2).
In late-Roman Period I, 4.4% (157/3,530) of all burials included coins. Coins
were buried less often with infants (2.2%; 9/401) and juveniles (3.7%; 20/536)
than they were with adults (4.9%; 128/2,593); but this preference for burying
coins with adults did not continue past the early fifth century (Table 5). In
Period II, though a similar 4.1% (75/1,813) of all burials included coins, adults
received coins (4.4%, 61/1,388) in roughly the same proportion as infants
(4.5%; 6/133), and juveniles had almost half the number of coin burials
(2.7%; 8/292). By Period III, however, only 2.5% of burials (53/2,081) included
coins, and juveniles were twice as likely to receive coins (4.1%; 15/365) compared
to adults (2.2%; 37/1,652); only one infant received coins in its burial during
Period III.

TABLE 4
FISHER’S EXACT TESTS (TWO-TAILED) RELATING AGE TO WHETHER BURIALS WITH THE ROMAN
ASSEMBLAGE ALSO RECEIVED ANGLO-SAXON GRAVE GOODS DURING PERIODS II AND III. THE NULL
HYPOTHESIS IS THAT AGE IS NOT A FACTOR IN INCLUDING THESE ITEMS IN BURIALS WITH THE ROMAN
ASSEMBLAGE.

Period II Period III

RA + AS RA only Total RA + AS RA only Total

Child 1 7 8 Child 5 10 15

Adult 40 4 44 Adult 38 6 44

Total 41 11 52 Total 43 16 59

p , 0.001, null hypothesis is rejected (age is related to p , 0.001, null hypothesis is rejected (age is related to
burial with both the Roman Assemblage and Anglo-Saxon burial with both the Roman Assemblage and Anglo-Saxon
items) items)
96 JANET E. KAY

figure 3 Percentage of each age population buried with Roman coins.

The most significant change in coins as grave goods during the fifth century is not
related solely to the age of the individual, but rather in how the coins were used. As
the century progressed, coins were more likely to be pierced, though the total
number of burials with pierced coins in each period is only a small percentage of

TABLE 5
CHI-SQUARE TESTS RELATING AGE TO BURIAL WITH ROMAN COINS. THE NULL HYPOTHESIS IS THAT AGE IS
NOT A FACTOR IN INCLUDING THESE ITEMS IN BURIALS.

Period I Period II
W/coins W/O coins Total W/coins W/O coins Total

Child 29 908 937 Child 14 411 425

Adult 128 2,465 2,593 Adult 61 1,327 1,388

Total 157 3,373 3,530 Total 75 1,738 1,813

p = 0.019, null hypothesis is rejected (age is related to burial p = 0.319, null hypothesis is not rejected (age is not related
with Roman coins) to burial with Roman coins)
Period III
W/coins W/O coins Total

Child 16 413 429

Adult 37 1,615 1,652

Total 53 2,028 2,081

p = 0.081, null hypothesis is not rejected (age is not related

to burial with Roman coins)
 CHILDREN’S BURIALS IN FIFTH-CENTURY BRITAIN AND CONNECTIONS TO THE ROMAN PAST 97

the total number of burials with coins (Figure 4; see Table 2). Only 3.8% of burials
with coins during Period I included pierced coins (n = 6/157); this percentage quad-
rupled during Period II (17.3%; 13/75), and more than doubled again in Period III
(52.9%; 26/53). Fisher’s exact tests of coin burials from each period indicate that
there was a preference for burying these pierced coins with children in Periods I
and II (Table 6).
Overall, however, pierced coins were a general rarity at all sites, and roughly half
of the total for each period came from one or two cemeteries. In Period I, five of six
burials with pierced coins come from the Butt Road Cemetery in Colchester
(Crummy and Crossan, 1993: 277–88). Eight of thirteen in Period II are in the Buck-
land Cemetery, Dover (Evison, 1987: 49; Parfitt and Anderson, 2012, 174), while
eight of twenty-six burials in Period III are at Butler’s Field, Lechlade (Boyle et al.,
2011: 84), and ten of the remaining eighteen are from Portway, Andover (Cook
and Dacre, 1985: 94–5). This suggests that including pierced coins in burials
across the fifth century was practised by particular communities, rather than a wide-
spread trend. Including pierced coins in burials seems to be a community-specific
trend, but one that is related to age within that community.
Similarly, each community might have had its own ways of including pierced coins
with each specific age group. The only infant burial to include pierced coins – or any
coins at all – in Period III was at Lechlade, where the infant in Grave 132 was buried
with two coins tied around its neck (Boyle et al., 1998: 109–10). The backs of these
coins bore the image of Lupa with Romulus and Remus, an issue that Crummy
(2010) has suggested was used as an amulet to protect children during the Roman
period. This is one of two occurrences of such a coin in all of the fifty-three

TABLE 6
FISHER’S EXACT TESTS (TWO-TAILED) RELATING AGE TO BURIAL WITH PIERCED ROMAN COINS, AS PART OF
THE TOTAL NUMBER OF BURIALS WITH COINS. THE NULL HYPOTHESIS IS THAT AGE IS NOT A FACTOR IN
INCLUDING PIERCED COINS IN BURIALS RATHER THAN UNPIERCED COINS.

Period I Period II
W/pierced W/O pierced Total W/ pierced W/O pierced Total

Child 4 25 29 Child 6 8 14

Adult 2 126 128 Adult 7 54 61

Total 6 151 157 Total 13 62 75

p = 0.011, null hypothesis is rejected (age is related to burial p = 0.012, null hypothesis is rejected (age is related to burial
with pierced coins) with pierced coins)
Period III
W/pierced W/O pierced Total

Child 11 5 16

Adult 15 22 37

Total 26 27 53

p = 0.077, null hypothesis is not rejected (age is not related

to burial with pierced coins)
98 JANET E. KAY

figure 4 Number of burials in each age population that include pierced Roman coins.

Period III burials with coins, and its burial with an infant suggests that the commu-
nity at Lechlade used that coin specifically, rather than any of the ten other pierced
coins buried with four juveniles and four adults in the same cemetery. Perhaps this is
one instance where cultural memory of the use of such coins with infants survived,
or the same idea to use that coin’s reverse image as a protective item for infants
occurred to the people at Lechlade.

Disc Brooches
The disc brooches studied here appear in Britain for the first time during the early
fifth century. These brooches, usually made of copper alloy, were influenced by
late-Romano-British artwork, but were not part of a typical late-Roman artefact
assemblage (Dickinson, 1979: 41–8; Inker, 2000: 48–50). They were decorated
with simple, punched dot-and-circle shapes and patterns (Figure 5), in contrast to
the more elaborate, later disc brooches, which were often made with precious
metals and stones (Avent, 1975; Dickinson, 1979). They have no precedent on the
Continent, suggesting that they were first manufactured in Britain and drew from
existing Romano-British traditions, although this does not preclude that some
were crafted by immigrant artisans (Dickinson, 1979: 49–53; Inker, 2000: 40–8).
None of the burials from Period I included these early-fifth-century disc brooches,
nor did any infant burials from all three chronological phases. They are, however,
found in cemeteries from Periods II and III, but only where Anglo-Saxon material
culture is prevalent – at the newly begun cemetery of Berinsfield (Jennings et al.,
1995), for example, but not the post-Roman cemetery built over the ruins of the
late-Roman temple at Henley Wood, Somerset (Watts and Leach, 1996). These
objects became more popular through the course of the fifth century, increasing
from 1.3% of the total population (23/1,813) in Period II to 2.4% (49/2,081) in
 CHILDREN’S BURIALS IN FIFTH-CENTURY BRITAIN AND CONNECTIONS TO THE ROMAN PAST 99

figure 5 Examples of the types of disc brooches studied in this article, depicting the range
of sizes and front decorations developed from late-Romano-British artwork (Top: complete
brooch HAMP-884A73, Source: © Portable Antiquites Scheme, via Winchester Museums
Service; Bottom: the fragmented centre of brooch IOW-01EBC1, Source: © Portable Anti-
quites Scheme, via Isle of Wight Council).

Period III (Figure 6; see Table 2). Over time, however, disc brooches were increasin-
gly buried with adults. In Period II, they were buried with juveniles and adults in
equal proportion to the overall age population, 1.4% (4/292) and 1.4% (19/
1,388) respectively. In Period III, adults were almost twice as likely (2.6%; 43/
1,652) to receive disc brooches as juveniles (1.6%; 6/365). Chi-square tests,
however, suggest that there was no age preference for these grave goods (Table 7).
The age patterns of the brooches also suggest that the biocultural approach taken
in this paper may need to be adjusted when discussing these particular
early-fifth-century items in graves. Eight of the ten infants and juveniles with disc
brooches in Periods II and III were aged nine years or older. Previous studies of child-
hood and life stages in Anglo-Saxon culture have argued that between the ages of ten
and fifteen, particularly for females, individuals passed a significant social threshold,
and that this age limit slowly increased with time (Crawford, 1999: 32; Stoodley,
100 JANET E. KAY

figure 6 Percentage of each age population buried with disc brooches.

2000: 462–4). If the relative percentages of juveniles and adults buried with these
artefacts are adjusted according to this life stage threshold, all twenty-three of the
burials with disc brooches from Period II are with adults, while all but two of the
forty-seven in Period III are also of adults (Figure 7). Corresponding p-values are
small enough to contradict the null hypothesis that age was not a factor in burial
with disc brooches (p = 0.009 in Period II and p = 0.034 in Period III) (see
Table 7). There may have been another age category between ‘juvenile’ and
‘adult’ that included those aged nine to fifteen, and for whom burial with these
items was appropriate (Stoodley, 2000: 463). The exclusion of infants from burial
with disc brooches, however, as well as the higher percentage of adults buried
with them as time progresses, suggests that these were not items for ‘children’.
Though these items may have decoration from Romano-British tradition, they
were treated more as contemporary early medieval items, like saucer brooches,
than they were like the items in the Roman Assemblage.

Discussion
Taking an age-related perspective when studying changes in grave goods presents a
useful and necessary way to include child burials in the discussion of early medieval
Britain without isolating them from a larger discussion of adult society and culture
(Baxter, 2006; Kamp, 2001). Childhood studies emphasize the important role that
infants and children – upon whom new generations of a community depended for
its survival – play in understanding the lived experience of that community
(Baxter, 2006: 2–3; Sofaer Derevenski, 2000). Funerals, in particular, are inherently
public displays, and are used to create or confirm or negotiate social roles, hierar-
chies and memories (Williams, 2006). In the past twenty years, the funerary
 CHILDREN’S BURIALS IN FIFTH-CENTURY BRITAIN AND CONNECTIONS TO THE ROMAN PAST 101

TABLE 7
CHI-SQUARE TESTS RELATING BURIAL WITH DISC BROOCHES TO AGE. THE NULL HYPOTHESIS IS THAT AGE
IS NOT A FACTOR IN INCLUDING DISC BROOCHES IN BURIALS. NO INFANTS IN ANY OF THE THREE PERIODS
WERE BURIED WITH DISC BROOCHES, NOR WERE ANY OF THE PEOPLE FROM PERIOD I. THE TOP SHOWS
THE DISTRIBUTION OF DISC BROOCHES ACCORDING TO THE ORIGINAL AGE DISTINCTION OF JUVENILES
BEING BETWEEN EIGHTEEN MONTHS AND FIFTEEN YEARS; THE BOTTOM SHOWS THE SUGGESTED
REDISTRIBUTION OF AN AGE GROUP THAT BEGINS AT NINE YEARS, RATHER THAN FIFTEEN.

Juvenile ≤ 15 years
Period II Period III
W/ DB W/O DB Total W/ DB W/O DB Total

Juvenile 4 288 292 Juvenile 6 359 365

Adult 19 1,369 1,388 Adult 43 1,609 1,652

Total 23 1,657 1,680 Total 49 1,958 2,017

p = 1, null hypothesis not rejected (age is not related to p = 0.350, null hypothesis not rejected (age is not related
deposition) to deposition)
Juvenile ≤ 8 years
Period II Period III
W/ DB W/O DB Total W/ DB W/O DB Total

≤ 8 years 0 292 292 ≤ 8 years 2 363 365

9+ years 23 1,365 1,388 9+ years 47 1,605 1,652

Total 23 1,657 1,680 Total 49 1,968 2,017

p = 0.023, null hypothesis rejected (age is related to p = 0.007, null hypothesis rejected (age is related to
deposition) deposition)

archaeology of late Roman and early medieval Britain has increasingly focused on
child burials, in an effort to create a narrative of the lived experience of this
younger age group in their communities (e.g. Crawford, 1999; Hadley and
Hemer, 2011). These studies examine the construction of age identities, using
grave goods and age-related burial patterns to illuminate how the children and
adults of a community were differentiated in death, and therefore may have been dif-
ferentiated in life (Gowland, 2002; Stoodley, 2000). Analyses of age identity,
however, usually focus on those constructed by one particular cultural group. The
year AD 400 has been used as a dividing line between two separate culture
groups – Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon. Such a neat delineation fails to
account for the fluidity of cultural identities during the fifth century (Gowland,
2007; Loveluck, 2002), and perpetuates the notion that children buried before
AD 400 necessarily belonged to a different culture group than those buried after
because of a periodization derived from textual sources.
This paper studies changes in children’s burials not only to include them as an
important element in historical and archaeological discussions of the fifth century,
but also because they are a valuable source of information for that period. Child
burials are particularly appropriate sources for exploring how a community
understood its relationship to the past. Studies of the household, family structure
102 JANET E. KAY

figure 7 Number of burials in each age population with disc brooches. On the left are
those according to the original age parameters of the study (juveniles = 18 months to 15
years). On the right is the suggested adaptation of the age parameters to fit the pattern of
these objects being buried with ‘adults’ nine years of age or older (juveniles = 18 months
to 8 years).

and the education process have recently argued that children can represent differ-
ent aspects of time (de Lucia, 2010); they are ‘both literally and figuratively the
future of every community, since its perpetuation rests on the successful training
and adaptation of each new generation’ (Baxter, 2005: 10). The socialization and
education of children represents the intersection of past, present and future
(Mizoguchi, 2000). They can therefore be considered to coexist in two time
frames: ideas for the future contained within the framework of the present or
past (Mizoguchi, 2000), and children who die before reaching maturity are
part of a lost future (Martin-Kilcher, 2000). Studying how children were buried
with objects from the Roman past illuminates the ways in which a community
told the story of its history, as well as its changing ideas of past, present and
future at a time when the world as fifth-century Britons knew it was rapidly
disappearing.
During the fifth century, communities remembered and connected to their real
or imagined Roman past through the inclusion of Roman artefacts such as jew-
ellery, brooches and re-used items in the graves of their children. After the early
fifth century, as new material cultures began to appear in graves, many commu-
nities continued the late-fourth-century practice of according burial with the
Roman Assemblage according to age. Roman-style burial practices involving
bronze bracelets and finger-rings and other late-fourth-century items survived
the fifth century in practices surrounding child burial. While both adults and
 CHILDREN’S BURIALS IN FIFTH-CENTURY BRITAIN AND CONNECTIONS TO THE ROMAN PAST 103

children were buried with these items, the inclusion of other artefacts as grave
goods differed.
Adults were buried with Roman-style items, but only as part of a larger assem-
blage that included or consisted mainly of objects usually found in early medieval
graves such as Anglo-Saxon brooches, amber beads, knives and weapons. Most
of their grave goods emphasized their ties to the living community and its future,
while their Roman goods appear more as trinkets. For example, one woman at Was-
perton was buried with over 100 glass and amber beads, a copper alloy pin, several
rings, a knife and a pendant made from a late-Roman military belt (Grave 15;
Carver et al., 2009: 157–60), while an eighteen-year-old woman at Barrington A
(Edix Hill) was buried with a group of grave goods containing a copper alloy small-
long brooch, several glass and amber beads, two pairs of copper alloy wrist clasps
and a silver finger-ring made from a re-used Roman bracelet (Grave 19; Malim
and Hines, 1998: 53–4). In contrast, when early medieval children were buried
with Roman artefacts, the other objects in the grave were not recognizably part of
a non-Roman material culture.
This preference for burying children, rather than adults, with recognizably
Romano-British artefacts mirrored the late-Roman tradition of burying the same
items mainly with juveniles and infants. During and after the fifth century, the prac-
tice of burying individuals in a similar way survived but was still considered a rite for
children rather than adults. Though the number of burials containing such objects
from all three periods (n = 262) is small compared to the overall number of
burials examined (n = 7,424), these objects are included in graves across Britain
throughout the fifth century, and follow the same age-related burial pattern. Items
found in the child burials in particular were carefully curated. They are rare,
even in cemeteries that include relatively large numbers of children, and so
represent individual cases in which the community thought that the child’s death
particularly disruptive or memorable. These communities therefore deliberately
chose to bury children in elaborate graves with Roman-style objects – and only
these objects.
While some of these artefacts with these children were only remnants – such as
those with an infant at Droxford, who was buried in Period III with two small
iron pieces and the broken remains of Romano-British brooches (Grave 40; Alds-
worth, 1979: 134) – many of the objects were intact or repurposed. For instance,
a juvenile around the age of six was buried at Cannington in Period III with a
bronze bracelet, an amber bead and a late-third-century coin of Allectus (Grave
407; Rahtz et al., 2000: 97), while an infant in the same period at Apple Down
was given a Roman-period copper alloy bracelet that had been resized to fit a
smaller wrist (Grave 51; Down and Welch, 1990: 41). As time progressed, though
the past was still an important part of a community’s memory, it was something
that the community associated with children.
In some cemeteries that continued in use from the late fourth or early fifth
century, such as that at the Bainesse cemetery at Catterick, outside the ruins of
the Roman town, this could be interpreted as a community’s reassertion of its
recent past, and perhaps a cultural memory of how Roman children were
buried with the same items. Each of the Period II cemeteries (SSD1 and SSD10)
104 JANET E. KAY

discovered in the Bainesse excavations buried items from the Roman Assemblage
with one child – items such as an iron armlet and necklet (Wilson, 2002a, 2002b,
2002c; Wilson et al., 1996). In other, early medieval cemeteries that were first
used for burial in the mid-late fifth century, communities that theoretically and
chronologically are not expected to retain cultural memory of Romano-British
burial practices chose to appropriate that past for themselves by placing fourth-
century items in graves according to late-Roman traditions. One of two children
buried with the Roman Assemblage at the Buckland cemetery in Dover was given
a hand-built pot, a pile of Roman glass fragments, a copper buckle, several
copper rings made from re-purposed Roman jewellery and a pendant made
from a copper Roman horse harness (Grave 377; Parfitt and Anderson, 2012:
433). They may have retained this cultural memory within their communities
or learned it through the excavation of Roman graves; in either case, they simi-
larly chose to bury their children in ways that connected them specifically with
the past, and did not include early medieval objects. Others, such as the commu-
nity at Lyminge, Kent, did not distinguish between children and adults in burials
with the Roman Assemblage. The only two people buried with such artefacts at
this rural cemetery in Kent were an adult and a child. The adult wore a cloisonné
buckle at her waist, at the centre of which was a jasper intaglio of Athena (Grave
32; Warhurst, 1955: 24). The child, though wearing a copper alloy wire bracelet
on its left arm, was also given a small cloisonné purse mount at its right shoulder,
lying under a knife (Grave 27; Warhurst, 1955: 20).
The community at Hallow Hill, however, specifically differentiated between
adults and children in the placement of Roman grave goods. They chose to bury
the two children in Graves 51 and 54 with an assortment of Roman objects such
as glass beads and jet fragments, a glass cup, a Roman finger-ring, a copper alloy
and enamel disc of a Roman plate brooch, a copper alloy and millefiori seal box
and a fragment of a silver snake-headed bracelet (Proudfoot, 1996: 417–22).
None of the adults in the cemetery were given grave goods. Radiocarbon dating pre-
cludes these two child graves as being Roman; though the organization of the cem-
etery allows the possibility that they were founder’s graves, they are roughly
contemporary with the rest of the cemetery (Proudfoot, 1996). We are therefore
left with the conclusion that these two children, and only these children, were con-
sidered appropriate recipients of such items from the Roman past.

Conclusion
The scholarly discussion on the use of Roman objects in early medieval graves has so
far focused on how these items were recovered and why they were used instead of
contemporary material culture. This paper has argued that by studying age-related
burial patterns in the use of Roman objects as grave goods across the long fifth
century we can learn not only about why these objects were included in burials,
but also about how children were understood by the communities that buried
them. If we look at the long fifth century, we see that not only were Roman items
still used in burial, but that Roman traditions of using these items continued.
 CHILDREN’S BURIALS IN FIFTH-CENTURY BRITAIN AND CONNECTIONS TO THE ROMAN PAST 105

Roman objects provided links to the past, particularly with children. This suggests
that the items were not simply used for magical or functional purposes, but that the
communities that continued to bury the Roman Assemblage with children knew
about the same late-Roman tradition, and continued or copied it, even as they
buried adults with contemporary material culture. Early medieval communities
had the choice also to bury contemporary items with children who received
Romano-British items, as they chose to do with adults. Children, and their funerary
rites, so it seems, were considered to be the connection between the Roman past and
the early medieval present.

Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a Dissertation Research Fellowship from Boston
College, whose entire medievalist cohort has been enormously supportive in their
discussion of this paper. I am particularly grateful for the supervision of Robin
Fleming and her comments throughout the many drafts. I would also like to
thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions,
as well as Duncan Schlee at Dyfed Archaeology for further information on burials
at Porthclew, and Andrew Simmons at Oxford Archaeology for the same at
Tubney Wood. Any errors are, of course, my own.

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Notes on contributor
Correspondence to: Janet E. Kay, History Department, Boston College, 140 Com-
monwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467, USA. Email: janet.kay@
bc.edu