Chapter 19

1. Oolitic strata. 2. Boulder clay, or marine northern drift, rising to about ninety feet above the Ouse. 3. Ancient gravel, with elephant bones, freshwater shells, and flint implements. 4. Modern alluvium of the Ouse. a. Biddenham gravel pits, at the bottom of which flint tools were found.)

The boulder clay Number 2 extends for miles in all directions, and was evidently once continuous from b to c before the valley was scooped out. It is a portion of the great marine glacial drift of the midland counties of England, and contains blocks, some of large size, not only of the Oolite of the neighbourhood, but of Chalk and other rocks transported from still greater distances, such as syenite, basalt, quartz, and New Red Sandstone. These erratic blocks of foreign origin are often polished and striated, having undergone what is called glaciation, of which more will be said by and by. Blocks of the same mineral character, embedded at Biddenham in the gravel Number 3, have lost all signs of this striation by the friction to which they were subjected in the old river bed.

The great width of the valley of the Ouse, which is sometimes 2 miles, has not been expressed in the diagram. It may have been shaped out by the joint action of the river and the tides when this part of England was emerging from the waters of the glacial sea, the boulder clay being first cut through, and then an equal thickness of underlying Oolite. After this denudation, which may have accompanied the emergence of the land, the country was inhabited by the primitive people who fashioned the flint tools. The old river, aided perhaps by the continued upheaval of the whole country, or by oscillations in its level, went on widening and deepening the valley, often shifting its channel, until at length a broad area was covered by a succession of the earliest and latest deposits, which may have corresponded in age to the higher and lower gravels of the valley of the Somme, already described.

At Biddenham, and elsewhere in the same gravel, remains of Elephas antiquus have been discovered, and Mr. Wyatt obtained, January 1863, a flint implement associated with bones and teeth of hippopotamus from gravel at Summerhouse hill, which lies east of Bedford, lower down the valley of the Ouse, and 4 miles from Biddenham.

One step at least we gain by the Bedford sections, which those of Amiens and Abbeville had not enabled us to make. They teach us that the fabricators of the antique tools, and the extinct mammalia coeval with them, were all post-glacial.

FLINT IMPLEMENTS IN A FRESHWATER DEPOSIT AT HOXNE IN SUFFOLK [17].

So early as the first year of the nineteenth century, a remarkable paper was communicated to the Society of Antiquaries by Mr. John Frere, in which he gave a clear description of the discovery at Hoxne, near Diss, in Suffolk, of flint tools of the type since found at Amiens, adding at the same time good geological reasons for presuming that their antiquity was very great, or, as he expressed it, beyond that of the present world, meaning the actual state of the physical geography of that region. "The flints," he said, "were evidently weapons of war, fabricated and used by a people who had not the use of metals. They lay in great numbers at the depth of about 12 feet in a stratified soil which was dug into for the purpose of raising clay for bricks. Under a foot and a half of vegetable earth was clay 7 1/2 feet thick, and beneath this one foot of sand with shells, and under this 2 feet of gravel, in which the shaped flints were found generally at the rate of 5 or 6 in a square yard. In the sandy beds with shells were found the jawbone and teeth of an enormous unknown animal. The manner in which the flint weapons lay would lead to the persuasion that it was a place of their manufacture, and not of their accidental deposit. Their numbers were so great that the man who carried on the brick-work told me that before he was aware of their being objects of curiosity, he had emptied baskets full of them into the ruts of the adjoining road."

Mr. Frere then goes on to explain that the strata in which the flints occur are disposed horizontally, and do not lie at the foot of any higher ground, so that portions of them must have been removed when the adjoining valley was hollowed out. If the author had not mistaken the freshwater shells associated with the tools for marine species, there would have been nothing to correct in his account of the geology of the district, for he distinctly perceived that the strata in which the implements were embedded had, since that time, undergone very extensive denudation.*

(* Frere, "Archaeologia" volume 13 1800 page 206.)

Specimens of the flint spear-heads, sent to London by Mr. Frere, are still preserved in the British Museum, and others are in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries.

(FIGURE 24. SECTION SHOWING THE POSITION OF THE FLINT WEAPONS AT HOXNE, NEAR DISS, SUFFOLK. See Prestwich "Philosophical Transactions" Plate 11 1860.)

1. Gravel of Gold Brook, a tributary of the Waveney. 2. Higher-level gravel overlying the freshwater deposit. 3 and 4. Sand and gravel, with freshwater shells, and flint implements, and bones of mammalia. 5. Peaty and clayey beds, with same fossils. 6. Boulder clay or glacial drift. 7. Sand and gravel below boulder clay. 8. Chalk with flints.)

Mr. Prestwich's attention was called by Mr. Evans to these weapons, as well as to Mr. Frere's memoir after his return from Amiens in 1859, and he lost no time in visiting Hoxne, a village five miles eastward of Diss. It is not a little remarkable that he should have found, after a lapse of sixty years, that the extraction of clay was still going on in the same brick-pit. Only a few months before his arrival, two flint instruments had been dug out of the clay, one from a depth of 7 and the other of 10 feet from the surface. Others have since been disinterred from undisturbed beds of gravel in the same pit. Mr. Amyot of Diss has also obtained from the underlying freshwater strata the astragalus of an elephant, and bones of the deer and horse; but although many of the old implements have recently been discovered in situ in regular strata and preserved by Sir Edward Kerrison, no bones of extinct mammalia seem as yet to have been actually seen in the same stratum with one of the tools.

By reference to the annexed section, the geologist will see that the basin-shaped hollow a, b, c has been filled up gradually with the freshwater strata 3, 4, 5, after the same cavity a, b, c had been previously excavated out of the more ancient boulder clay Number 6. The relative position of these formations will be better understood when I have described in the twelfth chapter the structure of Norfolk and Suffolk as laid open in the sea-cliffs at Mundesley, about 30 miles distant from Hoxne, in a north-north-east direction.

I examined the deposits at Hoxne in 1860, when I had the advantage of being accompanied by the Reverend J. Gunn and the Reverend S.W. King. In the loamy beds 3 and 4, Figure 24, we observed the common river shell Valvata piscinalis in great numbers. With it, but much more rare, were Limnaea palustris, Planorbis albus, P. Spirorbis, Succinea putris, Bithynia tentaculata, Cyclas cornea; and Mr. Prestwich mentions Cyclas amnica and fragments of a Unio, besides several land shells. In the black peaty mass Number 5, fragments of wood of the oak, yew, and fir have been recognised. The flint weapons which I have seen from Hoxne are so much more perfect, and have their cutting edge so much sharper than those from the valley of the Somme, that they seem neither to have been used by Man, nor to have been rolled in the bed of a river. The opinion of Mr. Frere, therefore, that there may have been a manufactory of weapons on the spot, appears probable.

FLINT IMPLEMENTS AT ICKLINGHAM IN SUFFOLK.

In another part of Suffolk, at Icklingham, in the valley of the Lark, below Bury St. Edmund's, there is a bed of gravel, in which teeth of Elephas primigenius and several flint tools, chiefly of a lance-head form, have been found. I have twice visited the spot, which has been correctly described by Mr. Prestwich.*

(* "Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society" volume 17 1861, page 364.)

The section of the Bedford tool-bearing alluvium, given in Figure 23, may serve to illustrate that of Icklingham, if we substitute Chalk for Oolite, and the river Lark for the Ouse. In both cases, the present bed of the river is about 30 feet below the level of the old gravel, and the Chalk hill, which bounds the valley of the Lark on the right side, is capped like the Oolite of Biddenham by boulder clay, which rises to the height of 100 feet above the Lark. About twelve years ago, a large erratic block, above 4 feet in diameter, was dug out of the boulder clay at Icklingham, which I found to consist of a hard siliceous schist, which must have come from a remote region. The tool-bearing gravel here, as in the case to which it has been compared near Bedford, is proved to be newer than the glacial drift, by containing pebbles of basalt and other rocks derived from that formation.