Fortunately vessels of this description have been preserved in the ancient burial places of the Britons, and are occasionally exhumed in a state of tolerable preservation. They are for the most part not turned on the potter’s wheel, but moulded by the hand, and marked on the exterior by ornaments, not in relief, but always depressed or incised, having the appearance of indentations made in the soft clay by plaited osiers, rushes, or strips of hide, more or less distinct, but, so far as I know, all referrible to such an origin.[15] In some the coating of clay appears not to be carried to the mouth of the basket, but the plaited rushes seem to have been folded inside, and thus the interior of the urn is on its upper portions indented with the same pattern of basket-work as that on the outer side. All British urns are, comparatively with Roman or with Saxon examples, wide-mouthed, a condition essential to their being made by hand on an exterior frame-work of plaited rushes or willows; and some appear to have been constructed on two separate baskets, one inverted over the other. There is rarely any attempt at _ansation_, the nearest approach to handles being heavy perforated knobs placed a little beneath the mouth, for the evident purpose of attaching to them the twigs, withes, or thongs, which served both to protect and to suspend these fragile vessels.
I must not be supposed to assert that the ornaments found on British, occasionally on Anglo-Roman, and abundantly on Anglo-Saxon urns, were in all cases real impressions of basket-work; but merely that the use of that style of ornament probably originated in the manner I have described, and that it was continued after the introduction of the potter’s wheel by force of habit and long-continued custom. This induced the potter to stamp or incise on the surface of the vessels he made ornamental devices similar to those on the honoured urns of an earlier people; for that they were honoured and held in high estimation is apparent from the sacred purposes to which they were applied as receptacles for the ashes of the dead. In absence of all direct proof of this assumed origin of urn ornamentation, I have thought it right to test the possibility of the process;—with a result entirely satisfactory. Taking such small baskets as I found used by my family for ordinary domestic purposes, I have roughly coated them inside with different clays, subjecting some to the action of fire in the kiln, while others I have left exposed to the sun, and to a few I have applied heat inside only. On all the indentations of the basket-work are sufficiently marked; but they are best defined on the sun-dried specimens, since the shrinking of the clay under the action of fire in the kiln obliterates some of the more salient ridges. A comparison of these jars with ancient British urns will, I apprehend, be more satisfactory and convincing than any elaborate argument, leaving little doubt that both have been produced by similar processes, and that the British urn is, in truth, a secondary application of the British basket.