A more pointed blade, with the central rib much less pronounced, and the notch in the hilt more distinct, was found with a skeleton in a cist near Cheswick,[893] Northumberland, and is now in the Greenwell Collection in the British Museum. It has been carefully polished.
Another, with a small, well-defined central midrib and two rivets, was found by Canon Greenwell in a barrow at Aldbourn, Wilts. It accompanied a burnt body.
Some of the Italian dagger blades are provided with similar midribs.
Of the English weapons just described some closely resemble in character the much larger blades of which I shall subsequently have to speak, and which not improbably were those of some form of halberd or battle-axe.
A much longer and narrower form, in which the central rib is partly the result of two long lateral grooves along the sides of the blade, is shown in Fig. 301. This was found with two others at Plymstock,[894] Devon, in company with flanged celts, a chisel, and a tanged spear-head or dagger, Fig. 327, and is now in the British Museum.
I have a much smaller blade, of somewhat the same character (4⅞ inches), but imperfect at the base, found in a barrow near Cirencester; and one smaller still (4¼ inches), from a small barrow near Ablington, Cirencester, Gloucestershire. This latter appears to have had two rivet-holes.
A beautiful example of the form of dagger of which Sir Richard C. Hoare found numerous examples in the Wiltshire barrows is shown in Fig. 302. It lay with burnt bones in a wooden cist in a barrow near Winterbourn Stoke.[895] With it was another, which was, however, broken, an ivory pin and tweezers, and two small pieces of ivory with bronze rivets, which were supposed to have appertained to the tips of a bow. They may more probably have formed part of the hilt of the dagger. The blade is ornamented with parallel lines as usual, but it also has a series of fine dotted lines.
Two other blades (8½ and 8 inches), less highly ornamented, and one of them straighter at the edges, were found with a skeleton buried in the hollowed trunk of an elm-tree in the King Barrow,[896] Winterbourn Stoke. With one of these at the breast of the skeleton were traces of a wooden scabbard, with indentations which were thought to have been gilt. The handle is described as having been of box-wood, and rounded somewhat like that of a large knife. The other dagger was at the thigh. On the breast was also a bronze awl with what is said to have been an ivory handle (Fig. 227).
Dr. Thurnam[897] thinks it not improbable that one of the blades may have been a spear-head for use in the chase. In writing of these blades he observes, “Where two are found with the same interment they are not exactly of one type, but one is light and thin and of greater breadth, the other strengthened by a stout midrib relatively heavier and of more pointed or leaf-like form; the rivets also are larger. In such cases the former may, perhaps, be supposed to be the dagger, the latter the spear.” Sir Richard Hoare in some cases discriminates between the spear and the dagger when two blades were found; and Mr. Cunnington observed in a barrow at Roundway,[898] Wilts, that a pointed blade only 3 inches long with three rivets had a wooden shaft about a foot in length, which, as Dr. Thurnam remarks, could not have been the haft of a dagger.
The fact that many of these blades bore traces of having had a sheath is in favour of their being daggers rather than spear-heads, though it must not be forgotten that Homer[899] describes Achilles as drawing the spear which had belonged to his father from its sheath—