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Archaeologia Cantiana -  Vol. 6  1866  page 163

Account of the Society's Researches at Sarr (Sarre) Part II by John Brent Esq., F.S.A.

a plate on our own door-posts. Part of the original woodwork remained attached to the lock; but the whole is scarcely perfect enough to solve the mystery of the curious hooked Anglo-Saxon keys, and shew how they performed their office.
   3. The double sheath containing the knife or dirk and the smaller knife together is, I believe, unique as a Saxon relic. I made a drawing of these immediately, and although they became parted upon exposure, and much of the wooden sheath has crumbled away, I can state with certainty that their juxtaposition was not accidental, but that they formed the true type of the Highland scian, dirk and knife in a double scabbard. The larger knife is nine inches in the blade, and, including haft, nearly twelve in length.; its blade is one inch and a half in breadth. The smaller is six inches long.

both sides; it is also punched with a rude indentation on both sides. Weight, 300 grains. The other three may probably, by their shape, have been coins, but bear no traces of figure or inscription.  is roughly cut, not dissimilarly to Fig. 11.

   It seems impossible to trace proportion among these weights or to refer them to any fixed standard: nor does a comparison with the other sets, discovered at Gilton and Ozingell, at all help the attempt. The opinion that such scales and their adjuncts are those of money-changers, who made their weights as they required them, to test the many different coins of all nations which came before them in their business, seems a very reasonable one. It should, however, be remarked that Figs; 2, 4, and 6, which are marked respectively with seven, five, and three little indentations in a line, bear a proportion in weight near enough to seven, five, and three, to be scarcely, I think, the result of accident. May not this rather point to a looseness and want of accuracy in such tests not unreasonably to be expected in the absence of a fixed general standard of weight? Some very similar marks are upon some of the Gilton weights, but the Gilton money. changer and he of Sarr meant widely different quantities by their signs. It is to be hoped that further discoveries may throw new light on the obscure subject of Saxon weights.
   The occupation of a money-changer seems admirably represented by the somewhat various relics found in this grave, and commented on by Mr. Brent above; the weapons especially forming, no doubt, a very essential part of his stock-in-trade.—T. G. F.]

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