fashionable.[35] The upper classes wore collars and bracelets of gold,
and necklaces of glass and amber beads.

E. 12.--This last item suggests an interesting question as to whence
came the vast quantities of amber thus used. None is now found upon
our shores, except a very occasional fragment on the East Anglian
beaches. But the British barrows bear abundant testimony to its
having been in prehistoric times the commonest of all materials for
ornamental purposes--far commoner than in any other country. Beads
are found by the myriad--a single Wiltshire grave furnished a
thousand--mostly of a discoid shape, and about an inch in diameter.
Larger plates occasionally appear, and in one case (in Sussex) a cup
formed from a solid block of exceptional size. If all this came from
the Baltic, the main existing source of our amber,[36] it argues
a considerable trade, of which we find no mention in any extant
authority. Pytheas witnesses to the amber of the Baltic, and says
nothing, so far as we know, of British amber. But, according to
Pliny,[37] his contemporary Solinus speaks of it as a British product;
and at the Christian era it was apparently a British export.[38] The
supply of amber as a jetsom is easily exhausted in any given district;
miles of Baltic coast rich in it within mediaeval times are now quite
barren; and the same thing has probably taken place in Britain. The
rapid wearing away of our amber-bearing Norfolk shore is not unlikely
to have been the cause of this change; the submarine fir-groves of the
ancient littoral, with their resinous exudations, having become silted
over far out at sea.[39] The old British amber sometimes
contained flies. Dioscorides[40] applies to it the epithet [Greek:
pterugophoron] ["fly-bearing"].

E. 13.--The chiefs were armed with large brightly-painted shields,[41]