so that he might be sustained while he hunted in the other world with the
spirit of his favourite axe or spear. The museum contains examples of
socketed bronze celts and spear heads, as well as an infinite variety of
arrowheads, flint knives, stone hammers and celts, and also coloured beads
and other ornaments.

Thus we find that in these early days mankind teemed in this part of
Yorkshire. From all points around the shallow lake the smoke of fires
ascended into the sky, patches of cultivation appeared among the trees,
and villages, consisting of collections of primitive wooden huts, probably
surrounded by a stockade, would have been discernible.

A closer examination of one of these early British villages would have
discovered the people clothed in woven materials, for an example of cloth
of the period was discovered by Canon Greenwell in this locality and is
now to be seen in the British Museum. The grinding of corn in the stone
querns, so frequently found near Pickering, would have been in progress;
fair-haired children with blue eyes would be helping the older folk in
preparing food, dressing skins, making bows and arrows, and the
innumerable employments that the advancing civilisation demanded.

[Illustration: A Quern, now in the Pickering Museum.]

It is at this period that we reach the confines of history, records of an
extremely unreliable character it is true, but strangely enough there are
references by very early writers to the founding of Pickering. That the
place should be mentioned at all in these fabulous writings is an
interesting fact and gives Pickering an importance in those distant
centuries which is surprising. John Stow in his "Summarie of Englyshe
Chronicles," published in 1565, gives the following fanciful story of the