"Among some prehistoric graves disclosed at Dunstable was one containing the
relics of a woman and of a child. The authorities suggest that the latter may have been buried alive with its
mother, which is a proposition that one cannot absolutely deny. But there is
just as great a possibility that neither the mother nor the child came to so
sinister and miserable an end. Apart from the pathetic attitude of the two
bodies, the skulls are as moral and intellectual as any modern ones, and in face
of the simple facts it would be quite justifiable to assume that the mother and
the child were not buried alive, nor committed suicide, but died in the odour of
sanctity and were reverently interred. The objects surrounding the remains are
fossil echinoderms, which are even now known popularly among the unlettered as
fairy loaves, and as there is still a current legend that whoso keeps at home a
specimen of the fairy loaf will never lack bread,[67] one is fairly
entitled to assume that these “fairy loaves” were placed in the grave in
question as symbols of the spiritual food upon which our animistic-minded
ancestors supposed the dead would feed. It is well known that material food was
frequently deposited in tombs for a similar purpose, but in the case of this
Dunstable grave there must have been a spiritual or symbolic idea behind the
offering, for not even the most hopeless savage could have imagined that the
soul or fairy body would have relished fossils—still less so if the material
bodies had been buried alive"
Title: Archaic England
An Essay in Deciphering Prehistory from Megalithic
Monuments, Earthworks, Customs, Coins, Place-names, and
Faerie Superstitions
Author: Harold Bayley
