As a President wanders in the rooms of the Society of Antiquaries, ever and anon he is confronted by the vision of his predecessors—sometimes singly, sometimes in formation; and for myself I cannot escape the feeling of bewilderment as to how I come to be in such company; and with it goes that exquisite sensation of inadequacy mingling with vainglory on which several of my predecessors have commented at their first entering in—and above all the rich sense of gratitude and appreciation for an honour scarcely earned but deeply felt. In particular, an incoming President cannot escape the amiable eye of his predecessor Jeremiah Milles—familiar to all of us from his portrait in the Meeting Room and his bust in the Library; and in the year now past he has been in a quite special way in our thoughts. It was just over two hundred years ago under his Presidency that the Society acquired one of the most valuable of its privileges or assets, if so we may term it: its rooms in Somerset House. This was the result of a pincer movement by ourselves and the Royal Society. Dr. Milles was a Fellow of both, as were many of the leading Antiquaries of the eighteenth century. He was an able, learned antiquarian and a Doctor of Divinity, who rose to be Dean of Exeter and to contribute to the study of the antiquities of Devon. He was a bon vivant who founded the first of our dining clubs. If he had been less of an antiquarian and more of a politician, no doubt he would have become a bishop; and very likely he would have been quite forgotten. But he was diplomat enough to know how this Society should secure free rooms in the new Somerset House. On 29th February 1776, after months or years of anxious intrigue, Lord North, the Prime Minister, was elected to our Fellowship, and agreed to carry to His Majesty King George III a petition for the rooms; on 19th March Lord North came to announce His Majesty's consent. In 1781 we entered possession; and a little under a hundred years later graciously consented to withdraw from Somerset House on condition that we were provided with adequate new accommodation on the site where we still meet.

The small Middle Bronze Age hoard from West Buckland, Somerset has been assumed to be lost since its publication in 1880. Plaster casts still exist of the objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Parallels are given for these objects and their chronology discussed. The way in which the casts may have reached the collection is considered. The circumstances of the find are also discussed, with the possibility that these objects may be from a burial, thus raising the question of our definition of hoards.

The Aston mirror plate and its handle were found in ploughsoil, but were derived from a cremation burial which included two pottery vessels tentatively dated in the first century A.D. The area in which the discovery was made shows considerable activity in the Belgic and Romano-British periods. A detailed examination of the mirror, using, inter alia, light-section photomicrography, enables an attempt to be made to group the known mirrors using criteria derived from the techniques employed in the decoration; the Aston mirror falls into an East Anglian Ridge/Chiltern group.

A number of ecclesiastical buildings in Norfolk and northern Suffolk show a common repertoire of distinctively elaborated mouldings, which in several cases involves such precise repetition of formations that the same templates must have been used repeatedly. On the evidence of the mouldings, and of other detailed similarities between the buildings, it is argued that they may all be seen as the work of the same designing mason, and the documentation suggests that his active career was centred on the second quarter of the fifteenth century. The range of his personal manner of design in parochial churches is best seen at Wiveton, near the north coast, but he was also able to work on a more expanded scale, as in the Erpingham Gate into Norwich Cathedral close; the connecting link between the two scales of his work is to be found in the parochial west tower of Wymondham abbey.

The riveted spectacle frames from Trig Lane (City of London) are the earliest from a deposit of known date. Their method of construction, from two bull metacarpal bones, is suggested, and their form compared with contemporary representations and the only other surviving examples from Wienhausen. Their possible mode of use is deduced from constructional details, contemporary illustrations and literary sources. A cluster of pinholes at the rim ends of both handles were probably intended to extend the field of view, acting as simple lenses, and as such probably represent the earliest European evidence of the utilization of pinholes in an optical instrument. There follows a survey of English medieval documentary references to spectacles which indicates that the Dutch spectacle industry had a vital influence upon developments in this country.

The paper deals with a well-known group of Tudor bucklers (once thought to be Roman), made of leather reinforced with riveted iron or brass rings, sometimes accompanied by radiating strips. The evidence of a group of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Welsh poems and other records is used to establish that they originated in Wales, and that Wrexham was a noted centre of production. A corpus of recorded examples is given.

It has long been thought that Laurence Nowell, Dean of Lichfield and Laurence Nowell, antiquary and tutor in the household of Sir William Cecil, were one and the same person. However, evidence embodied in a Court of Requests Case of 1571 has recently given rise to doubts as to whether the dean and antiquary were, indeed, one. A re-examination of evidence already known and the discovery of some new documents sheds further light on the career of Laurence Nowell, antiquary, and tends to substantiate the claim that the dean and antiquary should be ‘separated’. The evidence remains inconclusive but the reputation of Laurence Nowell, antiquary, as a scholar and cartographer suffers in no way from the possibility that he may not have been Dean of Lichfield.