I stand before you this afternoon as the thirty-second lineal successor to Peter Le Neve, herald, genealogist, and antiquary, chosen in 1707 to be the first President of the ‘new creation’ and reputedly a former President, as far back as 1689, when he would still have been on the right side of 30, of the last of the forerunner societies whose intermittent existence links our present body with the circle of Stow and Lambarde, Cotton and Camden. If filial piety to an alma mater is not out of place on such an occasion, may I say that one of the special pleasures you have given me, a Londoner born and bred, by electing me as your thirty-third President, is the thought that there is one thing which Peter Le Neve and I and no other two Presidents have in common: we were nursed upon the self-same hill, though admittedly the nursing of the 1670s and the 1920s took place on opposite sides of the Walbrook. I find another source of pleasure, and indeed of pride, in reflecting that the occupant of this chair in the days when I made my first three visits to these rooms in 1932 was also my predecessor as Chief Inspector; and if it is to the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments, Pitt Rivers, that we look back as the father of modern field archaeology, it is the second, Sir Charles Peers, successively Secretary, Director, and President of the Antiquaries from 1908 to 1934, who deserves to be remembered as the initiator of Britain's approach to the conservation of standing monuments, an approach which brought renown to his branch of the public service and set the standards which are still its guide today.

This article re-examines Helbaek's (1952) conclusion that wheat was the main crop in southern England during the Neolithic and Iron Age, but that barley was the main cultigen in the Bronze Age. It is shown that the grain impressions from Windmill Hill, which form most of our data on Neolithic crop agriculture, represent a mixture of two crop economies which were practised in ecologically dissimilar regions. The suggestion is made that both wheat and barley were staple crops in different areas of southern England from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. There is no evidence that the importance of either cultigen changed over this period.

A group of antler cheekpieces are described and illustrated which provide a small but significant contribution to the evidence of horsemanship in the later Bronze Age in the British Isles. Although independent dating evidence is meagre, they form a coherent stylistic and functional type which has parallels in the late Urnfield period in Central Europe. An attempt is made to reconstruct other elements of the bridle, and they are compared with a number of bronze cheekpieces which show some affinity.

The late A. W. G. Lowther had for long collected information on Romano-British ‘chimney-pots’ and in his final years concluded that this was the true function of his Group B, except where a closed base indicated use as ornamental roof-finials. New discoveries have enlarged his originally small Group A, wheel-made pottery vessels with side-openings, which may possibly have had a ritual function. His notes are now presented in a published form, with comments on dating, distribution, and continental parallels; the opportunity has also been taken of adding a short excursus on Romano-British stone finials.

Two problems in the design of the Hinton St. Mary mosaic are (1) that the elements of the design are placed the wrong way round if the mosaic was planned to be seen like a carpet; and (2) whether the bust of Christ is an original design or whether it is based on a formal set of rules. There is evidence to suggest (1) that the design of the mosaic as a whole may have been conceived as the decoration of a ceiling, and (2) that rules to which the bust of Christ conforms were still in use in the eighteenth century in Byzantine church-painting, and that there is a genuine continuity between the two points in time.

Total excavation of the nave, crossing, and transepts of Hadstock church in 1974, together with a detailed examination of parts of the upstanding fabric, revealed that this well-known Anglo-Saxon building is not a single-period structure, as has long been assumed. Three periods of Anglo-Saxon work are now known, the earliest of which probably belongs to the pre-Danish era: it comprised a large, five-cell cruciform church which, it is suggested, may be part of the seventh-century monastery founded by St. Botolph, at Icanho. Rebuilding on a monumental scale took place in the early eleventh century and the possibility is discussed that this was Canute's minster, dedicated in 1020. The church was extensively repaired in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, following the collapse of the central tower. Subsequently the decline in the size and importance of Hadstock as a village saved the church from further extensive alteration.