Firstly let me thank you for the renewal of confidence which you have placed in me. I can assure you that I will do my best to justify it and to do all in my power to promote the well-being of this ancient and distinguished Society in the year before us.

In 1946 a visit to the barrow, which lies on the edge of the western scarp of Chinnor Common, and a cursory examination of the adjoining area, cultivated during the war, resulted in finds of pottery and other objects indicating Iron Age occupation. The site lies on the saddleback of a Chiltern headland, at a height of about 800 ft. O.D. Two hollow ways traverse the western scarp, giving access to the area from the Upper Icknield Way, which contours the foot of the hill, then drops to cross the valley, passing some 600 yards to the north of the Iron Age site of Lodge Hill, Bledlow, and rising again continues northwards under Pulpit Hill camp and the Ellesborough Iron Age pits below Coombe Hill. The outlook across the Oxford plain to the west is extensive, embracing the hill-fort of Sinodun, clearly visible some fourteen miles distant on the farther bank of the Thames. The hollow way at the north-west end of the site leads down to a group of ‘rises’ hard by the remains of a Roman villa, and these springs are, at the present day, the nearest water-supply to the site.

The adoption of the volute in later Arretine ware has been ably demonstrated by Oxé as the result of the unrolling and disarticulation of the drooping palmette—a transformation which Drexel had previously advocated and described.

The tendency of the drooping palmette to uncurl the tips of its leaflets (either upwards or downwards) was already visible in the Anta-capital, in a capital of a temple of Apollo at Didyma, and at Priene. No. 5 with an upward curl of the leaflets occurs on the Cyma of the tholos at Epidauros; a downward curl is visible in a terra-cotta metope, no. 4, at Pallazalle, Sicily, and on Arretine ware stamped C ANNI at Tübingen; also on an Arretine ATEIVS crater at Haltern.

The type of cooking-pot considered here is common in northern England, is precisely datable, appears to have been fashionable only for a short period, and has an unmistakable profile. It is thus especially valuable as an index of chronology.

Though there are exceptions, most examples of the type are made in the same kind of fabric. This fabric is hard and coarse, with a smooth but unpolished surface; it is grey, black, or brown in colour. The body of the clay is charged with small fragments of white shell; these have often been dissolved by acids in the soil, leaving the surface pitted with shallow cavities, in the same way that pieces of mineral calcite are dissolved out of similar wares. The fabric thus belongs to the same family of calcite-gritted wares as Knapton ware and as the Huntcliff type of cooking-pot, without being identical with them. Wares of this character, differing from each other markedly in form, but only slightly in fabric, are found in early Iron Age, Roman, and Dark Age horizons, and are widely distributed; they were especially common in the Roman period in what is now Yorkshire, and in the north-east midlands. They did not appear in large numbers on Hadrian's Wall before the fourth century.

In Heraldry from Military Monuments before 1350 (Harl. Soc, vol. xcviii) the late Rev. Henry Lawrance listed, on p. 51, six coats for which no satisfactory identification had been offered. One of these, ‘…in the quarter an eagle displayed…’, is on the shield of a recumbent effigy in the south transept of Minchinhampton church (pl. xx, a and b). From the style of the armour and the architecture of the tomb-recess, the monument may be dated c. 1330–5 (Ida M. Roper, Monumental Effigies of Gloucestershire and Bristol).

The only other survival of these arms so far known is in the east window of Bristol Cathedral (pl. xx, c), where it is one of seventeen coats of arms in the glass of the tracery, headed by England, Maurice de Berkeley of Stoke Giffard and Brimsfield, and his brother Thomas, Lord Berkeley (d. 1361), in that order, the selection of the remaining coats being clearly made from among the associates of Lord Berkeley and his brother. The date of this glass is c. 1350. Among the coats included are those of Sir Thomas de Bradeston and Sir Simon Basset of Uley, both near neighbours of Minchinhampton. There can be no reasonable doubt that the arms here shown with the tinctures Gules, on a quarter argent an eagle displayed, are those of the same family, and probably of the same person as the effigy at Minchinhampton. Unfortunately the eagle is not leaded, but is in yellow stain, thus appearing as gold on silver; and as this was not an uncommon makeshift in the early days of the use of yellow stain, the colour of the eagle remains undetermined.

Just over a century ago Mr. William Chaffers read to the British Archaeological Association a paper in which he gave the name of Bellarmines to those mottled stoneware vessels, with bearded masks as their principal decoration, which were imported in large quantities from the Rhineland to be the regular tavern-crockery of Tudor and Stuart London. This paper, published by the Association in volume v of its Journal, appears to be the source of the popular belief, which almost everybody quotes and nobody checks, that the mask and jug were intended to satirize the features and rotundity of Cardinal Bellarmine, perhaps the greatest theologian of his time and certainly, to the hard-drinking Protestants of England, north Germany, and the Low Countries, the most redoubtable champion of the Church of Rome. Chaffers himself does not go so far as to claim detailed resemblance of face and figure, but says ‘if we can in any way rely upon the portraits of him thus handed down to posterity, he must indeed have been exceedingly hard featured’. On the other hand, he does specifically claim to be justified in ‘christening anew’ this type of vessel with the cardinal's name, and popular acceptance has done the rest.

Excavations on the bombed sites in the centre of Exeter were carried out in 1945–7 on behalf of the Committee for War-damaged Exeter: their main objective was to gain an understanding of the history and plan of the city in Roman times, but the remains of later periods were also to be investigated as opportunities arose in the course of the work. An important group of early medieval pottery was found in 1946, and it is considered to deserve publication apart from the main report on the excavations.

The fusee, as applied to horology, is a conically shaped arbor affixed to the main driving-wheel, or great wheel, of a spring-driven clock. It applies the principle of the lever to equalize the diminishing power of the spring as it runs down (fig. i). The word is derived from the Latin fusata, a spindle filled with thread, which is quite an apt description.