In the course of my Anniversary Address last year I welcomed the appointment of Professor Donald Strong as our new Secretary. We were all looking forward with confidence to his succession, for he had, as I then put it, exactly the qualities and the experience to fill the post with distinction. His sudden death in Turkey on 21 September last extinguished these hopes before he had the time to make the happy impact on the Society's affairs which we were all expecting. His loss has been universally mourned both professionally and personally by his very extensive circle of colleagues and friends, but it will be felt nowhere more acutely than in this room, where so much in the conduct of our business has always depended on the occupant of the Secretary's chair. We have been very fortunate in persuading Dr. Ian Longworth, Keeper of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities in the British Museum, to take this vacant seat, and we look forward to the reinforcement which his presence there will provide both generally and in handling those concerns of prehistoric archaeology which are his main field of professional interest.

The work of 1971–3 has produced a variety of important results. The Roman defences and defended area sequences set out in the first report have been confirmed with modifications of detail. New evidence has been found for the nature and extent of the Roman city outside the defended area: there are now the first hints of Roman planning in the St. Catherine Street—Hare Lane area and in Lower Northgate Street there was at least one monumental building and a street-side colonnade. Sub-Roman occupation has been recorded at 13–17 Berkeley Street. New evidence has been obtained for the possible first phase of Gloucester castle and the development of the medieval defences. The excavated evidence for the medieval occupation at 13–17 Berkeley Street has been combined with, and partly reinterpreted in the light of documentary evidence. At 82–4 Northgate Street the standing remains of a sixteenth-century and later building were recorded and its site excavated and related to documentary evidence. In the light of new discoveries, accounts are also given of St. Bartholemew's Hospital, the river Severn, and its two main medieval bridges within the city bounds.

A study of Roman domestic altars from sites in the Hadrianic frontier region suggests that flourishing stone-masons' workshops based at Chester-le-Street and Lanchester were in production in the third century A.D. Although some of the masons may have been time-expired soldiers, the workshops catered mainly for the civilian market. The altars show an enterprising approach to design, and skill in the application of decorative patterns and motifs. The workshops are examples of successful small-scale economic enterprise in the Romano-British period.

Mid nineteenth-century sketches of paintings then in the vaults of the Trinity Chapel ambulatory of Canterbury Cathedral are published for the first time. They provide an opportunity to discuss the iconographic programme and style of the lost paintings. Kings of England and local saints were among those represented in commemoration of the translation of the relics of Becket to the Trinity Chapel in July 1220. The date of 1220 which seems to be given in an inscription is confirmed by comparison with a Canterbury Psalter of before 1220, and sculptures at Wells.

In the fourteenth century coats of arms become increasingly complex, thus rendering more difficult the task of expressing concisely and clearly the relationships between the elements in a blazon. The author of the Ashmolean Roll (compiled c. 1334) is a professional herald. Faithful to traditional conventions, he is nevertheless innovative in his effort to respond to the need for greater clarity by expansion and adaptation of the linguistic structures of his trade. The well-known Parliamentary Roll is shown to be less reliable than the unpublished Ashmolean Roll as an indicator of trends in early fourteenth-century blazon.