In compliance with your request, I now forward to you the accompanying journal of my proceedings at Ithaca; and I have the greater pleasure in so doing, as it affords me an opportunity of showing my respect for and obedience to the wishes of one holding the office of Director of the Society of Antiquaries of London. At the same time, I cannot expect that this journal will be deserving of much of your attention, which is generally bestowed on higher subjects; though under your guidance I trust that it may not prove unacceptable to this Society.

This paper uses original documentary evidence held in the archives of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society in Devizes to reassess the work of William Cunnington, FSA, carried out on behalf of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, and the contribution of his two principal excavators, Stephen and John Parker, of Heytesbury, in Wiltshire. Previously the Parkers have been regarded as little more than regular labourers on Cunnington’s pioneering excavations; the evidence now suggests that they (and in particular John) were, in fact, key to the success of Cunnington’s work. By the time of Cunnington’s death in 1810, John Parker was identifying new sites on the Wiltshire Downs and, on occasion, taking sole responsibility for excavating and interpreting them. After 1810 Hoare sponsored few further excavations and, though John was employed on at least one occasion, in 1814, the Parkers dropped back into obscurity and poverty without the regular employment, and perhaps protection, provided by Cunnington. Although John’s obituary in 1867 described him as Cunnington’s ‘principal pioneer’, no research has previously been undertaken that specifically considers the contribution of the Parkers in those early British excavations. This paper seeks to redress that oversight.

This note discusses the enigmatic double-sided portrait of Sir Christopher Hatton now in Northampton Museum and Art Gallery. It seeks W illuminate the ways in which it could be read, how it might have been viewed, and suggests its possible functions. It also connects the picture with some central texts in Renaissance humanism, Erasmus's Adagia and Alciato's Emblematum Liber.

This paper explores the hitherto overlooked influence of France on the archaeological interests and approach of Harry Longueville Jones (1806–70), whose best-known contributions to archaeology centred on Wales. Focusing mainly on the period down to his co-founding of Archaeologia Cambrensis (1846) and the Cambrian Archaeological Association (1847), it analyses Jones’s engagement with both archaeological monuments and heritage measures in France. The discussion assesses the significance of his recording of medieval churches in and around Paris while resident in the city 1835–42, including an unpublished report that he submitted to the Minister of Public Instruction in 1840. Attention is also given to his role as one of the corresponding members for England of the French government’s Comité historique des arts et monuments. Lastly, Jones is placed in the context of other British responses to the institutions established by the July Monarchy to study and safeguard historic monuments in France.

This article looks at a fountain basin that is of outstanding art-historical interest as a surviving example of secular Romanesque sculpture. The fountain basin is signed by the Italian sculptor Drudus de Trivio and is dated c 1240. The article situates the fountain basin within Drudus’s oeuvre – most notably the ciborium in Ferentino and the choir-screens at Cività Castellana – and relates it to the recently completed cloister sculpture of the Lateran and San Paolo fuori le mura, of which Drudus had close knowledge. Possible sources are explored, and chronology, classical precedents and the innovative use of garlands are discussed. A new translation of the inscription, which has been rather neglected in previous studies, is offered. The translation places the inscription within the wider context of Italian fountain inscriptions and is used to suggest that the fountain was secular in purpose with the aim of querying the long-standing view that Drudus carried out only liturgical sculpture, thereby adding to our understanding of the work of the Cosmati.

In 1831 Dr James Raine excavated Bede’s tomb in Durham Cathedral, revealing a partial skeleton accompanied by a medieval ring. Three casts were made of the skull; the recent re-discovery of one of these casts provokes an examination of the authenticity of the remains and of antiquarian interests in craniology in the mid-nineteenth century.

Some time in the early years of the seventeenth century, the city fathers of Gloucester evidently commissioned twelve paintings of past benefactors to that city. The paintings survive in the Gloucester Folk Museum and were exhibited in the spring of 2014 to mark the approximate date of their four-hundredth anniversary. Given the absence of critically important sources that would have given precise information on their commissioning, their origin and history have remained somewhat obscure. This paper nevertheless strives to understand why, and by whom, they may have been painted, and why they remain significant today, both to the City of Gloucester and to the history of English portraiture. It argues that they were commissioned to bolster a sense of community identity and to encourage further benefaction at a time of local hardship and stress. It comments on them as examples of the regional English vernacular style in portraiture of the day, reflects on their current condition and very tentatively suggests who might have painted them.

In the mid-thirteenth century members of two branches of a family based in Savoy came to England and, through royal service, they reached baronial rank. One family, the Grandsons, thoroughly embedded itself in England and its members are recalled even today while the other, the Champvents, lapsed into obscurity, the name disappearing from the records after 1410. To discover why, this article looks at the significance of royal service to the families, the amount of royal patronage they received, their marriage strategies, how they related to the localities into which they were implanted, the extent to which religious loyalties and family piety illustrated their attitudes and whether they cut their ties with their former home lands.

Discovered in 1857, the site of La Tène, in Switzerland, played an important role in the rapid development of European prehistory in the mid-nineteenth century including the adoption of the three-age system in which it was named as the type site for the later Iron Age. The finds from it are now scattered across museums in Europe and America, and those in London are published here as part of a project to locate and publish all the finds from the site. The discovery of the site and the dispersal of its finds are discussed in the context of contemporary understandings of the past and collecting practices. Usually seen as votive offerings placed in a river, the finds have been re-interpreted recently as the remains of a trophy that displayed the bodies and equipment of an army defeated in c 220–200 bc.

I venture to think that bishop Reginald Fitzjocelin deserves a place of higher honour in the history of the diocese, and of the fabric of the church of Wells, than has hitherto been accorded to him.

His memory has been obscured by the traditionary fame of bishop Robert as the “author,” and of bishop Jocelin as the “finisher,” of the church of Wells; and the importance of his episcopate as a connecting link in the work of these two master-builders has been comparatively overlooked.

Antiquaries Journal, Vol. II (October 1922), p. 344, n. 1 : for (Nature, 29th April 1922, p. 563) read (Nature, 1st April 1922, p. 411).

The tomb of Richard II. has a triple interest: for Westminster Abbey; for English History generally; and for the Society of Antiquaries.

(1.) For the Abbey, Richard II. must remain, in spite of all his faults, one of its most familiar and consecrated personages. His coronation is described in the only volume handed down from mediæval times to the custody of the successive Deans of Westminster: namely, the Liber Regalis of Abbot Littlington, of which a reprint has lately been made for the Roxburghe Society by the munificence of Lord Beauchamp. The event was further marked by the first appearance of two features in the coronations, both especially connected with Westminster, the Champion, and the Knights of the Bath.