In 1923 the British Museum purchased the series of barbaric ornaments and jewels in the collection of the late General Bertier Delagarde, a well-known Russian archaeologist. The acquisition was made in order to secure a more worthy representation of the culture from which the industrial art of the early Teutonic tribes, including that of the Anglo-Saxons, derived its most characteristic features. We are now able to see in proximity examples illustrating the first and last stages in a long process of development, and observe the marked identity of style in the work of peoples separated from each other in time by three or four centuries, in space by the whole length of Europe. The two plates demonstrate this identity by an instant appeal to the eye. All that is required in addition is a brief indication of the source from which this far-travelling style was derived.

The present study arose from the need to provide the background for understanding theheraldry mentioned in the post-mortem inventories of Henry VIII, and while it seems unlikely that this commentary will appear in the foreseeable future it fills agap in the heraldic literature. The role of the ‘British History’ in English royal propaganda and state ceremonials antedated the accession of Henry VII as is evidenced by the material prepared in relation to Edward IV's supersession of Henry VI in 1461. The role of heralds and kings of arms in rationalizing the arms and beasts required for the pageants etc is examined with the ways in which it was organized for entries and other ceremonials. The period also witnessed the introduction of new decorations f ortournaments – ciphers and impresses. The appendices provide editions of some hitherto unpublished texts which were devised for these purposes.

Among the heirlooms of the Boughey family at Aqualate Hall, Forton, Staffordshire (close to the eastern boundary of Shropshire), are two small bowls, originally joined as one vessel, which have been inventoried as ‘Roman Pottery’. Mrs. John Morris, who has recently inherited the property, remembers them from her childhood, and was always given to understand that they were found in draining the swamps that lie to the north of Aqualate Mere and west of Thistleyfield Coppice, in the time of her grandfather, Sir Thomas Boughey, Bart., some seventy years ago, when trenches full of bones, armour, and (reputed) Roman pottery were discovered. Most of the finds were kept in an outhouse, but the two pots were preserved in a cabinet in the Hall, together with a big dagger, the blade much corroded; Mrs. Morris thought it was of iron with a brass or bronze handle; unfortunately, it has now vanished and all the other objects are lost with the exception of the twin bowls. These Mrs. Morris most kindly allowed me to study and sketch in June 1928.

In April last, immediately after the discovery was made, I had the pleasure to forward to the Society of Antiquaries a coloured photograph and short description of a portion of a tessellated Roman floor or pavement discovered in Burgate Street, in the city of Canterbury, and I then promised to communicate, when the operations then in progress should have been, completed, a general description of what might be further discovered, which promise I will now endeavour to redeem.

In submitting to the Society our twentieth and final report on the excavation of Calleva Atvebatuni, it may be pointed out that for the first time our work during the past season has lain altogether outside the Roman town. We were able in 1908 to bring to an end the excavation of the whole of the 100 acres within the wall, but, as was then foreshadowed, there still remained to be examined the outer defences and the ditch encircling the wall itself. This formed the work of 1909.

A Manuscript volume of songs, ballads, and instrumental music, which once belonged to Henry VIII, has recently been brought to light, and it is of interest, not merely for restoring a large number of songs of which no other copies are now known, but also because some among them were written by the King himself, within the first three or four years of his reign. Henry was then so much subject of his own songs, that these are of material assistance in forming a judgment of his early character.

I beg to call attention to a very interesting monument still preserved at Coventry. It consists of a large piece of Tapestry, 30 feet long by 10 feet high, wrought at the close of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century, and affording a singularly perfect example of the arts of design and weaving at that period. I am not aware that we possess many examples of tapestry before the sixteenth century; but specimens after the establishment of a manufactory at Mortlake, under Sir Francis Crane, seem to have become very numerous, chiefly, however, of Scripture-historical and allegorical compositions. The greater part of these are of the French school; although, in accordance with the wish of King Charles I., several sets of tapestries from Raphael's Cartoons, which are now at Hampton Court, were executed at that manufactory.

Every cultivator of our national biography and literary antiquities must rejoice at the appearance of the first volume of the Athense Cantabrigienses. That a work which was so obviously suggested nearly two centuries ago by the Athense of the sister University, which has been contemplated by so many successive collectors, and for which such large, though imperfect, accumulations have been formed, should, in spite of ever-increasing difficulties, at length greet our view in substantial paper and print, is a victory over old Time of which any generation may fairly be proud; and I therefore cannot be thought to magnify its accomplishment too highly if, on this first public allusion to the work at the Society of Antiquaries, I hail its authors as conquerors who have overtaken the spoiler, and recovered from his grasp some of his most estimable treasures.

This paper examines the context of two nineteenth-century images of the thirteenth-century statue of the Angel Gabriel in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey. One, by John Wykeham Archer, was previously unidentified; the other, by Elizabeth, Lady Palgrave, was misidentified.

The great tower of Dudley Castle, in the West Midlands, is re-examined in order to situate it within the evolutionary sequence of great tower designs. In so doing, it is argued that the origins of its plan are to be found in the works of the early to mid-thirteenth century, and that the tower itself was probably begun during the 1260s. Furthermore, it is asserted that the tower represents a milestone in the thinking that underpinned the redevelopment of castle mottes, and that it is to be seen as the prime connection between the circle-based plans that dominated motte redevelopments in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and later developments that led, ultimately, to the radically different, but architecturally successful scheme adopted by the builder of the donjon of Warkworth Castle in Northumberland.

The investigation described in the following paper may perhaps throw some light on the nature of those remarkable sepulchral mounds, known as “long barrows,” which as yet remain the crux and problem of the barrow-digger and archæologist. Many of the long barrows of South Wiltshire were examined at the beginning of this century by Mr. Cunnington and Sir Richard Colt Hoare; but with so little return for the pains bestowed on them, that, though Sir Richard was satisfied of their high antiquity, he was utterly at a loss to determine the purpose for which such immense mounds had been raised. In another part of his “Ancient Wiltshire,” he tells us that he and his colleague “had at length given up all researches in them, having for many years in vain looked for that information which might tend to throw some satisfactory light on their history.” In the various long barrows which were opened by these investigators, we find that, with very few exceptions, human skeletons were discovered on the floor of the barrow, at the broad, or east end, “lying in a confused and irregular manner, and generally covered with a pile of stones or flints.” The total absence of bronze weapons, of all personal ornaments, and of urns of pottery, such as were constantly found by them in the circular barrows of the same district, is repeatedly noticed by Sir Richard Hoare, who observes that “their original purport is still involved in obscurity, and a further explanation of them would be a great desideratum.”

The carved marble fragment illustrated in plate IX and in the accompanying drawing (fig. 1) is walled into the right-hand side of the entrance to the museum of Riom, a small town about ten miles north of Clermont-Ferrand, in the department of Puy-de-Dôme. It is labelled ‘Fragment d'un tombeau gallo-romain’; and although nothing further seems to be known either about the circumstances of its discovery or how it came to enter the museum collections, to judge from the other lapidary fragments with which it is displayed there is a strong probability that it was found locally.