This paper describes and analyses a previously unrecorded Sarum book of hours of considerable artistic and textual interest. Seven of its pages have bar-frame borders illuminated in a distinctive and remarkable style. Four of these pages also have initials with figure-subjects, some of which are contextually unusual or unique. There is also an initial with a coat of arms displaying a black engrailed cross on a gold field (the arms of Mohun of Dunster in west Somerset). While the manuscript cannot be linked to a member of the Mohun family, the occurrence of a Somerset toponym in an obit dated 1429 in the calendar and the early addition to the litany of St Urith of Chittlehampton show that it was owned by someone who lived in Somerset or Devon in the early fifteenth century. Indeed, the book may also have been made in this region. Several features of its border illumination are paralleled in the Sherborne Missal (London, British Library, Additional ms 74236), produced in north Dorset or Somerset in the decade c 1398–c 1408. The parallels suggest a relationship (not necessarily direct) between the two manuscripts. Certainly, the book of hours discussed here is closer in style to the missal than it is to manuscripts made in or around London in the same period.

This paper brings together the evidence bearing on the relationship between the Society of Antiquaries and the women who contributed to it during a significant period when archaeology, through the work of such men as Samuel Lysons and Richard Colt Hoare, was beginning to emerge as a distinct field with its own conceptual and technical systems. It takes its departure from the first substantial appearance by a woman in the Society's publications in 1776, and continues until the accession of a female monarch, Victoria, in 1837, a period of just over sixty years. It explores what women did and what reception they received and assesses the significance of this within the wider processes of the development of an understanding of the past and the shaping of gender relationships through the medium of material culture, in a period that saw fundamental changes in many areas of intellectual and social life, including levels of material consumption and the sentiments surrounding consumerism.

This paper draws upon documentary, visual and archaeological evidence to chart the development of the sacristy of Westminster Abbey from its construction as one of the earliest parts of the abbey’s thirteenth-century rebuilding to its demolition in the mid-eighteenth century − a story that reflects wider changes of religious and political history.

This paper seeks to characterise through elemental analysis some unusual gold glass tesserae said to have been found at a Roman villa site in Southwick, West Sussex. The site is no longer accessible, being underneath a Methodist chapel, but it has been excavated, to some extent, on several occasions. Glass tesserae are not common in a British setting but they are by no means unusual in Roman mosaics. Gold glass tesserae, however, in which gold leaf is sandwiched between two layers of glass, are very unusual: fewer than twenty such tesserae are known from Roman Britain and the seven examples from Southwick make up the largest single group. However, the provenance of these Southwick tesserae remains doubtful and so they were analysed and compared to gold glass tesserae from Roman London to try and establish whether they are compositionally related to typical Roman glass. For comparative reasons, the handful of coloured glass tesserae from Southwick were also analysed. Our results suggest that the tesserae said to be from Southwick are anomalous in relation to the other material and cannot be assigned to the Roman period.

The church of St Bartholomew the Great in West Smithfield is not generally thought of as a building of major importance, probably because the plan of its presbytery seems to suggest that it was a rather outmoded imitation of Norwich Cathedral. The first part of this paper examines the basis for such an assumption and offers an explanation for the similarities between the presbyteries of the two buildings. Affiliations between the two institutions are placed in the wider context of the aspirations of the London episcopate in the decades either side of II00. Smithfield emerges as an extraordinary building, highly untypical of contemporary Augustinian architecture. The twelfth-century foundation narrative of Smithfield implies that, while in building, the church struck onlookers as astonishingly innovative. Taken at face value, this is puzzling, since most of the elements of its design had been common architectural currency for a generation or more. This apparently paradoxical situation is explored in the second part of the paper and the basis for Smithfield's perceived modernity while under construction very tentatively reconstructed.

The following list of ancient Words, commonly used by the inhabitants of a northern district of England, is offered to the Society as an object not devoid of interest. In presenting it, I may hope other Members will be excited to form collections of terms employed among the peasantry in different counties. Such a plan, it must be evident, would greatly contribute to elucidate both History and Philology. Those who make a research in other parts of the island will probably find a rich harvest, when compared with my gleanings near the rugged hills of Westmoreland, and in the adjoining border of Yorkshire.

Although it is in the nature of things that all liturgies should be characterized by great conservatism, yet there are plenty of instances of liturgical usages which in the course of time have become obsolete or nearly so; and one of the most interesting of these is, I venture to think, that which concerns the object with which the present paper deals, namely, the Eucharistic Reed, or, as it is more frequently called, the Calamus or Fistula.

The following discussion takes account of recent work, published and unpublished, but is largely based on personal inspection of the remains of some 150 shields from Early Saxon burials (Appendix 5). Comparative evidence includes the well studied Sutton Hoo shield, essentially a Scandinavian shield in an Anglo-Saxon context (Bruce-Mitford 1978, 91), the Swedish parallels from Vendel Period burials at Valsgärde (seventh/eighth century AD), and the well preserved shield remains from Roman Iron Age bog deposits in the Continental homelands of the Anglo-Saxons (mostly third/fourth century AD).

Ten years ago, through the kindness of a member of the Wollaston family, I came into possession of a large circular plate apparently of bronze. It was much oxidized and begrimed, and had been preserved with the scientific instruments and other relics belonging to their illustrious ancestor Dr. William Hyde Wollaston, President of the Royal Society in 1816, who died in 1828.