So much anxiety has been aroused by recent cases where historic buildings and collections of archives have been transported across the Atlantic, or where through apathy and neglect we have allowed their destruction at home, that I think it may be serviceable to the Society if I summarize the general situation, directing attention to the organization of effort to preserve our heritage, to the obstacles encountered in the process, and in a more general fashion to the strengthening and improvement of our methods. And let me say at the outset that our Society is closely concerned in the problem. We have taken our full share during the past twelve months in striving to influence public opinion in the right direction. Our duty is not only to investigate the past, but to hand forward to our successors the fullest measure of our historic assets, confident that as time goes on their value will ever be the more appreciated.

The Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania began its fourth campaign at Ur on 1st November 1925, and closed down in the field on 13th March 1926. The season was the longest we have yet had, and at its height as many as three hundred men were employed.

On behalf of Mr. Newall and myself I am making the 6th Report on the work carried out at Stonehenge which covers the season of 1924. The excavations were continued in a similar way to those of the previous year by making a succession of trenches between the rampart and the standing stones, beginning this time near no. 12 Aubrey hole and continuing towards the west. In the previous year a quadrant from north-east to south-east was searched, and it was determined to complete another quadrant from the south-east to the south-west.

In September 1925, Mr. Thomas Jenkins, a carpenter of Llangorse, Breconshire, recovered a dug-out canoe of oak from Llangorse Lake. This lake is situated six miles to the east-ward of the county town. It is about 500 ft. above sea-level, in the valley and near the source of the stream known as Afon Llynfi, which flows northward (into the Wye) along the western escarpment of the Black Mountains. The lake is a mile in length and in greatest breadth, and is of glacial origin.

When Birtsmorton Church, Worcestershire, was rebuilt in the fourteenth century, a number of its windows were filled with painted glass of the period. The only portions now in situ are the arms of the Ruyhales, the lords of the manor, in the tracery lights of some of the windows in the nave, and of one in the north transept. What remained of the contents of the main lights, together with various fragments in the style of the fifteenth century, had been collected, perhaps early in the last century, in the east window of the chancel, where facsimile drawings, partly coloured, were made of them for Dr. Prattinton, whose Worcestershire collections are in our library. When the church was restored in 1877, the east window was rebuilt on a new pattern, but the glass was not replaced in it, and ultimately found its way into the adjoining ‘Birtsmorton Court’, where the present owner Mr. F. B. Bradley-Birt discovered it lying loose, and had the fragments releaded so as to form two panels. When I first saw the latter, I recognized that they contained the principal elements of the drawings in the Prattinton collection with which I had recently made acquaintance.

This subject was not considered in any great detail in the work of Mr. Johnson and myself upon Court Hand because in the medieval period Arabic numerals do not appear to any considerable extent in English Archives—indeed their appearance there at any date before the late fifteenth century may be taken as fairly strong evidence of foreign influence—and concerning Roman numerals there was little to say. Moreover the subject had been recently dealt with by Dr. Hill. But in the period after 1500 Arabic figures begin slowly to fight their way into English Archives—i. e. into business writings; and since this (the Archive) class of documents is precisely that which was more or less closed to Dr. Hill it seems worth while to indicate in a preliminary sketch the types of document which may be of use to any student interested in further research along these lines; and to give the results of some tentative examination of them by the present writer, even when these are negative. The questions of interest are—where and when do Arabic figures make their entry into English Archives ? how far are they affected by being used in conjunction with the special Set Hands which were such a feature of Archive writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? how far do they retain any of the primitive forms ? and can these be used at all as criteria for dating ?

The change from the mosaic to the enamel system of glass-painting and the causes which led up to it do not seem to have received from historians of the art the attention which they rightly deserve. The popular view, as stated in all the books, is that glass-painters adopted enamels in preference to coloured glass. Therefore, as the demand for pot-metals fell off, there was less and less inducement for glass-makers to make them, so that the art dwindled away until it was finally lost.

The site of the See of Elmham has been the subject of one of those entirely artificial controversies which troubled the archaeological peace of the nineteenth century, and arose from a curious and then very prevalent phase of archaeological thought. Plain, and one would have thought obvious, statements of fact were first queried and then rejected to substitute in their place theories unsupported equally by evidence, tradition, or probability. Such was the theory which endeavoured to transfer the See of Elmham from North Elmham in Norfolk to South Elmham in Suffolk, in the face of all definite evidence and reasonable probability and solely on the ground that a pre-Conquest church, known traditionally as the Old Minster, existed in the Suffolk area. The fact that the word Minster is sufficiently widespread and seldom indicates a cathedral was not considered, and the statesman Theodore was credited with the inconceivable stupidity of splitting up the East Anglian See by establishing two bishop's stools within thirteen miles of one. another. This theory, which received the tentative support of more than one distinguished antiquary, has now, one may hope, been finally consigned to the limbo from which it should never have emerged ; the paper of the late Mr. Richard Howlett1 sets forth the clear facts of the case and the overwhelming evidence in favour of the Norfolk site.

The knife-handle to be considered here is said to have been found fifty or sixty years ago at Brinkhill, Lincolnshire. It is 4·6 in. in length, pierced longitudinally, and carved on all sides with a representation in high relief of the Tree of Jesse.

Jesse is shown seated on a chair with upright back and the side ornamented with linen panelling, his right arm on the arm of the chair, his head resting on his hand. His left arm encloses the trunk of the tree, which issues from his breast, the branches extending scrollwise to receive the other figures, which are thirteen in number culminating in the crowned Virgin seated with the Child.

Shortly after the Conquest the Honour of Blyth, comprising a large part of South Yorkshire and parts of Derby, Notts., and Lincoln, as well as manors in more distant counties, was granted to Roger de Busli, a Norman named from his manor of Builli-en-Bray near Neufchâtel, in the pasture country of north-east Normandy, a kinsman of the great house of Belesme. By the time of the Domesday Survey de Busli had moved the head of the Honour to Tickhill, where he had selected the site of his great castle, and in 1087–8 he decided to found a monastery at Blyth, not impossibly upon ground cleared by this transfer. His foundation charter endows the monks with the church of Blyth, &c., making it over to ‘the monks serving God in that place’. The priory was made subordinate to the abbey of Holy Trinity (elsewhere described as St. Katherine) at Rouen, on a pension of 405. The church is said to have been completed shortly after the death of the founder, who is known to have been dead in 1098, and just before that of his eldest son, who died in 1102. Another son, Arnaldus, who carried on the line, appears as a witness to the foundation charter, and a daughter, Beatrix, married Robert earl of Eu. The foundation had twenty-nine known priors, who came mainly from the abbeys and priories of Notts, and Yorkshire, and was dissolved in February 1535–6, when the eastern or monastic portion of the church was condemned to destruction, the area being included in the grant of the Blyth Hall estate, and the western or remainder became entirely parochial.

Amongst objects from Professor M. P. Pogodin's Collection now in the State Historical Museum and formerly in the Rumyantsev Museum, Moscow, are some interesting pieces of wood and bone. The exact place of their discovery is unknown, but they all come from the Altai region and are Scytho-Siberian in style.

Works of art dating from the Early Iron Age of Britain have an interest proportionate to their scarcity, and two examples to be added to the list are destined for public museums. The Society is privileged to examine them before they leave London for their permanent homes in the West.

The following details of work done on the Akeman Street between Ramsden and Asthally, Oxon., may help to supplement the somewhat meagre account of this section of the road given by Codrington, who dismisses it as follows: ‘For two miles [southwest of Ramsden] a lane marks the course, and then for three miles across the Windrush Valley there are apparently few traces, but beyond Asthall a parish boundary takes up the line’…&c. In point of fact the road is very visible during the first of these three miles, and the ‘apparently few traces’ include one of the most remarkable features in the whole of its course, namely the causeway in Pool's Bottom, Asthally. The references throughout are to Ordnance Survey 25 in., Oxon., 1922, sheet xxv, 15 (cited as ‘O.S.’).

After the late Lord Curzon had bought Tattershall Castle as an empty shell, he had it roofed, the windows were glazed, and floors were inserted, so that the interior has regained something of its original use and appearance, and, in particular, it is now possible to examine in comfort the famous chimney-pieces which were rescued and replaced by Lord Curzon. As is well known, these are decorated with all the heraldry belonging to the builder of the castle, Ralph Lord Cromwell (1394–1456), including the badge of a purse to show that he was Lord Treasurer under Henry VI from 1433 to 1443. When I saw these for the first time in 1924 I noticed that on the chimney-piece of the ground-floor chamber the panels with the badge, alternating with those which contain the coats of arms, show the purse wreathed or framed by two branches or sprays of naturalistic foliage (pl. XXVI); and the same feature appears in the chimney-piece on the first floor; while on the third floor the same plant is associated with the purse in the spandrels of the fireplace arch. It is not represented on the fourth chimney-piece. The contrast between this natural leafage and the conventional carved foliage on the other parts of the chimney-pieces is very marked, and it is obviously intended to represent a real plant having a tall stem with narrow, pointed leaves. I felt sure that it must have a meaning, and this idea was confirmed when afterwards I went into the church, which was also built by Lord Cromwell, and saw, among the remains of the original painted glass, now collected in the east window, the Treasurer's purse again wreathed by similar sprays, treated rather more formally.

In turning over the Indices to our Proceedings under the heading of Church Bells during recent years, I have been surprised at the scarcity of communications on this subject. We have had a few on cognate subjects, such as mortars or other objects of bellmetal, but practically nothing on bells themselves. Possibly one explanation of-this neglect may be that our church bells are not so easily accessible as other forms of church furniture, and even where they are accessible, the circumstances of their position, in dark chambers surrounded by masses of beams and other gear, militate against the possibilities of photography or other forms of reproduction. I do not therefore feel that any apology is necessary for bringing forward a subject which has been somewhat ignored. In this paper I propose to limit myself mainly to the form of the English church bell during a certain period, namely the thirteenth century, which was a time of great and rapid advance in all branches of ecclesiastical art. It is hardly necessary to touch on the wonderful development of our church architecture during this century. Lincoln, Salisbury, Beverley, and other exquisite creations tell their own tale. We find the same advance in illuminated manuscripts, in stained glass, and in other directions.

The phenomenal progress made during the last twenty years in road-making and maintenance is common knowledge. In no other sphere of the country's public activities has so great an advance been made in such a short time. The rapid progress is due largely to the wise and active co-operation of the Ministry of Transport and the considerable financial help derived from the taxation of motor vehicles.

The old road from Damascus to Baghdad having been blocked by disturbances in Syria, the members of the 1925–6 Joint Oxford University (Weld) and Field Museum Expedition to Kish were compelled last winter to use the more southerly route over which the Nairn convoys were running. This is an eastward extension of the road -from Jerusalem to Jericho, and runs through Amman to Rutba Wells and Ramadi, whence it follows the valley to Baghdad. Having noticed worked flints during our halts on the journey, we asked and obtained permission from the Air Vice-Marshal, Sir John Higgins, to return with the armoured car patrol, under the command of Flight-Lieutenant Sweeny, who with his men rendered great assistance in the search for implements.

Rich remains from all periods of the Copper and Bronze Age have been found in Cyprus ever since archaeological excavations began there, but hitherto there has been no evidence of a Stone Age. A few implements of stone, some celts and one flint-knife, have been found, but none of them in a Stone Age stratum; those of known provenance are all from the Copper and Bronze Age, and no tombs or other deposits of the Stone Age have been discovered at all. As the Stone Age is represented all round on the mainland, a priori one might be inclined to suppose its existence also in Cyprus, and therefore its non-appearance would be strange in view of the frequent finds of the Copper and Bronze Age.

In January 1925, Mr. J. E. Ainsworth, of the Braye Road, Alderney, reported that an exceptionally high tide, accompanied by a heavy gale, had undermined a portion of the cliff-face at Longy Bay near the Nunnery, on the south-east coast of Alderney, and had exposed a number of small stone cists in the second, or lower, band of black soil some 10 ft. below the upper surface of the cliff-face, and about 4 ft. above mean high spring-tide level.

In his history of the parishes of Minchinhampton and Avening, Gloucestershire, published in 1915, the late Mr. A. T. Playne gave a description and illustration of a medieval bell which had for some time been in the possession of his family, but which was quite unknown to campanologists, in spite of its exceptional interest. My curiosity was roused, as dated medieval bells are very rare, and I took the first opportunity that offered of visiting Minchinhampton in order to examine the bell personally. Previous to my visit in August 1923, Mr. Playne had died, and the bell had been given by his representatives to the parish church, where it has been conveniently placed in the south transept.