The rarity of runic inscriptions from early Anglo-Saxon England, and particularly from the southern kingdoms in the pagan period, makes even a nearly illegible example worth recording. We draw attention here to the remains of such an inscription, hitherto unrecognized, on a sixth-century sword-pommel from the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Sarre, on Thanet in east Kent, and we take the opportunity of reconsidering two well-known contemporary inscriptions, on a sword-pommel from the cemetery at Gilton, Ash, also in east Kent, and on the scabbard of a sword from the cemetery on Chessell Down in the Isle of Wight.

At the end of this first full year of my office as your President I wish to thank every Fellow of the Society for the kindness and support that they have shown me and naturally above all I must thank my fellow officers whose patience and counsel have been unbounded. 1967 is an important year for the Society, for in it we celebrate our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary. The Council has considered what should be done to mark this occasion and it has been decided that this will take the form of an Anniversary Party to beheld from 5.30 to 8.30 p.m. on Thursday, the 12th of October. There will be some guests, but Fellows will be asked to subscribe towards their own entertainment. Two hundred and fifty years is half five hundred years, yet I still feel that the Old Lady of Burlington House is quite young for her age. Long may she remain so, and it is right and proper to salute the young as well as the not so young who make up our membership and to beg them to keep her ever in her pristine freshness and enterprise.

The earliest record of the Henge at Durrington Walls, in the parish of Durrington, Wiltshire (SU. 150437) (location map, fig. 1), is that made in the early nineteenth century by Sir Richard Colt Hoare (1812, p. 169). Today, the bank and ditch of the henge have been largely either ploughed flat or masked by comparatively modern accumulations of plough-soil and there is little to indicate to the casual visitor that these degraded earthworks represent all that is left of the largest henge monument in Britain.

In 1937 Dr. Felix Oswald contributed a paper to the Journal of Roman Studies entitled ‘Carinated bowls (Form 29) from Lezoux’. Twenty years previously James Curie had published a paper in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland which described and illustrated inter alia some early Lezoux decorated ware in the celebrated Plicque collection at the Musée des Antiquités Nationales, Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

The Cirencester Excavation Committee conducted two sets of excavations in 1966: at Easter, four weeks were spent excavating the Saxon church and an internal tower on the Roman defences; during the Summer, in a six week campaign, various development sites in the town were examined (fig. 1) and sections were cut across the seating bank of the amphitheatre.

In a recent account of the sixth-century Anglian cemetery at Londesborough in the Yorkshire Wolds, one curious piece of bronze from a female's grave was inadequately described merely as ‘perhaps an unusual type of buckle’. Too late for publication in that report a small group of parallel objects came to my notice, the existence of which has since been corroborated by Dr. Roes's recognition of a complete class of early continental quoit brooches, of which this group forms one variant. In fact, the fragmentary Londesborough piece (fig. i (4)) appears to be identical with an uncommon early Alamannic or Marcomannic group of thistle-shaped annular brooches.

The excavations conducted in the summer of 1966 were concentrated upon two projects: the final excavation of the previously unexamined parts of the North Wing, and of the early structures lying beneath it, and the large-scale stripping of selected areas of the garden belonging to the Roman palace. The modern cover-building, which is being erected by the Sussex Archaeological Trust over the remains of the Roman North Wing and which was begun in July 1965, had reached a state of near-completion by September 1966. The excavation work beneath was therefore carried out with the benefit of a roof above it, but with minor inconveniences incurred by being surrounded by builders and subcontractors. Earlier in the year some trial trenching had been carried out in the modern gardens of houses which now occupy the site of the Period I bath building. This work, though limited, has added considerably to the outline plan hitherto available.

The drawing fig. I, by Mrs. Marion Cox, and photograph pl. xxxix a, by Mr. R. L. Wilkins, were made while this urn was on loan to the University Institute of Archaeology at Oxford, soon after discovery in November 1965. A cinerary urn, it was found in the course of mechanical digging for sand on land at Milton Malsor, formerly owned by Mrs. Raynsford of Milton Malsor Manor, now owned and worked by Milton Sand, Ltd., and is published here by their permission. The firm being grouped under Mixoconcrete (Holdings) Ltd., possession of the urn remains with this company's Board of Directors, at Little Billing near Northampton. Milton (name contracted from ‘Middleton’) is some three miles south-south-west of Northampton and its ancient passage of the Nene (fig. 2), on the Lias sands of the first ridge south from the landmark hill of Hunsbury; the road south-west from there, crossing the ridge a mile to westward as ‘Banbury Lane’, here represents the old main trackway from the Humber down to the Cotswolds.

A further selection of twenty-eight fragments of samian moulds, originally found by Plicque at Lezoux and formerly belonging to the Oswald–Plicque Collection, is discussed in this paper; like their predecessors, all these fragments are now preserved in the Birley Collection, at the Department of Archaeology, University of Durham.

The bronze animal-headed torc from Vieille-Toulouse, Haute Garonne, which forms part of the Morel Collection now in the British Museum (pls. xl a–b; xli a; fig. 1; diameter 14 cm.), has been but briefly mentioned in print by Jacobsthal, Morel himself, and others and little attention has been paid to its possible stylistic affiliations; the following notes attempt to fill the gap.

South Cadbury Castle (N.G. ST 6225) occupies a free-standing hill, some 500 feet high, towards the Somerset-Dorset border. The hill itself is principally, if not entirely, of yellow sandstone belonging to the Jurassic series. To the west there are wide views across the low-lying Somerset basin centred on Glastonbury, an area of great importance in the early post-Roman centuries. To the east, a scarp marks the western edge of the higher ground of Wessex. In cultural terms, South Cadbury lies within the north-western limits of the coins of the Durotriges, but is only a dozen miles from the Glastonbury Lake Village. In the post-Roman period, it is one of the most easterly sites to produce imported pottery of Tintagel type, as well as one of the most inland.

The multiplicity of terms used to blazon crosses and the diversity of manners in which they were depicted constitute one of the most confusing aspects of medieval heraldry. Sir William St. John Hope deplored this situation in the following terms:

As regards the cross, heraldic writers have gone mad, and from the few simple crosses of pre-Tudor days there have been evolved scores of fantastic forms for which it would be difficult to find instances outside the heraldry books. In the Glossary of Heraldry, published in 1847, upwards of fifty varieties are enumerated, and there are other modern works in which they exceed two hundred!

The houses with which this paper is concerned belong to the small segment of the eastern slopes of the Pennines known as the ‘Ancient Parish of Halifax’. It is not known when the ‘Ancient Parish’ was formed but the first recorded vicar of Halifax was inducted in 1274 and in that same year the Wakefield Manor Courts ceased to meet in Sowerby Town and made Halifax their centre.

The Ancient Parish covers ten miles of the valley of the river Calder and its tributaries, Halifax itself lying on the Hebble. The area is bleak; it lies, all except the extreme eastern part, on Millstone Grit and rises from a height of some 200 feet above sea level in the valley to an altitude of 1,400 feet. The old settlements mostly lie on the sloping hillsides at an average height of 700 feet.

One evening towards the end of August 1964, Mr. G. H. Bell walked across to the excavations north of Winchester Cathedral and told the writer that some pots had been found during the digging of a new sewer trench opposite his house in Grange Road, Winchester. The site of the discovery was visited the same evening and the pots, which later proved to have come from Grave I, at once showed that the find was of Roman date. Immediate inspection revealed one pit, later numbered Grave II, in the east side of the sewer trench. The following day a talk with Mr. Butcher of King's Worthy, who had been driving the mechanical digger excavating the trench, revealed the full story of the discovery.

The Late Bronze Age hoard found at Guilsfield, Montgomeryshire, as well as being the largest and best known from Wales and the Marches, has also been one of the most discussed. Dr. H. N. Savory has recently reviewed the find with the aim of making clear its true content, and with the intention of setting the hoard in its proper local and national context. Consequently, he has provided ‘a reasonably complete set of measured drawings’ and inventory, and the most detailed analysis and evaluation of the hoard hitherto attempted. The present writer has been independently engaged in the study of the same hoard and feels that further critical evidence can be adduced to clarify the nature and significance of this important find. In view of these facts, and bearing in mind the large number of important studies of this period which have been published in the last few years, yet another discussion of the find seems desirable.

In 1966 the Winchester Excavations Committee was again joined by the University of North Carolina and Duke University in excavations on four sites in the city. The work lasted ten weeks from the middle of June to the latter part of August and an average of 160 people took part, about £14,000 being spent.