The Society may, I think, congratulate itself that, after the occurrences of a week ago, it is possible to hold its Anniversary Meeting in its own apartments in Burlington House, and this not only from a private point of view, but as some indication of the entire failure of an eight-month long attempt to render our City uninhabitable. Apart from much broken glass and an incendiary bomb, some time ago, which so damaged a cistern on the roof as to render itself innocuous, the actual structure of our apartments is, as yet, unscarred.

In 1939, in Antiquity, xiii, 58, and Revue Archéologique, janvier–mars, p. 103, I summarized the results of the work of an expedition sent out in 1938 by the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Leverhulme Trustees, and the University of London, to investigate the hill-forts of northern France. The purpose of the expedition was twofold: first to prepare a map and classified schedule of these hill-forts, and secondly to ascertain by partial excavation the dominant cultures associated with outstanding or representative examples. Our survey covered the departments of Finistère, Morbihan, Côtes-du-Nord, Ille-et-Vilaine, Manche, and a part of Loire-Inférieure. Our excavation was sufficient to ascertain the cultures associated with the outstanding hill-fort known as the Camp d'Artus at Huelgoat (Finistère), the Châtellier at Le Petit Celland, east of Avranches (Manche), and Kercaradec in the commune of Penhars, near Quimper (south Finistère).

It is only rarely that Romano-British brooches can be dated with the precision possible in the case of coins, or even of decorated Samian ware; their chronology is, more often than not, based on stylistic arguments, and even where stratigraphic evidence of date is available, the possibility of “survival” is a serious impediment to the formation of definite conclusions.

The three Barrows described in this paper are in the northern part of Llantwit Major parish in the Vale of Glamorgan. Being nameless, they are defined by (a) the nearest farmstead, and (b) the height of their crests above O.D. The work of excavation was begun on 5th December 1939 and finished on 25th February 1940. It was thus carried out during the severest winter weather of modern times. Alternations of frost and thaw played havoc with sections and floors, and prolonged delays ate into the time available. Thus in many respects the effects were irremediable, and the record suffers.

During the excavation in 1932 of a small rectangular building in Insula V at Verulamium a large rubbish-pit was found impingeing upon, but not underlying, its south wall (Verulamium, pp. 111–12). Fourteen vessels from this pit are illustrated in the Report (ibid., p. 186 and figs. 30 and 31), and described as follows:

The contents of the pit included a number of ‘saggers’ and ‘wasters’ evidently the debris from some neighbouring kiln. Both the wasters and much of the pottery were of a uniform hard buff ware and had evidently come from the same source. The pottery, which was clearly of one period, was associated with coins of Sabina (A.D. 119–38—M. and S. 1023), Hadrian (A.D. 132–4—M. and S. 714), and Antoninus Pius (A.D. 154–5—M. and S. 930), and may be ascribed to the period A.D. 120–60.

It will be apparent that we have here the ‘throw-outs’ of a local pottery manufactory, whose activities are approximately dated by coins to the Hadrian-Antonine period, a date which can, moreover, be checked by reference to the associated non-local types.

On 21st April 1940 Willcocks McKenzie, lorry-driver of Thame, while walking along the left bank of the river Thame, about one mile north of the town and a short distance upstream from a pool known as Jemmett's Hole, had his eye attracted by the gleam of metal. This, on investigation, proved to come from the parcel of rings and coins which are the subject of this account.

In 1939, having failed after much searching to locate any extant seal of Strongbow, I gave in Historic Heraldry of Britain (Oxford, 1939, pp. 36–7) such particulars as I could of two which have perished, one known by a drawing, the other by a photograph and description. Soon after the book's appearance a letter from Captain R. B. Haselden informed me that what I had been seeking existed in the Huntington Library, namely, a complete and almost perfect seal of Strongbow attached to a charter formerly at Stowe. To the historian, the sigillographer, and the herald alike, this seal is of exceptional interest: to the historian, because it is the only known seal extant of an important historical figure; to the sigillographer, because of the unique design of the counterseal; and to the herald, for its bearing on the early history of one of the two or three oldest heraldic devices.

Our ancestors were making horseshoes of a characteristic type at the very beginning of the Roman occupation. It was a highly developed type, and its elaboration, whether here or upon the Continent, presumably occupied many preceding years. It is this first type which it is proposed to describe as the Iron Age horseshoe. Its various characteristic features were slowly modified during succeeding centuries, but they were not finally lost until about the twelfth or thirteenth century A.D. From a survey of the various specimens which seem to have been in use during this long period there emerge derivatives of the Iron Age shoe, some of which are sufficiently distinctive to deserve the status of subtypes. Towards the end of the period we begin to meet with shoes which are medieval in their general characters, but which show that the technique of the Iron Age was still not wholly forgotten. Such specimens are conveniently described as transitional, but it is sometimes difficult to be sure whether individual shoes are genuine derivatives of the Iron Age shoe or examples of an entirely new, and possibly Norman, pattern, modified by traditional methods of manufacture.

During the past three years the work of the Trent Navigation Company in dredging the river above Nottingham has brought to light a number of interesting finds. The company's dredger has been removing large quantities of gravel from the river-bed, and in particular it has been dealing with the Clifton reach, where a large accumulation of gravel projecting from a point on the left bank directly opposite the downstream end of the tree-covered bluff called Clifton Grove has been cleared right away. This point is in the parish of Wilford, and here the river is nearly 100 yards broad with an almost straight course for a considerable distance between Clifton Grove and a wide expanse of level meadows on the left bank (fig. 1).

In a codicil to his will dated 5th January 1926 the late Lieutenant-Colonel G. B. Croft Lyons wrote: ‘I desire that the income derived from the property left to the Society of Antiquaries of London … should be applied to the encouragement of the study of heraldry and in the first instance I wish that a new edition of Papworth's Ordinary should be prepared to be published by the Society.… And in order that such Edition may be generally useful I desire that the blazon of the Arms in such new Edition shall follow the style of blazon in the present Edition and that the new forms affected in recent years by certain writers be not adopted but that the blazon be full and exact and such that any person can as far as may be understand it.’

This is our charter. In accordance with its terms the appropriate Committee of the Society in January 1940 decided that for the present the new edition of Papworth's Ordinary should have priority over the other purposes specified, and appointed editors. At the same time they decided that since the same material differently arranged would make a new General Armory (which was needed not less than a new Ordinary), this should be prepared concurrently.

It is generally prudent to regard foreign coats in any rolls of arms with circumspection: they not infrequently depart widely from the versions accepted at home. Yet it sometimes happens that records of arms are found earlier in foreign than in native documents. Thus the first occurrence so far known anywhere of the arms of a Count of Chalon is in our Fitzwilliam and Camden Rolls. So, too, the lion and battle-axe of the King of Norway in the same two rolls, and also in the Segar Roll, give earlier news of the colours, it is said, than have ever yet been found in that country. And there are other examples of the kind. This is not surprising, seeing that we have more copious resources surviving from earlier times than other countries. The coats now to be spoken of are the more unexpected that they show the converse case: points of heraldry appertaining to these isles have been recorded in several continental rolls, but do not appear in our rolls at all.

In Spain of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were employed, for the adornment of the altar, certain objects which would appear, although perhaps originally designed for another purpose, to be closely related to the altar-cards now commonly (and even in the sixteenth century to some extent) a feature of the celebration of the Mass. Their employment would seem to have been fairly extensive, since a good many examples, of one kind or another, still survive. The Spanish name for them—sacra—is the same as that for the altar-cards, three in number, now ordinarily set upon the altar in Roman Catholic churches, in other countries as well as in Spain; and, correspondingly, the name I have heard applied to them in English is ‘altar-card’. They are of considerable interest, not alone because, as often, of their design or their workmanship, but also, seemingly, from their position as relics of a step in the liturgical history of the Roman Church in Spain.

It is well known from Ptolemy's Geography (11, ii, 10) that he places the tribe of the Parisii in east Yorkshire with its capital at Petuaria, the position of which has recently been established at Brough-on-the-Humber by an inscription found by Philip Corder, F.S.A. The obvious assumption that this tribe had migrated from the region of the Seine is supported by a comparison of their chariot-burials in the King's Barrow at Arras, at Hesslekew and at Seamer, all in east Yorkshire, with a chariot-burial at Nanterre near Paris of La Tène II age, where in both the British and Gaulish cases horses were buried with the chariot, contrary to the custom in the Marne chariot-burials. The Yorkshire graves are not anterior to 300 B.C., according to Déchelette, although the first migration of the tribe may possibly have taken place several generations earlier. In a grave at North Grimston, also in east Yorkshire, a short sword with bronze anthropoid handle (fig. 6) was found together with a typical La Tène II sword, and it is clearly closely related to an anthropoid sword found near Chaumont (Haute Marne) (fig. 5.) This Yorkshire example was probably a sword belonging to the earlier generation of the Parisii who migrated into Yorkshire presumably about 400 B.C. Two similar anthropoid short swords are known from the same part of Yorkshire, i.e. from Lord Londesborough's collection and from Clotherholme near Ripon.

In the last number of this journal (pp. 9–27) there appeared an article by Dr. Gordon Ward on ‘The Iron Age Horseshoe and its Derivatives’. Dr. Ward has a wide practical knowledge of his subject and a stimulating method of approach, but on some important aspects of his subject there is scope for considerable difference of interpretation. In suggesting certain modifications to the position which he has stated, I should like at the outset to make it clear that I am able to do so largely as the result of the work of publication and analysis undertaken by Dr. Gordon Ward himself, and by his predecessor in this field, Dr. R. W. Murray. I have also to thank Mr. C. F. C. Hawkes for much useful criticism and information.

Needham lies on the Norfolk side of the Waveney valley, not far west of Harleston. East of the village is the large gravel pit owned by Mr. H. Dean which has revealed the site (fig. 1) here to be described. This pit has already produced a Bronze Age food vessel, and is known as the site of a microlithic industry and of a first- and second-century Romano-British village. Commercial working has laid bare from time to time dark pits and ditches on the surface of the gravel, which have yielded the normal debris of the Romano-British peasant settlement. One of these ditches, however, lying to the south of the area of later occupation, has yielded remains of the Claudian period which throw considerable light upon the manner and date of the earliest attempt to romanize East Anglia.

In A.D. 1483 Abu Abdullah [Abdilla] Muhamad, better known to us under his Spanish name of ‘Boabdil’, who, as the head of a faction, shortly before had proclaimed himself king of Granada, attempted an attack on Medina Lucena. His attempt, ill conceived and badly conducted, failed; he was taken and, conforming to the usage of his time, yielded his arms to his Christian captors. Amongst those arms was a sword, still preserved, whose golden mounts are of rare beauty, those of both hilt and scabbard being adorned with little plaques of delicate cloisonné enamel, individually framed in stout metal, set in fields formed of tiny pellets of gold (see pl. XLII, a, reproducing a part, magnified, a little above the blade, of the hilt; similar work is on the scabbard and its accessories). A number of other swords, similarly ornamented with work of the same kind, but of less value and importance, have survived, as well as some isolated specimens of such work no longer in place on the sword (or swords) for which they were made. The hilt of Boabdil's sword is of gold, enriched with enamels of blue, white, and red; but the mounts of at least some of the other similarly ornamented swords are of gilded copper studded with little panels of delicate silver-cloisonné enamel. Besides the swords mentioned above there is, in the British Museum, a splendid head-stall, of gilded copper, composed of small framed panels of cloisonné enamel alternating with similar panels of granulated work (one corner of this is reproduced in pl. XLII, b), which has been described by O. M. Dalton, and a pair of stirrups in the Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan, at Madrid.

At the present time, when the thoughts and sympathy of many are with our Norwegian friends and allies, it may be of interest to recall certain other occasions on which they have had to face invasion from the sea. Moreover, the fortifications erected in Norway during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are of particular interest for comparison with those of this country during the same period, since, doubtless owing to their geographical position, both countries seem to have been influenced only gradually and spasmodically by the developing military science of the middle European peoples, the Germans and Italians.

Most of the artillery fortifications existing in Norway, as described in Festninger og andre militœrbygninger, date from the late seventeenth century or later, but even very brief research at the time of the International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences at Oslo in 1936 showed that some portions of earlier work still exist at various places, largely incorporated in later defences. No extensive survey of these remains can be attempted here, since the material is not readily available, but the two illustrations of Oslo (Christiania) here reproduced form an excellent introduction to the study of such defences.

It has long been recognized that the effigy of Bishop Henry Marshall (ob. 1206) in the choir of Exeter Cathedral is set on a tomb chest of later date, and their dimensions and style show that the two did not originally belong to the same monument. The discovery here recorded provides evidence for a reconstruction of the original tomb chest belonging to the effigy of Bishop Marshall.