In August I was asked by the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society to undertake a tentative excavation of the earthwork near Winchester known as Oliver Cromwell's Battery to ascertain its date of construction. Mr. F. W. Talbot, the lessee of the site, Mr. E. S. McEuen, the Rev. S. T. Percival, Mr. G. Weeks, and Mr. Lewis Williams at once offered to join me, and with the help of our own men we were the working party. We had the assistance of the Hon. Secretary Mr. Frank Warren, F.S.A., Dr. J. P. Williams-Freeman, Sir Thomas Troubridge, F.S.A., and Mr. V. B. Crowther-Beynon, F.S.A., the last named having been most helpful throughout.

I began my Address last year with a reference to the changes in procedure at our Anniversary Meetings, and to their effect on your President. The process of change has continued, and the meeting which was formerly an afternoon function, and then was divided between the afternoon and the evening, is now for the first time held entirely in the evening, beginning at an hour which demands a real sacrifice from those of us whose dinner time cannot be varied with impunity. It is no longer only the President who suffers. But we shall doubtless agree to give the new time-table a fair trial before reconsidering this small matter of domestic policy.

The Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania started its ninth season at Ur on 1st November 1930, and continued in the field until 20th March 1931. The season was a long one and a larger number of workmen than usual was employed, the average for the first three and a half months being 280 and for the remainder of the time 200; the amount of actual excavation done was in consequence greater than in any previous year.

The two matters which I have to lay before you to-night are the results of chance discoveries made at Ripon during the installation of a heating system and at York in digging a grave. Cathedral churches in full and constant use do not lend themselves to exhaustive archaeological investigation, but it is my first duty to express to the Deans of York and Ripon my most sincere acknowledgement of their kindness in allowing these researches to be pushed to the farthest possible limits. That certain points must remain doubtful is obvious, but since nothing short of the complete ruin of the two Minsters would ensure a full examination we may content ourselves with the reflection that it is possible to pay too high a price for knowledge.

The rarity of any traces of Christianity among the Roman remains of this country has often been the subject of comment.

The little church at Silchester and its probable analogue at Caerwent make a poor show beside the more than twenty known pagan temples, and setting aside certain recognizably Christian tombstones, no other relics are hitherto known save some examples of the Chi-Rho monogram. The object here published is therefore anyhow worthy of remark, and the more so since its decoration exhibits a symbolism of long history and peculiar interest, namely, that of the Sacred Tree.

Chastleton Camp, or Chastleton Barrow (pl. LIV, 1 and 2), as it is sometimes called, is situated at the south-east end of the parish, which projects like some huge spur from the north-west edge of the county and from the line of the road which on either side of the base of the spur for a short distance divides Oxfordshire from Gloucestershire on the one hand and from Warwickshire on the other. This road is an age-long trackway running diagonally across England by way of the Jurassic Belt from the Cotswolds to Northamptonshire, and is fringed by many remains of prehistoric man, in addition to the Rollright Stones and the dolmen known as the Whispering Knights. Along it must have moved the invaders of the early Iron Age to their conquest of the Midlands, establishing a line of strongholds of which Chastleton must in its original condition have been a formidable example.

In the house of Sir Edmund Lechmere, known as Severn End, near Hanley Castle, Worcestershire, there has been preserved for a long time past the interesting Saxon funereal stone, which, through the owner's kindness, I am permitted to make known to readers of the Antiquaries Journal. Many have seen and admired it, but it has not yet been published. Its history is unknown except in so far as its presence at Severn End goes back beyond any memories or records, and may run to centuries. So housed, it has escaped many of the ills that carved Saxon stones are heirs to, and, as the photographs on pl. XXVII will show, is in a singularly good state of preservation. One most important fact about it is its material, which is the local oolite, so much used in the neighbouring Saxon church of Deerhurst, with which it has some artistic affinities, and it is not only a local product but is attested as of Saxon origin by its general character and details.

The hill-fort of Cissbury, situated on a ridge of the Sussex Downs four miles north of Worthing, is one of the best known examples of its kind, though in regard to the strength of its defences it can scarcely be compared with such Wessex forts as Maiden Castle (Dorchester), Hambledon, Yarnbury, or Battlesbury.

Of the two collections which I exhibit this evening, the first consists of objects found early in the present year at Stanwix, the northern suburb of Carlisle. Carlisle itself is on the site of a small Roman town, which probably succeeded a fort of the first century; when the wall of Hadrian was built, its course was laid out so as to run about half a mile to the north of this site, reaching the river Eden after passing over the hill of Stanwix, on which a fort was built. The position of the fort, of whose plan and details we know very little, is marked by Stanwix church.

In 1928 by courteous permission of Mr. Badcock, the owner, the Oxford University Archaeological Society, under the supervision of Mr. R. T. Lattey, was able to examine a site in a field bounded on the west by the road leading from Radley village to Abingdon and on the south by a second road leading eastwards towards Radley station. There, on the wall of a disused gravelpit, holes filled with earth had produced evidence of human occupation. Exploration of some of these resulted in the discovery of a series of trenches, the relation of which to one another could not be exactly determined owing to the limited area available for investigation. One piece of trench ran with a somewhat north-easterly trend up to the northern edge of the field, with a recessed pit about 4½ ft. across at one point, while a second longer stretch, after running in a north-westerly direction for a few yards, turned almost at right angles towards the south-west, and some distance farther on, at the point where the excavations had to cease, appeared to be bending southwards.

The charter which is illustrated in pl. xviii is a grant by King Edward I to Roger de Pilkington and his heirs of free warren in their demesne lands of Pilkington and elsewhere in the county of Lancaster. The grantee was the son of Alexander de Pilkington, whom he succeeded at some date after 1282. He was a knight of the shire for Lancashire in 1316; and an adherent of Thomas earl of Lancaster, being imprisoned after the battle of Boroughbridge, and dying shortly afterwards. In Feb. 1289–90 he was granted for his services in Gascony 100 li from the first wardships which fell in on the south side of Trent; and in June 1291 he was granted the present charter. In the following year he was summoned to Lancaster to show to the justices itinerant by what warrant he claimed free warren in Pilkington and elsewhere, and he successfully exhibited to them the actual charter which is the subject of this note.

The seal (pl. xxviii) which has led to the following notes was discovered by the Duke of Rutland among his muniments at Belvoir Castle in 1928 and was exhibited by him to the Society of Antiquaries on December 6th of that year, when I gave a brief description of it. Some apology is owing both to the owner and to the Society for the time that has elapsed without anything being printed about a very interesting find; but the fact is, that it raises a number of points which in 1928 I barely mentioned, but which seemed to meof considerable interestand some importance, and which I designed to study in more detail. Up to the present this detailed study has not proved feasible, and I feel that I must not further delay publication; but I hope that by one hand or another the fuller treatment may yet be accomplished.

The three carved stones which are the subject of these notes have been in the possession of the Society for an indeterminate length of time. The late Sir William Hope appears to have known nothing of their provenance, which carries back the Society's possession of them beyond the year 1885 when he became Assistant Secretary. They were probably exhibited or were intended to be exhibited to the Society and never subsequently removed, though no record of such exhibition is to be found in our Minutes. This unfortunate omission deprives us of an exact knowledge of the place from which the stones came, but a scientific examination of the material of which they are made identifies it as Northamptonshire oolite or some very closely allied stone. This indicates the Peterborough district as the approximate area from which they came.

In 1929, during the excavation of a prehistoric and Roman site upon Camp Hill in Lord Bledisloe's deer-park at Lydney, on the borders of the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, a reputed earthwork upon the adjoining Little Camp Hill (fig. 1) was trenched and found to contain the remains of a small stone-built castle. The existence of this castle had not been previously noted, as the site has no known history and the remains of the walls are completely covered by the grassgrown banks of their own debris. The site had been regarded locally as that of a small camp, associated with the larger Roman ‘camp’ on the opposite hill. On the Ordnance maps it appears under the name Outpost.

The form of the Fusetto di bombardiere, or gunner's stiletto, is typical of most Italian stilettos of the seventeenth century. The grip is usually spiral, of ivory or wood inlaid with bone, or of turned iron, the quillons short and straight, and the blade stiffly triangular and tapering to a point. It is distinguished from other stilettos by the numbered graduations marked along one side of the blade.

On 28th November 1929 our Fellow Mr. Lawrence E.Tanner exhibited before the Society a sword, now preserved in the museum in the Undercroft of Westminster Abbey, which through his good offices had recently been cleaned and put in order (pls. lvii and lviii, I ). At the same time he offered with all due caution the suggestion that this might be the sword used at the funeral of Henry V which is mentioned in the Sacrist's Account Roll for 1422–3 as having been delivered to the keeper of the vestry together with ‘the whole armour of a man’.

The small priory of the nuns of Kingsmead was situated on the west of the medieval town of Derby in the meadows by the Odde brook; nothing now remains above ground, but Nuns' Hill and Nun Street keep the site in memory. The foundation recalls the origin of the Order of Sempringham and the story of the seven maidens for whom St. Gilbert built a habitation. In 1160 the abbot of the Augustinian canons of Darley Abbey built a habitation for maidens a mile away on land belonging to his house, and the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield with Chester gave the abbot permission to consecrate the maidens, and put them under his charge. At Kingsmead, as in a number of small nunneries in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a prior or master served the nuns as chaplain and managed their property. The nuns subsequently struggled for independence, and about 1250 the bishop released them and their property from the jurisdiction and control of the abbot and canons of Darley. A document among the Wollaston charters in the British Museum, which has hitherto not been noticed, records the effort of the prior and the nuns to raise money for the repair of their church and the buildings of the priory. Collectors were sent out with the appeal, and it was usual to read such appeals as these in parish churches after the gospel at high mass on Sundays and holy days. The appeal had been carefully prepared.

Of the two boats described, the first, from Llandrindod Wells, was examined by the writer in 1929 for the National Museum of Wales. The second was found before 1866 at Llyn Llydaw, Snowdonia (Arch. Camb. 1874, 147). It has recently been presented to the National Museum of Wales by Mr. Mervyn Griffith, and re-examination having shown that the illustration in the published record gives a wrong impression of its form, this opportunity has been taken of refiguring the vessel.

Last year I described before the Society a series of flint implements of Upper Palaeolithic (Upper Mousterian-Aurignacian) facies discovered by me in Yorkshire at the base of, and passing up into, a deposit considered by Lamplugh to resemble a weathered Boulder clay and classed by him as of Late Glacial Age. The geological aspects of these archaeological finds I have dealt with fully in a paper read subsequently to the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia. Both papers, however, were complementary to one read by J.Reid Moir on archaeological discoveries of a similar nature made by him in north-west Norfolk in the Brown Boulder clay. With the objects of obtaining confirmation of Lamplugh's geological opinion and of bridging the gap between north-west Norfolk and Yorkshire, I decided to investigate the glacial sequence in north-east Lincolnshire, choosing Kirmington as a centre.

A Trench for an outfall sewer in Thorpe Hall Avenue, Southchurch, in 1929, followed by excavation in the adjoining marshland in 1930, disclosed a new lacustrine site associated with pottery of Hallstatt and later dates. Complete exposure was not possible then, but results of archaeological interest were obtained, which are summarized briefly here; full details and references are recorded elsewhere.