In a previous paper in ANTIQUITY (September 1941) I indicated briefly the complexity of the interpretation of the jumbled myth, legend and fantasy contained in the Historia Regum Britanniae, and discussed the sources which seem likely to have been used by its unscrupulous author for those parts of the work which purport to deal with the pre-Roman ages of Britain. These sources appear in the main to have been a version of the Historia Britonum of Nennius and a collection of pedigrees of ruling houses of the Welsh Dark Ages; a variety of other classical and Celtic material was laid under contribution for embellishments, but there was certainly nothing that could be connected, even indirectly, with any source earlier than that of the classical writers' accounts of the Roman conquest and occupation of Britain. Geoffrey's prehistory is in fact completely bogus, and while it may sometimes incorporate interesting fragments of early medieval history or legend, it bears no relation whatsoever to the period it professes to chronicle.

Communities which depend for their existence wholly or largely on food-gathering (agriophages)—hunting, fishing, and the gathering of wild vegetable products—use implements that differ somewhat from those used by food-producing peoples (trophogens) who live by agriculture and pastoralism. Actually it is seldom, if ever, possible to draw a hard-and-fast line between the two economies; we ourselves, for instance, with our highly industrialized food-production, still depend to a very large extent on an equally industrialized form of food-gathering, viz. fishing. This is because we have not yet learnt how to domesticate the herring. Archaeologically, however, the distinction can be made, as is now well known, between the food-gathering economy of the Mesolithic and earlier periods, and the food-producing economy of the Neolithic and later phases.

The name of St. Alban, the protomartyr Angliae, occurs for the first time in the Life of Bishop Germanus of Auxerre which Constantius of Lyons wrote about 480. Germanus and his colleague Lupus of Troyes had been sent to Britain in 429 to fight against the Pelagian heretics; having succeeded, they visited the tomb of St. Alban to offer their thanks for the victory (c. 16, in Mon. Germ, hist., Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum VII, 262) : Conpressa itaque perversitate damnabili eiusque auctoribus confutatis animisque omnium fidei puritate conpositis, sacerdotes beatum Albanum martyrem, acturi Deo per ipsum gratias, petierunt. The genuine text of the Life does not tell anything more of the martyr, who evidently could be presumed to be known to the reader. The uneventful return of the bishops to Gaul too is attributed to the intercession of the saint (c. 18, p. 265) : Tranquillam navigationem merita propria et intercessio Albani martyris paraverunt, quietosque antestites suorum desideriis felix carina restituit.

In many parts of the world and at many periods the practice has prevailed of depositing boats, or models or other representations of them, with the dead, either as a means of facilitating his supposed voyage to another world, or as a symbol of his maritime activities during his lifetime.

That the former is generally the correct explanation of the custom there can be no doubt. This is shown by the evidence of the belief in a voyage to a future world, and the customs to which it has given rise, among living primitive peoples in the Pacific Islands and elsewhere, so well collected and presented by the late Sir J. G. Frazer. It is shown also by traditions such as that of our own king Arthur's journey by barge to ‘the island valley of Avilion, where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow’ It is shown also by the ancient Greek and Roman custom of placing a coin in the mouth of the dead to pay Charon's fee for ferrying him across the Styx.

The rabbit shares one characteristic with the archaeologist—both dig into the earth. Hence the latter, contemplating some object or evidence revealed by his spade, may sometimes be viewing merely the result of the activities of a humbler but much more numerous type of excavator. Is he not warned to ‘always make sure that an apparent post-hole is not a rabbit- or rat-hole’? And does not Professor James Ritchie describe the rabbit as ‘a burrower and a vandal which makes short cuts through the neat layers and classifications of the excavator’? On the other hand, the rabbit's activity or lack of it may on occasion be of service; it was a long patch of virgin turf on Easton Down, untouched by rabbits or moles, which led Dr Stone in 1932 to remove the turf, thus revealing a layer of tightly packed flint nodules covering a Bronze Age urn-field. Hence no apology, we feel, is needed for an article on the rabbit in a journal primarily concerned with archaeological research; particularly as much of the article deals with the status of the rabbit in medieval times, a topic which has already figured briefly in ANTIQUITY.