Owing to the neighbourhood of the civilized republic of Ragusa, which sprang as it were from the ashes of the Græco-Roman city, the antiquities of the Dalmatian Epidaurus have been investigated from the early days of the Renascence. The merchant antiquary, Cyriac of Ancona, who visited Ragusa during his voyage into the Levant, undertaken in 1435, had already begun the work of copying the remaining inscriptions, which was continued in the next century by the native Ragusan antiquaries, who supplied Aldus Manutius and others with epigraphic materials from the Epidaurian site. The work thus early begun was worthily continued in the last century by the Ragusan patrician De Sorgo, more recently by Dr. J. A. Kasnačić and others, and Professor Mommsen personally collated many of the inscriptions for the great work of the Berlin Academy. The aqueduct and general antiquities of the site are treated at length by Appendini, but in a somewhat fantastic and uncritical manner. A residence on the spot has now enabled me to make some fresh contributions to the materials already collected, and to correct perhaps some prevailing misconceptions.

The following extracts have been made by me, by the kind permission of the Bishop of Lincoln, from certain fragments of visitation books and detached papers connected therewith in the possession of his lordship. They range from 1473 to 1627, and are, as will be seen, of very varying degrees of interest; some of them are perhaps so trivial that it may seem almost an intrusion to bring them under the notice of the Society of Antiquaries; but all have at least a local interest, and the originals from which they are copied are many of them in a state of such rapid decay that it is to be feared, if they be not now preserved by being printed, that all memory of them may be lost.

By the kind permission of Mr. Oliver Claude Pell, of Wilburton Manor, near Ely, I am enabled to exhibit to the Society an exceedingly interesting and extensive hoard of ancient bronze objects recently found in Wilburton Fen. I am indebted to Mr. Pell for the following particulars as to the manner and the place in which the discovery was made. The hoard was found in the month of January of the present year (1882), in Wilburton Rush Fen, in the county of Cambridge; the exact spot being about 800 yards due south of Mingay Farm, on the catch-water drain, and just six miles south-west of Ely Cathedral. The objects were resting on the clay, at a depth of from 2 feet to 2 feet 6 inches below the surface of the black peat earth, and were found by a man while “gripping ” or cutting a deep narrow grip across the ground, in order to let off superfluous water. The whole of the articles lay within a space of about 6 feet by 3 feet, and they were for the most part dug out under the immediate supervision of Mr. Pell. A second careful examination of the spot brought to light a few small spear-heads and some minor articles, which are included in the list which follows.

The Church of All Saints, Friskney (a village on the seacoast of Lincolnshire, four miles south of Wainfleet), is of early date, though the lower part of the tower is the only part of the original Norman church which has survived the many changes made in the fabric. The earliest historical record of it that I have been able to find is by Dugdale and by Tanner, who quote extracts from the Harleian Charters showing that in A.D. 1256, William de Kime made grant …. “cum omnibus terris in Friskenâ” (sometimes spelt Freschena), to endow the priory of Gilbertine monks at Bolynton (or Bullington), founded by Simon de Kime in Stephen's reign, and, together with the land, “omnes patronatus et advocationes ecclesiarum …. de Bolynton et” (here follows a list of villages spread widely over Lincolnshire) “in medietate ecclesiæ de Friskenâ.”

At the meeting of the Society on this day, the Earl of Ashburnham exhibited the MS. Account of the Keeper of the Royal Wardrobe for 28 Edward I. 1299–1300, for comparison with that of the Controller of the Royal Wardrobe for the same year, which has long been in the Society's library, and was printed by them in 1787. The volume exhibited is described in the Catalogue of the Ashburnham MSS. Appendix, 1861, No. cxv. In connection with this exhibition the Director made the following remarks:—

“At the above period of history there were always, as I shall presently show, two concurrent Accounts of the Royal Wardrobe, the Keeper's Account and the Controller's Account, but in no instance but this, so far as I know, have both for the same period survived to our time.

The Keeper's Account before us was acquired by the late Earl of Ashburnham, and, through the courtesy of the present Earl, Fellow of our Society, has been left here for several weeks for our perusal.

I have the honour of exhibiting to the Society of Antiquaries, through Mr. Joshua James Foster, of Dorchester, some objects of bronze, iron, glass, and earthenware lately found together in Belbury Camp, near Higher Lychett, Poole, Dorset.

Bishop Tanner informs us that the Hospital of St. John the Baptist at Chepping Wycombe in Buckinghamshire was founded for a master, brethren, and sisters before 20 Hen. III. As the remains of the buildings belonging to it are threatened with demolition in the carrying out of a scheme for erecting a new Grammar School, sanctioned by the Charity Commissioners on the application of the Governors of the Wycombe Grammar School and Almshouse Foundation, it will be interesting, in the first place, to give some notion of the original situation of the Hospital and its surroundings. The present street, called Easton Street, a portion of the road from London to Oxford, cuts through what must have been a part of the Hospital grounds, and renders it difficult to realise the appearance of the place in the twelfth century, the street having been formed close to the buildings and leaving them in an irregular position.

The Inventories of Household Goods and Farming Stock which I have the honour of laying before the Society of Antiquaries have been copied by me from the original manuscript which is preserved in the library of Nostell Priory. They occupy some of the latter pages of a large folio volume, the earlier leaves of which contain lists of Yorkshire musters taken in the latter years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The volume had probably been purchased by Sir William Fairfax, as it has his initials W. F. on both the covers.

In a Paper read before this Society, 15 May, 1879, printed in Archaeologia, vol. XLVII. pp. 157–160, on “The Fret or Key Ornamentation in Mexico and Peru,” I showed that this form or symbol was there without doubt emblematic of water, and probably adopted independently of Western or Old World influence; and at the conclusion of the Paper I threw out a hint that the fylfot or swastika was an old Aryan symbol, connected with the older sky or air-gods, as represented by Indra and Jupiter Tonans and Pluvius, and not found in the New World. Since then I have gone very fully into a further investigation as to the general history and meaning of that ancient and mystic symbol; and believe I have arrived at a satisfactory solution of a question which has long been a puzzle to mythologists and antiquaries; but one which—in spite of the later labours and discoveries of Dr. Schliemann, Bernouf, Max Müller, of Ludvig Müller of Copenhagen, and most recently of Mr. Edward Thomas, the eminent numismatist —I believe, with Eergusson (Tree and Serpent Worship), has not yet been fully solved.

In Colyton church stands a small high tomb, on which is the recumbent effigy of a young lady with a coronet on her head and a dog at her feet. Over the effigy is a shrine-like canopy; in the sides supporting the canopy are angels with thuribula; and on the outside of the west end in a niche are the Virgin and Holy Child.

I am enabled, through the kindness of Mr. Henry B. Hull, of Nether Compton, Dorset, to exhibit to the Society a small manuscript volume, 6½ inches high by 3½ inches broad, bound in red morocco, and lettered on one side in blind tooling, Eduardus Dering, with the words Mercator Regius, superposed upside down in gilt letters. On the other side the process is reversed, the blind tooling being applied to the words Mercator Regius, while the superposed and inverted gilt lettering forms the name of Eduardus Dering. The manuscript bears the date 1660, and begins with “A List of His Mats Navie Royall, with their Dimensions, Number of Men, and Gunns,” &c.

This Burial Ground is five-and-a-half miles east-north-east of Banbury, a little more than a quarter of a mile north of Marston Hill farm, in the parish of Marston St. Lawrence, and 200 or 300 yards west of the Moreton road. The field was formerly called Bar-furlong, which name may be derived either from Barrow or from Barr, the summit of a hill, as Bardon Hill (Barrdun), the top of the hill, in Leicestershire.

The Church of All Saints, at Trull, near Taunton, in Somersetshire, consists of a chancel with chapels on either side, a nave with aisles, a south porch, and a tower at the west end of the nave; and the present building, although probably begun in the days of Henry VI., or even earlier, seems not to have been finished before 1560, which date occurs on some of the woodwork of the church. In consequence, if one excepts the tower, the whole building is, in style, Perpendicular. There is no chancel-arch, but a wooden rood-screen with a richly-vaulted overhanging canopy divides the chancel from the nave.

In venturing to lay before the Society of Antiquaries some notes on the architectural features of the church of Saint Augustine, at Hedon, near Hull, I have taken it for granted that I should be excused if I did not try at the same time to go into the archæological history of the town or churches; what is here expected from an architect being, I presume, that he should prepare a simple architectural description of the various parts of the building, such as might be given without any knowledge at all of the men who built it, or of any documentary evidence as to the dates at which they built. The truth is that we architects have not often the leisure necessary for the investigation of this part of the subject, and in this case I doubt whether if I had leisure I could have learnt much beyond what is told by Mr. Poulson in his careful History of Holdernesse.

The following Papers, relating to the Crown Jewels and Plate in the times of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I., are a selection from a number of Jewelhouse Accounts and Papers, which are now in the possession of Captain Hervey George St. John-Mildmay, R.N., of Hazelgrove House, Somerset. The full catalogue will be found in the Seventh Report of the Hist. MSS. Commission.

In directing your attention to the accompanying drawing I am not unmindful of the enthusiasm with which the late Mr. Charles Winston devoted himself to the study of ancient painted glass, nor the accuracy with which he transferred upon paper the beautiful colouring, character, and artistic merit of innumerable examples. I had the honour of being one of his correspondents, and he not only gave me whatever information I desired but often urged me to give attention to every example of ancient glass-painting I might come across, and to copy as much of it as was practicable. “Every little fragment of painted glass,” he was wont to say, “had its value in the eyes of the student, however insignificant in itself.”

The science of heraldry has faithfully preserved to modern times various phases of some of those remarkable legends, which, based upon an accurate study of natural phenomena, exhibit the process whereby the greater part of mythology has come into existence. There we find the lunar Unicorn, the wild, white, fierce, chaste moon, whose two horns, unlike those of mortal creatures, are indissolubly twisted into one, a most remarkable myth, which I have recently fully considered; and there, also, as in every department of ancient thought, the solar power is fully represented. I now propose to examine, briefly, the ancient and widely-spread heraldic myth of the Gryphon.

The object of this Paper is to describe certain Roman remains discovered in the year 1881 during extensive alterations on the premises of Messrs. J. Tylor and Sons (of which firm the writer is a member) in Warwick Square, adjoining the last of the three successive Roman walls of London, and near one of the gates of that wall (Newgate), and to draw therefrom certain conclusions as to the state in which Britain was found by the Romans, and the nature and object of their occupation.

To the Alexandrian Claudius Ptolemy, who flourished about the middle of the second century after Christ, belongs the honour of having achieved the final systematisation of the results of ancient research in the two sciences of astronomy and geography. His treatise on Geography continued to be the standard text-book on its own subject, as his Almagest was the standard text-book on astronomy, until the brilliant discoveries of the fifteenth century called the attention of Europe to their defects.