I am not quite sure how far the later records of Canterbury Cathedral are of sufficient importance to interest this Society, but, as we have long learnt that neither archaeology nor traditional architecture stop short in the middle of the sixteenth century, I exhibit two oil paintings of the interior of the choir of Canterbury Cathedral as in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and offer some notes upon them. A study of later documents, chiefly relating to destructions or replacements, certainly helps to throw light upon earlier history.

The excavations of 1908 began on 15th June, and were continued until 6th November, under the direction of Messrs. Ashby, Hudd, and Jones, assisted by Mr. F. King as architect.

From time to time the Society has the privilege of examining and publishing important examples of mediaeval art brought to its notice by the Fellows. Of these a fair number are fortunately in the safe keeping of museums or corporate bodies in this country, and such are mainly the most important. I have in my mind treasures like the relics of the Black Prince at Canterbury [would that they were better cared for!], the crozier of William of Wykeham at New College, and “King John's Cup” at Lynn. Such legacies as these are not likely to leave our shores, short of some national catastrophe. For the rest, still very numerous, that remain in private hands, there can be no doubt that the tendency at the present time is rather in favour of their finding homes in foreign than in English collections. Our riches in such directions, however, help to make London a market or exchange for works of art, and the wealthy buyer is forced to come here to increase his collections. In this way we have before us this evening a monument of mediaeval art workmanship of a kind and importance that is but seldom found in the open market.

The hoard of several hundred thirteenth-century Exchequer tallies, here brought to the notice of the Society, was found by the Office of Works during the recent repairs to the Chapel of the Pyx at Westminster, and transferred to the Public Record Office. A great deal of dust accompanied the tallies, and in this were found portions of some contemporary white leather bags of curious workmanship and a good many fragments of documents. Some of these fragments were of widely different dates and classes, and it seems probable that the whole constituted a collection of the sweepings, as it were, of the many series which at different times found a home in that important repository of records.

For some years past a collection of helmets and portions of plate armour has been exhibited in the Ethnological Museum at Athens which, in spite of the exceptional interest which attaches to it, has up to the present time escaped the serious consideration of writers on the subject of the defensive armour of the Middle Ages. It is especially interesting because, from the time of the discovery of the collection to the present day, there has not been any attempt to restore or alter the condition in which the pieces were found, and when we consider the frequent mistakes made formerly, in other armouries, in this direction, this alone should recommend it to the study of those interested in mediaeval equipment.

In the days of King Edward the Confessor the Manor of Eye next Westminster, entered as Eia in Domesday Book, was held of Queen Edith by William the Chamberlain. This William, to use the significant words of the record, lost the manor (manerium amisit) at the Conquest by William of Normandy, when it fell into the possession of Geoffrey de Manneville or Mandeville (latinized as Magna Villa), who, as perhaps chief of the Conqueror's companions in arms, profited in the acquisition of some 118 English manors, situated in ten counties, chiefly in Essex and Suffolk. This baron by many tenures, about twenty years after the Conquest, being in possession of the Manor of Eye adjoining the estate of the Abbey of Westminster, and no doubt desiring in a measure to atone for his misdeeds, gave the manor to the Abbey. He, in the words of the grant, “for his soul and the soul of Athelays his wife buried in the cloister of Saint Peter, where next to her he also was to be buried, and for the souls of his sons and daughters, gave to Saint Peter of Westminster the manor which near his church he had held, namely Eye, in perpetual heritage,” etc. The grant is undated.

Lord Carnarvon, in his Presidential Address of 1880, gave a list of Fellows who had held the office of Director. The list comprises the names of many men who distinguished themselves in the service of the Society; and I now submit to the Society such information as I have been able to get with respect to each of them.

The publication of the Italian armour from the Castle of Chalcis recalls the existence of other antiquities of similar date and origin discovered in the same place, and now preserved in the British and Ashmolean Museums. While the objects described by Mr. ffoulkes are all military, those with which we are here concerned were made for civil uses. They are personal ornaments, and illustrate in a pleasing fashion the knightly civilization in Greece during the Venetian supremacy in Euboea.

The excavations of 1909 were commenced on the 21st of June, 1909, and work was continued until the 6th of December. The work was carried out under the direction of Messrs. Ashby, Hudd, King, Jones, and White.

In seeking to recover the form and extent of the church which St. Edward built, we have two sources of direct evidence to guide us. First, there is the scanty evidence in stone, which consists of three Norman bases which remain beneath Abbot Ware's pavement in the presbytery. Secondly, we have the written evidence of a description of the church in a biography of the king written immediately after his death.

The object of the following paper is threefold: first, to give some account of certain relics of pleistocene times, from a cave situated on the south coast of the island of Jersey; secondly, to notice the contents of another cave existing near the north-west corner of the same island, the horizon here being more uncertain, though not improbably pleistocene; and, thirdly, to discuss briefly the general relation of the pleistocene to the post-pleistocene traces of prehistoric man in Jersey in the light of the available evidence, whether archaeological or geological.

Implements fashioned from the antler of the red deer have long been known to have formed part of the tools with which primitive man and his successors in much more recent times carried on the varied industries that claimed his care and skill, enabling him to turn to good account the many products of soil and chase which thoughtful Nature had placed at his disposal. Almost every part of the antler was utilized; the tines being removed in order to form gouges, punches, hand levers, and piercing instruments, while the beam, when deprived of its tines, was cut up into sections from which adzes and such-like cutting implements wrere formed, or hammers were devised. A useful instrument which served as a rake, or scraper, was made from the branching points at the cup; while a clever combination of beam and tines produced a tool which served the double purpose of pick (or lever) and rake (or scraper). Much ingenuity was shown in devising and considerable skill in forming such implements, but in no case is this more evident than in that of the deer-horn pick. Generally speaking, the pick was formed from an antler by severing the cup end and removing the bez and the trez tines, thus leaving the beam to form the haft and the brow tine to form the pick (fig. 1), while the burr remained in position in order to give strength to the weakest part, the angle of intersection between the handle and the “blade”, and to add weight to the blow. The “false brow”, or undeveloped bez, was sometimes left in place (plate XVI, no. 1), but this was rather the exception than the rule. The upper portion of the beam or the longest point beyond the “cup” was often left in position to form an elongation of the shaft which assisted greatly in directing the blow, while it added very materially to the leverage of the pick. Fig. 1 offers a very good example of a double-handed pick with an elongated shaft, and with blunted point and stem worn smooth by usage.

Market Overton is situated about a mile from the northern border of Rutland and a little under two miles south-west from the point where the three counties of Leicester, Lincoln, and Rutland meet. Here, in August 1906, ironstone workings were begun on a fairly large scale, and these operations have continued to the present time and are likely to go on for a considerable period. In the course of the excavations a large number of antiquities have been found, ranging, in point of date, from the neolithic period down to mediaeval and later times. Some of the objects found were exhibited before the Society on Jan. 30th, 1908, when I had the honour of presenting a report as Local Secretary for Rutland. The present paper deals with finds which have occurred since my 1908 report, and will be confined to a consideration of objects of the Anglo-Saxon period, which far exceed, both in number and interest, those of other periods which have come to light at Market Overton. It is quite clear that two distinct cemeteries existed here, separated by an interval of some 400 yards. The Saxon finds described in 1908 occurred in what may be distinguished as the North Cemetery, measuring approximately half an acre in area. The present series of relics were all met with in the South Cemetery, the size of which was apparently about double that of the other.

The desire of the writer is to afford some general information on the present condition, and presumable future, of these most interesting remains, and to enlist as far as possible the sympathies of all students of art and history in the preservation of mediaeval monuments, which, from circumstances of geographical position and present ownership, are comparatively unknown and uncared for.

The object of this paper may best be described by explaining how it came to be undertaken. The date 1481, which occurs (Table XLIV. 15) on an Italian medal of the Sultan Mahomet II, by Constantius, happened to be called in question. On inquiry it became clear that there was no reason to suspect this particular date on the ground of the forms of the numerals. But it was equally clear that there were other problems of the same kind more difficult of solution, and that the only way to approach them with any hope of success was to collect and classify as large a mass as possible of securely dated instances of the use of these so-called Arabic numerals. As always happens, the material proved to be a thousand times more plentiful, and by no means less difficult of verification, than he who light-heartedly undertook the research had supposed.

The royal officer known as the Keeper of the Wardrobe was, we may suppose, first appointed to look after the royal clothes, but at an early date his functions were enlarged until he became one of the most important officers of the Household.

The general recognition of man's existence in this country during the deposition of the terrace-gravels of our southern rivers may be said to date from a paper read to this Society by Sir John Evans in 1859; and it was in the same year that McEnery's papers relating to his labours in Kent's Cavern were published, demonstrating the former presence of palaeolithic cave-man on this side of the Channel. The transition from river-drift to cave-deposits, on the other hand, has only recently been illustrated by a close study of the brick-earth deposit on High Lodge Hill near Mildenhall, Suffolk; and the present paper is intended to amplify the evidence for a Moustier period in England, and to bring our deposits of that horizon into still closer relation with the French. If a relative date is incidentally provided for a deposit that has long been somewhat of a mystery to geologists, and if in their turn geologists are moved to do something more for archaeology, the advantage will be considerable. The success that has recently attended what may be called ‘intensive geology’ in connexion with pleistocene man will no doubt find an echo in this country, and our wealth of material has certainly been used with greater advantage in the last few years. The boulder-clays, which are denied to France, should enable workers in this field to straighten out the connexion of man with the glacial period.

To talk of St. Paul's School before Colet will to most people seem pure absurdity. Even those who know there was such a school think that it was only a poor sort of choir-boys' school, and would be inclined to apply to it, mutatis mutandis, the famous Scotch bull on the roads in the Highlands:

If you'd seen these roads before they were made,

You'd hold up your hands and bless General Wade.

A portion of the town of Largs is built on a raised beach which here attains a breadth of nearly a mile, though in general it is a mere strip of flat land along the coast. This low ground is fertile, and beyond it rises a picturesque background of grassy hills which shelter the town and bay on the east, a combination of natural advantages which must have rendered the locality an attractive place of abode for man from the earliest times. A plot of cultivated land, near the termination of Nelson Street which intersects the raised beach, was acquired by a townsman as the site of a small villa. The area selected was slightly more elevated than the vacant ground on the east side, but its relative height with respect to its western boundary was uncertain, owing to the land there having been already built upon. It would, however, be no exaggeration to describe it as a low gravelly mound. While digging the foundations of the proposed villa nothing of an archaeological character attracted attention, but later on, in course of some outside operations close to the south wall of the newly erected building, the workmen came upon a small cinerary urn containing calcined bones. The vessel was shaped like a modern flower-pot, without any ornamentation, and stood mouth upwards, having, apparently, been simply deposited in a hole in the gravel. It appears to have been extracted in fragments, and dispersed among private collectors.

In the year 1790 the Bishop of Carlisle, Dr. John Douglas, who was also Dean of Windsor, communicated to the Society of Antiquaries an account of ‘the Vault, Body, and Monument, of Edward IV. in St. George's Chapel at Windsor ’. This forms one of the memoirs printed in the third volume of Vetusta Momintenta, and describes certain discoveries made on 13th March, 1789, ‘in making the ground to receive the new pavement’ in the north aisle of the quire.