Professor C. Northcote Parkinson has demonstrated that government officials increase by a process of quasi-organic growth, unrelated to the burden of work for which they are responsible. The phenomenon is as apparent in the Roman Empire as in modern Britain; but modern British scholarship working on the evidence from the Roman Empire has carried the process even further by producing an official who never existed - though in fairness it must be admitted that no new post was created. It would be interesting and instructive to follow the process by which this apocryphal administrator became accepted into the canon of governors of Roman Britain, but problems of space mean that we can do no more than show why he must be declared redundant.

A unique linchpin depicting a human thumb, discovered in North Lincolnshire in the 1980s, is here reconsidered and particular emphasis is placed on its potential as an apotropaic symbol. This function is explored in terms of the wider material and literary basis for magical gestures in Roman Britain and the Roman world. The relationship between this image and the space in which it was used is also explored.

During the early stages of excavation at the Chessalls, Kingscote, Gloucestershire (ST 8065 9608) late in 1975, several large fragments of wall-plaster were exposed in the destruction debris of an early-fourth-century building with mortared stone walls. Subsequent excavation revealed that the plaster was lying in situ, face up and face down, concertina fashion, as it had fallen. Dr Norman Davey gave instruction and assistance in the lifting of this material and it was removed to his workshop in Potterne, near Devizes, for reconstruction to be carried out. As a result of several months of painstaking work Dr Davey was able to restore large areas of a mural painting or paintings, which will shortly be put on exhibition in the Corinium Museum, Cirencester.