The fruits of that Victory to which we referred with pride and hopefulness at the last Anniversary Meeting and of the one which so quickly followed it have been slow to manifest themselves in our homes or in our wayfaring; but the wheels of peace-time industry are turning and as a chronicler of the year's work of the Society I have a pleasant task. Great difficulties have been met, but these difficulties, thanks in large measure to the efforts of the Assistant Secretary and his staff, have been surmounted.

In the architectural description in the Victoria County History of the superstructure over the tomb of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester (d. 1447), in St. Albans Abbey, there is a drawing by our late Fellow, the Rev. E. E. Dorling, of a frequently repeated ornamental detail that is called ‘a device of daisies in a standing cup’, and there rightly said to be one of the duke's badges, for it was observed that it was used not only in conspicuous decorative bands, but also as the cresting of the coronets over the duke's arms (pls. xiv and xv). In 1796 our famous Director, Richard Gough, also noted and figured this badge, which he described as ‘wheat-ears in vases on pedestals’, and he suggested that it was the device of Abbot John Whethamstede who, he thought, had built the tomb. Chauncey (1700) and the later historians of Hertfordshire made no reference it it; Weever (1631) did not notice it, nor did Sandford (1677), whose beautiful, but in this respect inaccurate, illustration of the canopy shows the device as an angel's head with wings.

The minor arts of the Renaissance in Italy included the ornamentation of small wooden boxes with reliefs moulded in a plastic material which was applied while yielding and hardened subsequently to the firmness of a soft stone. Although persons of a romantic turn of mind like to call such boxes ‘jewel-caskets’, it would seem more probable that they were made for the use of persons of moderate means, as substitutes for the caskets of precious materials such as were used by the rich, to contain trinkets and small oddments rather than gems or jewellery. In the fourteenth century and during a great part of the fifteenth the pastiglia covered the whole, or almost the whole, of the outer surface of its wooden foundation, was in most cases modelled smoothly in gentle gradations of relief, and was painted with colours which accentuated the forms of its comparatively large figures and supplied details of the decoration. In the second half of the fifteenth century, and continuing into the sixteenth, the decoration, in both its figures and its conventionalized ornament, was on a much smaller scale and in much sharper relief, and was applied to a level surface which might itself be a kind of pastiglia, either plain or marked all over with a regular repeated pattern.

A small moated site in Scales Park near the village of Nuthampstead, Hertfordshire (fig. 1), has lately been examined by the Ancient Monuments Department of the Ministry of Works. It lies just within the Hertfordshire-Essex boundary, four miles north-east of Buntingford and eight miles north-west of Bishop's Stortford. On the O.S. 6-in. sheet (Herts. 9 NE.) it is marked as The Warren, but not as an antiquity; nor is it included among the 139 homestead moats recorded for the county by the Royal Commission.

Scales Park comprises something over 400 acres of well-grown woodland on the plateau which forms the watershed of the rivers Stort and Quin, both flowing south to join eventually the Thames. Its height above sea-level is 450 ft. on the northwest, declining gently to 400 ft. on the east and south. Geologically the area consists of chalky clay over the chalk.

The moat of the Warren, enclosing an approximately square island about a quarter of an acre in size, varied in width from 10 to 25 ft. and at the time of excavation was filled with black boggy silt. Round its outer edge ran a low much-spread bank, 20 to 30 ft. wide but not more than 2 ft. high. The enclosure presented a puzzling combination of mounds and hollows. A large mound, 9 ft. 6 in. high, on a raised platform occupied the north-eastern half. The south-western half had centrally a similar platform, 5 ft. above the surface of the moat, with flanking mounds, 6 and 7 ft. high, at the corners (pl. xxiv b). The cavities between the mounds were practically level with the moat; slight ridges barred the western hollow and the south end of the eastern hollow.

In fig. 1 we have a ground plan of Kildrummy Castle in Mar. The ‘noblest of northern castles’, as Cosmo Innes called this splendid ruin, is of special importance because it appears to be the most northerly example extant in Europe of the thirteenth-century castle of enceinte which on the lay or feudal side was the culminating expression of what has been styled the greatest age of Latin Christendom. Conformably to its type, the castle consists of a high and massive curtain wall, enclosing a courtyard, and defended by round towers, large and boldly salient, at four of the angles, while at the fifth, midway in the south front, is the gatehouse. Along the north front are the principal domestic buildings—hall, kitchen, and camera—while on the east side is a large chapel, projected beyond the curtain, and set askew so as to aim at a correct orientation.

A cursory consideration of medieval coats of arms shows that any of them might undergo variation, often marked, without obscuring its association with the bearer and his family. Anyone who recognizes that a barry of argent and azure stands for Grey is prepared to allow that the same arms with a bend or a label or three roundels added may quite possibly indicate another Grey kin to the first. It is to such variants as these three latter examples that the technical term ‘differencing’ is here applied, that is, modified versions of an original arms borne by several members of the same male stock. While every student is aware of the fact of this differencing, the number of ways, or modes, of it is unexpectedly large. The following lines indicate the principal modes that are exemplified by the early rolls of arms still extant. Every discernible example—some thousands—has been examined.

The Council has decided that the study (primarily the survey) of boundary dykes and defensive linear earthworks shall be the major scheme of research to be sponsored by the Society. It is desirable that reports intended for publication by those workers who will take part in this research shall be prepared on agreed lines, in order to facilitate comparative study of the diverse material thus gathered; it will be appreciated (to take only one point) that a dyke is an engineering work usually of well-defined technical character, and that undated constructions may prove amenable to grouping in known schools (such as the Western Mercian) or in recognized culture periods.