The Reliquary of the True Cross which is preserved at Poitiers in the convent of Sainte-Croix is the earliest existing authentically dated object decorated with enamel in a Byzantine workshop. It has never before been reproduced in any accurate form, and no living expert has had the opportunity of examining it. Its history is complete and fully authenticated. The tale is worth brief recapitulation. It involves the doings of two eminent personages, St. Radegund and St. Fortunatus, the one distinguished as the first civilized and refined queen of France, the other still memorable as the last of the Roman poets.

My last report presented a year ago concluded with an account of the third excavation of the ditch outside the circular earthwork. A fourth excavation in continuation of the third was begun immediately afterwards and carried 26 ft. to the west. It was made 2 ft. wider, as the ditch here appeared to have been wider and deeper, but except for this there was no appreciable difference from former sections. The upper soil had been much disturbed by rabbits or persons digging them out, the burrows being occasionally found to be 4 ft. deep. The upper layer of humus, and the rubble layer beneath it, contained chips of the building of Stonehenge to the number of 570, but none was found lower than the junction with the silt. With the chips were four small worn pieces of Bronze Age pottery, 10 of the Roman Period, a small quartzite maul, about 60 animal bone fragments, and the greater part of a human ulna bone.

The beaker here illustrated is new only in the sense that it is now for the first time accessible. It was discovered some years before 1901 by a farm boy in a stone cist in the yard of Llancaiach Isaf, an old farm-house in the parish of Gellygaer, 12 miles north of Cardiff (O.S. 6 inch, Glamorgan XIX. S.E.). The cover-slab of the cist then, and until the present year, was level with the paving of the yard, and no traces of a mound survived. Within the cist were found the beaker, a skull, and, it is said, some ‘ornaments’, of which nothing is now known. The skull was seen by a local medical man, but was then, by order of the landowners, replaced with the beaker in the cist. From that time, according to the (then) tenant of the farm, the burial remained undisturbed until 25th June 1901, when a local resident, Mr. George Seaborne, who has greatly assisted my inquiries, reopened the cist and drew attention to it in the Western Mail newspaper (19th July 1901). The contents, however, were not removed, and the precise locality of the burial remained the close secret of one or two persons until the present year, when cist, beaker, and skull were removed to the National Museum of Wales.

The primary purpose of the following desultory notes is to place on record a number of pieces of English medieval alabaster work, some of unusual type or form, others resembling examples more or less familiar, which have lately come to my notice.

The earth-works at Great Berkhampstead which form one of the finest examples of a Norman Castle have also an interest almost unique in that they provide an example of (what may well be) siege-works of the thirteenth century. That this was the case was first suggested by Sir William Hope some ten or fifteen years ago, but the matter does not appear to have been fully considered in the light of all the available evidence.

Immediately within the gates of the North Ambulatory of the Abbey Church, and west of the table-tomb of Abbot Estney, is the marble slab which is assumed to cover the remains of Sir Thomas Parry, treasurer of the household of Queen Elizabeth and steward also of the manors of the newly re-created dean and chapter of Westminster. Thomas ap Harry was the son and heir of Henry Vaughan of Tretower. He married Anne, daughter of Sir William Reade of Boarstall in Buckinghamshire, was knighted in 1558, died in 1560, and was buried in the Abbey Church on 15th December in that year. In 1562 his widow, Dame Anne, surrendered her lease of ‘one great mansion house within the precinct’ known as ‘Vaughan's House’, and was granted in return a lease of what in an older day had been the prior's house, which the dean had just vacated and which now is built up in the later Ashburnham House.

The archaeology of the Black Sea coast quickly attracted attention when the Russians conquered the Crimea at the end of the eighteenth century, and the Scythic barrows of the Steppes began to be carefully excavated almost as soon; but it was not till the fifties and sixties that the less imposing antiquities of northern Russia found any one to study them even among Russians. West European interest naturally came later, the pioneers were first the Finn Aspelin in the seventies and next the Baron de Baye, who about 1890 sought to throw light from the East upon the Merovingian and other Teutonic styles which were his special province.