In these days it is the habit of Prime Ministers and Presidents to lie abroad for the good of their country, and I can only hope that your own President's unconscionable absences during the past year may shelter under that umbrella. In Southern Rhodesia, at Zimbabwe, he looked upon the rugged best that trans-Saharan Africa can produce and was shown incidentally, with a proper reverence, the crumbling cavity where one of our Vice-Presidents ‘directed her first solo-excavation’. In Pakistan he was invited by the Government to conduct an expedition in the North-West Frontier, and has pleasure in recalling the open-handed collaboration, not only of the Pakistan Department of Archaeology, but also of the highly efficient Pakistan Air Force. In India he saw his old colleagues and pupils at work on a scale unapproached by any other country in the world at the present time, unless it be rivalled by the hidden prowess of the U.S.S.R. Only the untidy seas of the African coast barred him at the last stage from Cyrene, where he would have found our Fellow Mr. Richard Goodchild still the accepted master of free Cyrenaica's archaeological enterprises, a position which reflects alike his knowledge and his understanding. And in all these far-flung missions your President was conscious, and many of his hosts were conscious, that he bore with him the hallowed lamp of Burlington House. It is not a bad thing that a Society so universal in its concern, whether in time or space, as ours traditionally is should do a little travelling in an age when the poet can no longer complain that there ain' no 'buses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay. To our wider work and opportunity in partibus I shall turn again in a few minutes.

In the first part of this article are listed the architectural fragments found at or near the site of the temple of Apollo Phanaios in South Chios, including several hitherto unpublished mouldings. The discussion of them is prompted by the excavations conducted by the British School at Athens from 1952 to 1955 at Emporio, some 8 km. from Phanai, and the discovery there of parts of more than one early Ionic building. The similarity of the Emporio mouldings to those from Phanai led to a study of the latter. They have so far been neglected by most writers, but since they afford evidence of some important local fashions it seems of value to record them fully, both for their own sakes and for the light they throw on the Emporio buildings. The full publication of these must await that of the rest of the site. To the Phanai pieces are added a number of other early mouldings from Chios, other than those found at Emporio.

The castle of Ascot Doilly appears from documentary sources to have been put up c. 1129–50. Excavation in 1946–7 of a small mound on this manorial site showed that it had contained a stone tower 35 ft. square which had been built up from the natural surface of a 4-ft. rise of Lias clay protruding through the gravel of the Evenlode valley bottom. Round this tower, as it was raised, had been piled a low mound of clay; thus the impression of a tower on a mound was created. Beside it are remains of a bailey and contemporary paddocks. The tower had been deliberately demolished, probably c. 1180.

The excavation thus revealed a new principle in smaller defensive building of the period, a mound piled round a stone tower. It also yielded a useful series of mid- to later twelfth-century pottery and other objects, and evidence of domestic window glass in the twelfth century.

There are remains of thirteenth-century and later buildings in the bailey area. The village of Ascot represents a dual holding, with two mound-and-bailey castles at opposite ends 800 yds. apart, and between them the church (with twelfth-century work). There is also evidence of pottery-making in the village, at least in the early thirteenth century.

That the Great East Window at York (Pl. xl) was designed by John Thornton of Coventry in 1405 is a matter of common knowledge, and much study has been expended by various writers in attempts to discover further particulars about the artist.

But the crux of these researches has always been the inability to account for the connexion which he undoubtedly had with the east window of Great Malvern Priory; for at the time at which, there is reason to believe, it was made, Thornton must have been, according to the expectation of life in the middle ages, an aged man.

Although both short and tentative, this paper must begin formally with acknowledgements and apologies. The acknowledgements are for help generously given by our Fellows, Mr. A. J. Taylor of the Ministry of Works, and Mr. Claude Blair of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and also by Mr. H. M. Colvin of St. John's College, Oxford. The apologies turn upon the central and fundamental fact that, though I have an ill-informed interest in clocks, and own rather more clocks than my house has room for, I am not a horologist. It follows that I shall not deal with the mechanics of early clocks, with verge and foliot escapements, going and striking trains, and all the other technicalities which horologists love to discuss. And if I mention, here and now, the name of Giovanni de Dondi, this is only to emphasize that I have at least tried to read up the subject before having the temerity to write upon it.