An unusual group of gold jewellery was discovered by a metal detectorist near Winchester in southern England in 2000. The hoard included two possibly unique massive necklaces made in a clearly classical style, but different from typical classical necklaces and from the torcs and collars of Iron Age Europe. The hoard also contained extremely rare gold versions of types of brooches commonly made in bronze and iron in north-west Europe during the first century BC, the end of the pre-Roman Iron Age. This paper describes these unique objects and the results of an archaeological investigation of their find spot. Detailed scientific analysis of the objects’ technology has proven crucial for interpreting their origins and broader significance. Finally, the broader consequences of the find for interpreting the significant changes that took place in southern Britain in the century before the Roman conquest are discussed.

The cemetery at Heath Wood, Ingleby, Derbyshire, is the only known Scandinavian cremation cemetery in the British Isles. It comprises fifty-nine barrows, of which about one-third have been excavated on previous occasions, although earlier excavators concluded that some were empty cenotaph mounds. From 1998 to 2000 three barrows were examined. Our investigations have suggested that each of the barrows contained a burial, although not all contain evidence of a pyre. A full report of the 1998–2000 excavations is provided, alongside a summary of the earlier finds. The relationship of Heath Wood to the neighbouring site at Repton is examined, in order to understand its significance for the Scandinavian settlement of the Danelaw. It is concluded that Heath Wood may have been a war cemetery of the Viking Great Army of AD 873–8.

This paper examines the use of vaults in ecclesiastical and secular architecture in Great Britain and Ireland from 1066 to around nyo. We commence with an investigation of the distribution of vaults in various types of buildings. Local workshop traditions are explored and aspects of architectural iconography are considered. The gazetteer provides full references to one-word place names in the text, along with descriptions of the vaults and bibliographical references.

The origins of the Herefordshire School of Sculpture have traditionally been associated with Shobdon Priory, although both Leominster Priory and Kilpeck Church have also been suggested. This paper proposes that the origins of the Herefordshire School should be sought elsewhere, most probably in Hereford Cathedral. Recent studies tend to date the activity of the Herefordshire School earlier than was previously supposed, but it is here argued that these principal monuments of the School are actually later in date than the revisions suggest and that the Herefordshire School of Sculpture was active for around thirty years, into the early 1160s. The importance of lay patronage is confirmed, but scope for the influence of churchmen in the promotion of the School is also proposed. Some of the schemes adopted may have served to convey messages intended to help the church protect itself and its possessions in the turbulent times of the Anarchy.

The Great Tower of Chepstow Castle is probably the most important surviving domestic medieval building in Wales. In the Norman period it consisted of a single large room partly surrounded by niches built over a vast undercroft. In the second quarter of the thirteenth century, the first floor was dramatically converted into a more conventional great hall and chamber, through the insertion of new windows and the construction of a pair of sumptuously decorated arches across the building in the most refined Early English style. These alterations also provided a single second-floor chamber, which was extended across the whole building in the 1290s. This article gathers together the documentary, architectural and art historical evidence in an attempt to identify who was the patron of each phase of this remarkable building and what they were hoping it would provide.

In 1996 the Palestinian Department of Antiquities, Gaza, identified a previously unknown site dating to the second millennium BC, in the area of el-Moghraqa, some joom north of the Wadi Gaza. The cultural remains recovered from the surface included a series of terracotta cones stamped with the cartouches of Thutmose III and Hatshepsut. These artefacts are unique amongst the cultural assemblages of the Levant and are most closely paralleled by Egyptian funerary cones of the Eighteenth Dynasty from Thebes. Fieldwork conducted by the Gaza Research Project (GRP) in 1999 and 2000 examined the archaeological context of the cones, with the purpose of identifying their function and assessing the symbolic significance of this Egyptianizing material within a Levantine context.

The Swalecliffe later Bronze Age well complex was reported in detail in volume 83 of the Antiquaries Journal. The site comprised seventeen wells cut into the base of a previously reduced hollow. Groundwater could thus have been more readily accessed within the subsequently cut well pits. The depth of the base of the wells, at up to 2.5m below ground level, and their consequent waterlogged nature, allowed exceptional preservation of wooden linings and plank steps. Application of dendrochronological and radiocarbon dating suggested that the individual wells were used in sequence over a period of around 500 years, from an origin probably in the late thirteenth century BC to abandonment probably within the seventh century BC. The earlier phases (1–4) were dated mainly by dendrochronology, a 348-year sequence known as SWALECLF 1, whilst the later phases (5–7) were dated by a series of five radiocarbon dates.

Stamps on the blade of a sword from the Thames, originally considered to be Anglo-Saxon, now place the sword stylistically in the La Tène II period (late third to early second century BC). X-ray fluorescence tests have shown that the gold-coloured foil covering the stamps consists of 80 per cent copper and 20 per cent zinc, this being the formula for brass. The sword therefore represents the earliest known use of brass in Britain.

This annotated transcript and translation of a Roman curse tablet found on the site of a rural Roman temple in 1963 shows that the curse was prompted by the theft of woodcutting tools and protective clothing.

Mamucium, the Roman name of Manchester, is often explained as ‘place on the breast-shaped hill’ from the hypothetical British mamma ’breast; breast-shaped hill’. But the name of Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, suggests this is baseless. A likelier etymology is ‘place on the river called Mamma, “mother”’, apparently the old name of the River Medlock, perhaps revered as a Celtic goddess.

The only known illustrations of the lost Anglo-Saxon silver hanging-bowl from the River Witham, Lincolnshire, are those in the Society's collections, including a hitherto unknown sketch, published here for the first time. Further information concerning the bowl's pedigree, since its discovery in 1816, has also come to light, together with evidence for its survival into the twentieth century. Attention is also drawn to three recent finds of ornamental metalwork from southern Scandinavia of stylistic relevance to the bowl's internal decoration in the form of a free-standing animal.

In 1991 the author completed research for his dissertation on the twelfth-century Tournai fonts for a Master's degree in Art History at the University of Essex. Based on this research, his first published article sought to update the paper by our Fellow G C Dunning. In 1997, during his research for The Romanesque Fonts of Northern Europe and Scandinavia, the author discovered and published further information about the products of the Tournai School. Among the fonts listed in the author's 1993 paper were the ‘fragments’ at Soignies, known to be built into the fabric of the church. Late in 2003 his attention was drawn to a monograph published by the Chapter Museum of the collegiate church of Saint-Vincent, Soignies (about 16km south west of Brussels), detailing the recovery, conservation and subsequent display of the font bowl. This article has been pieced together from the three sections of that monograph and we are indebted to the Museum, and to the scholars whose articles make up the monograph, for permission to use their material and a selection of their illustrations.

Warrens provided a profitable use for the light soils and steep hillsides of the chalk downlands of England, and during the seventeenth century many thousands of rabbits were produced annually. The paper considers the documentary evidence for Wiltshire warrens, the complex and profitable leases granted by landowners, the large-scale traffic in rabbits and the damage that they caused to neighbouring farms and woodland. The complaints of farmers, coupled with increasing prices for corn, cattle and sheep, led gradually to the decline of the formerly lucrative trade in rabbits as cultivation and improved pasture were extended on the high downland.

The paper discusses the ceremony of the Loving Cup that follows the dinners of many City of London livery companies. It concludes that, far from being of Saxon origin, as has been widely believed, it was a Romantic revival of the late eighteenth century derived, almost certainly, from the medieval use of grace cups.

The cataloguing of the Earle Collection of prints and drawings in 2001–2 prompted an enquiry into Earle himself. This paper sets out the results of that enquiry, outlines what was done in cataloguing the collection and seeks to draw wider attention to the nature and content of the bequest.

The value of ‘the Ruin’ as a stimulus to reflection on the past and the passage of time was well recognized in the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries.1 An essential part of the organic, and therefore changing, ethos of the ruin was that it should be associated with whatever natural vegetation was appropriate and in a state of decay. This is summed up by the Revd William Gilpin's statement in 1786: ‘A Ruin is a sacred thing. Rooted for ages in the soil; assimilated to it and become, as it were, part of it; we consider it as a work of nature, rather than of art'.2 In 1982 David Watkin further concluded that a constant feature of the Picturesque is the subordination of architectural to associational values, which leads to the evocative powers of ruins and also the insistence that architecture is seen as part of its environment.3 Following this approach the ruin is thus seen as in decay (ruined), softened by vegetation and an integral part of its wider environment.