I have to thank you very sincerely for once again electing me to preside over our Fellowship, and no less sincerely to thank you for again electing the officers whose steady and generous support makes my tenure of this chair possible. To them, as to the Assistant Secretary and the Staff of the Antiquaries, I am deeply indebted.

By this communication to the Society, the author aims at drawing attention to the Palaeolithic archaeology of Boyn Hill, the western and highest part of the Berkshire town of Maidenhead. The name of this area is of course familiar to all geologists and to many antiquaries because it has so long been applied to most significant features of the Thames valley. Curiously enough, although Boyn Hill is held as classic ground, the Pleistocene deposits here have only been broadly studied, and of their archaeological contents little has been made and no specimen ever illustrated. Recently the place has given scope for more intensive researches than before, and if the work in the field, which will be described, has not been very rewarding, it has at least been the means of bringing together several loose threads. In a sense, too, this paper is a record of eleventh-hour rescue operations undertaken for information and for securing specimens to relate with past discoveries.

The Rose Ash bowl was found by Mr. B. M. Ayre of Munson Farm when he was cutting drainage channels in the corner of a marshy field in September 1959. It came up in the shovel of a mechanical digger and Mr. Ayre noticed it as soon as the load was turned out: it lay bottom upwards on the heap of sticky grey clay and ‘shone as though it were gold’. He took it back to the farmhouse, washed it under the tap, and the next day, since he was going to Barnstaple, took it into the North Devon Athenaeum and asked the Curator, Mr. A. Blackwell, to identify it. Mr. Blackwell very properly sent it to the British Museum, and kindly told me about the discovery.

This paper is intended to examine in detail certain problems concerning the binding of the Victor Codex (MS. Bonifatianus I)in the Landesbibliothek at Fulda (pl. xxxv). It is hoped to show that the metal mounts of the binding are of Northumbrian manufacture; that, in all probability, the leather binding was executed at the same time and in the same area, and that the binding is of late-seventh or eighth-century date.

A half-century of research and discussion has advanced our knowledge of the Pharos of Alexandria without, however, eliminating all the uncertainties that enshroud its architecture, ornament, and technical character. In his monumental study of 1909 Hermann Thiersch worthily prepared the ground, by collecting into a single volume nearly all the evidence then available; but his architectural conclusions must now be read in conjunction with Don Miguel de Asin's essay of 1933 based on an Islamic source which Thiersch had overlooked. More recently, in 1952, Professor Charles Picard has published some important observations which refer particularly to the summit of the Pharos, with its projecting Tritons and crowning statue.

Excavations have recently been conducted at the Saxon-Shore fort of Reculver (Regulbium) by Mr. Brian Philp, through whose kindness the writer is able to comment upon the inscription here discussed (fig. i). Eleven fragments comprise a substantive part of an inscribed rectangular slab, of local calcareous sandstone, now 11½ in. high. All the margins except the bottom one are in evidence, and exhibit plain edges, as if the slab had either been set into walling or framed by ornamental features.

The purpose of this paper is to record three stones recently brought to my attention. The first was found about twenty years ago by Mr. Benjamin Wyles when digging a dyke in a field called the Long Liner near Slate House Farm, in the parish of Wilsford near Grantham. It is preserved in Wilsford church and is published by the kind permission of the Rector, the Rev. J. D. Smart. The other two, which are fragmentary, were found in the core of the north-east buttress of the east of Ancaster church in the course of reconstruction during August 1960. The wall, which is of the late twelfth century with flat plain buttresses, has had a fourteenth century window inserted into it, and has been repaired and refaced possibly at same time as the insertion of the window. There remain traces of the jamb-shafts and arch-springing of the original triple twelfth-century window. The wall developed serious settlement-cracks, and these were bonded by inserting concrete tie-beams behind the face of the wall, and at the same time grouting the loose core. Both stones are likely to have been built into the buttress in the twelfth century. I am indebted to Mr. L. H. Bond, L.R.I.B.A., for bringing them and the above facts to my notice, and to the Rev. L. W. B. Bacon, Vicar of Ancaster, for permission to publish.