My task to-night is both easier and more difficult than has been the case on former Anniversaries. It is not now for me, as in other years, to discuss questions of policy. The salutary custom which sets a five-year term to the Presidential office ensures a periodical revision of aims and methods which is essential to such a Society as ours.

Between the rivers Test and Itchen in Hampshire, to the west of Winchester, and to the north-east of Romsey, there is a tract of high ground, forming the watershed between these two rivers, rising at Farley Mount, close to the Roman road from Venta to Sorbiodunum, to a height of 500 ft. above the sea. A part of this tract, particularly the area above the 300-ft. contour, in the ecclesiastical parishes of Farley Chamberlayne and Braishfield, is specially rich in surface flint implements of Neolithic or Early Bronze Age. The Broom Hill site is at the southern boundary of this area, on the borders of these two parishes and in the civil parish of Michelmersh. The position is latitude 51° 2′ north, and longitude 1°27′ west. It happens to be marked on O. S. 6-in. xlix, NW., by a triangle, showing that the place was used as a trigonometrical station, and is, therefore, readily visible for some miles around. The height of the point above sea-level is 330 ft.

Here at intervals, during the years 1932 and 1933, the writer discovered some neolithic pottery which will be described by Mr. Stuart Piggott. The site is approximately 150 yards wide from east to west, and some 250 yards long from north to south. It is a ridge of chalk, capped by a sandy clay, above which again is a rough pebbly gravel in which the pottery was found, about twenty to thirty inches below the turf. The fact that there is clay under the gravel causes the land below the hill to be exceedingly marshy, and this state of things was probably even more pronounced in ancient times. The site is a narrow neck ending in a broader portion, entirely surrounded, except at the southern end, by steep slopes or marsh. The form of the site cannot be judged from the shape of the 300-ft. contour on the map, for there is an under-feature which causes the site to assume the form of a peninsula jutting northwards. But at the narrow southern end there is no sign of any defensive bank, which might, perhaps, have been expected; but the site shows signs of having been under plough, though not in living memory.

In considering the question whether London did or did not survive as a substantially intact administrative unit throughout the Pagan Saxon period, Sir Laurence Gomme and others have laid stress upon the supposedly Roman origin of the wide territorial rights of the medieval Londoners. These rights, it has been claimed, take us ‘behind the Norman conquest, and behind the Anglo-Saxon rule also, for there is nothing in Anglo-Saxon institutions to which [they] can be referred’: they represent the old ‘territorium ’ of Roman London and are good evidence, therefore, of an unbroken civic tradition from Roman times. The doubtful details with which enthusiasm or fantasy have tended to enrich this theory do not necessarily deprive it of essential validity; and I venture to think that it is in fact rather more securely founded than Gomme's own statement of it would lead us to infer.

Material for a third report on the site of the Saxon village at Sutton Courtenay, Berks., has been gradually accumulating since the second was presented in 1926, but so slowly that it seemed advisable to wait until, as appeared likely to happen in the near future, the limits of the occupied area should have been reached. In the meantime, however, an important addition to our knowledge of the early Bronze Age has been obtained from Cassington, Oxfordshire, and since this presents several interesting points of comparison and contrast with the more recent discoveries of the same age at Sutton Courtenay, it has seemed preferable to anticipate the Third Report on the latter site by including the Sutton Courtenay material of Bronze Age date in a combined account. The numbering of the pits at Sutton Courtenay follows on those described in the Second Report in Archaeologia, lxxvi.

A recent visit to Eastern Provence gave an opportunity of visiting a group of chambered cairns which is of great interest, as it includes at least one of ‘long barrow ’ type, apparently the first example of such a monument to be recorded from S. France.

The group lies on the hill-side near St. Cézaire, about eight miles west of Grasse, overlooking a high plateau having an average level of about 1,500 ft. and commanding a very wide view, including the sea to the south with the whole range of the Montagnes des Maures, and stretching westward to the mountains at the back of Marseilles.

The long cairn known as the ‘Dolmen des Puades’ or ‘de la Lèque’ forms one of a group which is said to number over five-and-twenty, but time only allowed of inspection of three, two of which were round; all three, however, contained stone chambers approached by a passage which opened to the west.

Peter Cunningham's book, The Story of Nell Gwyn and the Sayings of Charles II, first published about 1854, contains an interesting account of work done by one John Cooquus, silversmith, for Nell Gwyn, when she was living in Pall Mall as the king's mistress.

Cooquus is briefly referred to in the various popular lives of Nell Gwyn, and by Mr. E. Alfred Jones in his books on old silver, but beyond the mention of his name in connexion with that of Nell Gwyn, no particulars of his personal history have so far been disclosed. I have therefore attempted to place together some facts recording events in his life which may fill the gap.