By tradition this annual address is something of a miscellany, not to say a farrago. Among the many ingredients that may go into it, there is one element which is fairly constant, namely a certain amount of comment on the activities of the Society during the year just concluded, on changes in the staff and officers, and on any other notable events which have occurred. Any custom as time-honoured as this one should surely be regarded as venial, if not commendable, in this Society. However, it seems to me that in this case it can also plead a very positive justification and practical utility in that it brings to the notice of the Fellowship generally much which would otherwise be buried in the Minutes of various committees. At all events, I give notice that I intend to follow custom in this matter this evening.

The discovery in 1719, at Brough-on-Humber [North Humberside, SE 93 26], of a hoard of Late Bronze Age weapons and casting matrices is described from contemporary manuscript and printed sources. The subsequent passage of its component artefacts through antiquarian collections is carefully documented, and four pieces are recognized as surviving in the British Museum. These comprise two rare two-piece casting moulds together with one example of each casting product. One mould is a Welby, the other a Meldreth, type, formerly provenanced respectively to ‘Yorkshire’ and ‘Quantock Hills, Somersetshire’. All are described in detail and suggestions made as to the casting techniques in which they were employed. The hoard, possibly originally comprising more artefacts than were recorded, was accompanied by a spearhead, a socketed chisel and a tanged awl or spike, now lost. These are attributed to Burgess's ‘Ewart Park phase’ of LBA2, with parallels scattered throughout the north-east, east, south-east and south of England.

The archaeology of two Iron Age sites, ‘Loughey’ in County Down, Northern Ireland, and Meare Lake Village, Somerset, is discussed. Changes in the archaeological interpretation of the sites are considered in the light of recent research into Iron Age sites in Britain and Ireland. Consideration of the chemical composition of the glass from ‘Loughey’ and Meare helps to add weight to the existence of suspected links between Ireland and the Continent in the first century B.C., and not, as has regularly been assumed, specific links with south England. The compositional characteristics of the glass from Meare are found to be totally different from those of the ‘Loughey’ glass and it is suggested that glass raw materials were imported to Ireland for the manufacture of Iron Age glass beads there. We can not now be as confident that the person buried at ‘Loughey’ was of ‘foreign’ origin.

This paper describes the context and nature of an assemblage of forty-four Palaeolithic hand-axes from a Roman religious site at Witham, Essex. The hand-axes are considered to have been derived from several sources, and it is suggested that the Romano-British occupants of the site deliberately selected them for their shape and placed them in the bottom of two large man-made depressions. In the light of stone axe finds on continental temple sites, and of classical Roman texts and traditions, the possibility arises that the Witham finds may have represented ‘thunderbolts’ in the worship of Jupiter or a local Celtic equivalent.

This paper describes the discovery, by geological and archaeological fieldwork, of a major Iron Age and Roman quern quarry which was supplying much of south-east and south-midland England. The debitage from the site is described and the chronological development of querns from the quarry assessed in the light of material found on habitation sites. It is argued that production reached a peak the first century A.D. The broad distribution of Lodsworth products during the Iron Age, and to a lesser extent during the Roman period, is discussed.

In 1792 the Society published in Archaeologia an engraving of ‘An antient Mortar at Eridge Green’, with the claim that it was the first gun made in England. Subsequent writers on the history of artillery, while noting the gun's importance as one of the first examples of a wrought-iron cannon or bombard (to give it its correct name), believed that it had been destroyed. In fact, by the date of its publication, the bombard had been removed to Boxted Hall, Suffolk, where it remained unrecognized until its transfer to the Royal Armouries, H. M. Tower of London, in 1979. This article traces the history of the bombard, the method of its construction and concludes that it was probably made in England, in the Weald, during the fifteenth century.

Newly discovered evidence, here printed, from the proceedings in an equity suit in the Exchequer shows that le Sueur's statue of Charles I was indeed buried underground in the Interregnum, and illuminates the circumstances of the burial. This fills a lacuna in the documentary history of the statue.

On the printed title-page to the Monasticon are the names of Roger Dodsworth and William Dugdale. The main body of the work was divided into sections, each dealing with a monastic order and the edifices which had belonged to it. It was Dugdale who commissioned Wenceslaus Hollar and his pupil Daniel King to make views of the cathedrals and churches for this enterprise. Since the development of the monasteries and the Church of England were inextricably mixed, this vast book in three folio volumes became a history of the foundations of all the principal churches in the kingdom.

Previously unpublished letters of William Stukeley (1687-1765) to Alexander Gordon (?1692-?1754) are printed with a commentary to commemorate the tercentenary of Stukeley's birth. The letters are important as being the only correspondence extant between Stukeley and Gordon, and because they sum up many aspects ofStukeley's personality and shed light on his early preoccupation with the Druids.