It was recently my good fortune to discover in the Muniment Room of King's College, Cambridge, in a very unusual situation, the manuscript of a fourteenth-century love-song. Mr. Flower kindly drew my attention to a love-song of the early sixteenth century preserved in a rather similar manner at the Public Record Office. Both manuscripts included musical settings. That of the fourteenth-century song, Bryd one brere, has been edited and arranged by Mr. F. McD. C. Turner, of Magdalene College, Cambridge; that of the song from the sixteenth century by Professor E. J. Dent, of King's College; and they will be found in later sections of this paper. Meanwhile I shall endeavour to describe the manuscripts themselves, the literary texts of the two lyrics, and what can be inferred of their history.

The photographs and drawings here illustrated have been placed at my disposal by Mr. Kendrick of the British Museum, and enable me to publish with the Curator's permission a short note on these very attractive trinkets. They are three fragments of silver found in the City of London and preserved in the Guildhall Museum. Each is part of a small cylinder provided with holes for rivets, to be fastened as a decoration on some kind of staff. The original destination of the object is not clear: in any case the cylinders seem too slender for a crozier shaft, but belonged to something worthy of this costly and aristocratic decoration.

The excavations at Jarlshof, Sumburgh, have now been carried on for a couple of months each summer for the last four years, and a general review of the progress made, and of the results obtained, is now permissible.

The site is a remarkable one, a low promontory which projects into the Sumburgh Voe (as such inlets of the sea are termed in Shetland) on its western shore, on the side of the narrow isthmus which links the lofty headland of Sumburgh Ness, the most southerly point of Shetland, with Mainland, as the principal island is called. Facing towards ‘Fair Isle’, which lies midway between Orkney and Shetland, this would be the first land which any adventurous mariner would make in early times, and thus it comes about that a surprising collection of remains covers the area.

An early volume of the Society's Proceedings contains Stephen Stone's record of his archaeological observations in the parish of Stanlake, Oxfordshire, and the immediate neighbourhood. The record as published is of a mixed nature, and at times it is quite difficult to disentangle the various periods to which the subject of his explorations belonged, though through no actual fault of his own, but rather because, at the date at which he wrote, archaeological knowledge had not advanced to a point at which an exact interpretation of the material was possible. Thus his account of a British village is almost inextricably mixed up with that of what we can now recognize to be circular trenches of a Bronze Age culture, and their close proximity to one another has perhaps added to the confusion. At the present day we can clearly realize that we have to do with two distinct cultures, even though actually they may not have been separated by any great distance of time; and that in spite of the fact that the pottery found in the British village is passed over with the barest notice, and only a few pieces have been preserved to give us a clue to its character. But that the village belonged to the Iron Age is established both by the description of the pits from which it came and also by the recovery from one of these pits of an iron knife complete with bone handle (pl. iv, 1), such as can be closely paralleled by a specimen from the Marne region. Two vases are preserved in the Ashmolean Museum (pl. iv, 2): one formerly in Mr. James Parker's collection is labelled Stanlake, and one given by Stone's executors came probably from this same site; though not very distinctive, both serve to corroborate the evidence of the knife. Vases obtained by Rolleston from a site in the parish of Wytham, Berkshire, fall into the same category (pl. iv, 3).

In SE. Dorset a section of Roman road runs from Hamworthy on Poole Harbour to Badbury Rings, passing near the present village of Corfe Mullen just before it dips into the Stour valley. It has been known for several years, from discoveries in the Southern Railway's ballast pit, that a Romano-British settlement existed at this spot. The finds comprise pottery ranging from bead-rim to New Forest wares, as well as a storage-pit containing grain, on which Sir R. H. Biffen reported to the writer in 1929 as follows: ‘The bulk is wheat similar to that from the Iron Age sites at Fovant and Meare. But grains of oat are also present.’