Early in 1963 much of the land occupied by the Roman building at Fishbourne was purchased by Mr. I. D. Margary, M.A., F.S.A., and was given to the Sussex Archaeological Trust. The Fishbourne Committee of the trust was set up to administer the future of the site. The third season's excavation, carried out at the desire of this committee, was again organized by the Chichester Civic Society.1 About fifty volunteers a day were employed from 24th July to 3rd September. Excavation concentrated upon three main areas; the orchard south of the east wing excavated in 1962, the west end of the north wing, and the west wing. In addition, trial trenches were dug at the north-east and north-west extremities of the building and in the area to the north of the north wing. The work of supervision was carried out by Miss F. Pierce, M.A., Mr. B. Morley, Mr. A. B. Norton, B.A., and Mr. J. P. Wild, B.A. Photography was organized by Mr. D. B. Baker and Mrs. F. A. Cunliffe took charge of the pottery and finds.

The excavations at Cirencester in the summer of 1963 were the most extensive that have so far taken place, with work continuing at the Amphitheatre and on five new sites inside the town. Also, as so often has happened in past years, yet another rescue dig had to be undertaken in October, after the main season had finished. Apart from the Amphitheatre, a site in the middle of the Forum was most generously made available by Mr. and Mrs. Constable; further information about the buildings in Parsonage Field, close to the earlier excavations of Miss K. M. Richardson, F.S.A., and Miss M. Rennie, was obtained, thanks to permission given by Gloucestershire County Council; extended knowledge of the defences on the south-west side of the town was obtained by the kind permission of the Watermoor Hospital Management Committee; problems relating to the street system were resolved in the front garden of the telephone exchange thanks to the General Post Office, and in the garden of Dyer Court thanks to Cirencester Urban District Council, who, with Lord Bathurst, also gave permission for the continuation of work at the Amphitheatre. Finally a small site in West Way produced information of Roman buildings in a hitherto unexplored area, for which permission was granted by Ardin and Brooks and Partners on behalf of their clients Messrs. Lipton's Ltd. The Excavation Committee's indebtedness to all who took part in the excavations, over ninety in number, and to all who contributed financially towards them, must be gratefully recorded.

‘Villages’ of ‘up to a hundred little huts’ and even ‘pit dwellings' passed from history to mythology after Bersu's Little Woodbury excavations, and Professor Hawkes's consequent reinterpretation of the Cranborne Chase ‘village’ of Woodcuts as superimposed successive farmsteads. The ‘villages’ of the old Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain have no place in the scheme of things exemplified in the 1956 edition. But the new orthodoxy of the ‘single farm’ as the dominant, or indeed the exclusive, settlement form in the Roman and immediately pre-Roman countryside has itself been thrown open to doubt as scholars have, on the one hand, accumulated more evidence of the actual abundant variety of Iron Age to Roman settlement types and, on the other, questioned themselves and each other more closely on the origins of the pattern of English settlement, and the probability that it was not imprinted on a countryside devoid of all trace of previous land-use and organization.

The drawing of this astounding design is in the Library of the Society of Antiquaries of London. It is in pen and ink (black and brown) with sepia and watercolour washes, with some gold added; there are some setting-out lines and underdrawing in pencil and at the foot of the drawing is a drawn scale of approximately eight feet to one inch. The drawing is executed on a wove paper which is in five pieces, the whole now mounted on linen; there appears to be nothing on the back of the paper.

The evidence for geared mills in Roman Britain is sufficiently slight for the addition of a further item to be worthy of record.

Among the hoard of ironwork discovered in a well at Silchester in 1890 and described by Sir John Evans was an iron bar, 36.1 in. long, tentatively identified as an unfinished carriage axle. Though this explanation was clearly unsatisfactory, no better one was forthcoming and the use of the bar remained a mystery. Whilst it is clearly an axle or spindle of some kind its weight and asymmetry show it was not intended for a carriage and, contrary to Evans's statement, it is a finished object showing signs of wear in places. A recent re-examination has suggested that it was the pivot of a large geared mill (fig. 1a), transmitting the power from a toothed wheel, through the central hole in the stationary lower millstone, to the upper stone. The well-known example from Great Chesterford, Cambs., offers a fairly close parallel and that from the German limes fort at Zugmantel possibly an even better one. The absence of the terminal rind from the Silchester spindle is explained by the fact that it was keyed to the axle by means of the rectangular end on the bar and could thus be easily removed when the spindle was taken as scrap. The end of this keying has been battered over to give greater security in fixing.

An inspection of the Old Deanery in 1948 failed, for some reason unknown, to disclose the early date of the building. Neither the medieval form of the plan nor the antiquity of the Hall roof were recognized. In default of any clear case for preservation on archaeological grounds, and though the case on scenic grounds was very strong, the decision was made to demolish the building to make way sooner or later for the development of a Ladies' Training College, despite pleas for preservation from the Local Planning Authority and from Mr. H. de S. Shortt, Curator of the Salisbury Museum.