The recent identification of whale baleen from a medieval archaeological context in Perth raises the issue of what uses were made of baleen in the medieval period. This note investigates the military uses to which this unusual material was put.

The late twelfth-century aisled hall at Oakham Castle, Rutland, is well known as the earliest and most complete building of its type in England. This study, based on detailed fabric analysis and little-known excavations of the 1950s, puts forward a new theory for the building's development. It is proposed that the original hall had attached lean-to buildings at both gable ends, probably built of timber, housing services and other lesser rooms. Like other early halls, the principal chamber at Oakham took the form of a free-standing chamber block, some of whose features have been later incorporated in the surviving hall, including its great east window. Tree-ring dating has shown that, although the roof was rebuilt around 1737, many original timbers survive from the 1180s. A comparative study of other early halls is made, to set Oakham into its wider Anglo-Norman context.

With the outbreak of war in September 1939 many of the staff of the Ministry (then H.M. Office) of Works concerned with ancient monuments were drafted to other work, military or civil. Yet the tasks falling to the lot of their fellows, who were left at their normal desks, so far from decreasing, as their colleagues of other divisions often blandly suggested, were soon increased very far beyond their normal peace-time scope. It is true that work on the preservation of the structures of guardianship monuments dwindled slowly until it became insignificant in amount, but it never entirely ceased, because of a firm determination not to destroy the cadre of skilled foremen and masons which it would be extremely difficult to replace. The supervision of this work, therefore, remained as one task even in war-time.

The excavation of the Tarxien megalithic ruins, taken in hand in 1915 and continued during the summer months of subsequent years, was brought to an end in September of 1919. The ruins discovered in 1915 and 1916 were reported upon in Archaeologia Those reports give an account of the clearing of two megalithic sanctuaries extending in a south-west to north-east direction for about 150 ft. (45 m.) with an average width of 80 ft. (24 m.). The present facade and the outer court, which represent the front of the later of the two sanctuaries, extend to about 80 ft. (24 m.) in length with the main axis pointing SSW. to NNE. The second temple, which is the earlier, has an axis about 80 ft. (24 m.) in length, with a direction WSW. to ENE., making with the axis of the later building an angle of about 30 degrees.

On 9th March 1718 five citizens of the island of Sark, William Tanquerel, Henry de Carteret, Pirre de Carteret, Philipe Guille, and Nicholas Guille appeared before the Seneschal. They had been summoned by the Procurator Substitute, Philipe Slowley, on behalf of the Very Honourable Seigneur, Jean, Lord Carteret, Baron of Hawnes, Seigneur of St. Ouen, Sark, etc. Philipe Guille had been punished earlier in the day for having allowed his dog to run loose against the regulations. As a result of the proceedings the Seneschal ordered the five to deliver into the hands of the Procurator intact a treasure which they had found in the ground in making a ditch in a farm, commonly called La Voroque, which belonged to William Tanquerel, and this was duly done. The event is recorded in the Ledger for 1718, preserved in the Greffe Office in Sark.

The Aston mirror plate and its handle were found in ploughsoil, but were derived from a cremation burial which included two pottery vessels tentatively dated in the first century A.D. The area in which the discovery was made shows considerable activity in the Belgic and Romano-British periods. A detailed examination of the mirror, using, inter alia, light-section photomicrography, enables an attempt to be made to group the known mirrors using criteria derived from the techniques employed in the decoration; the Aston mirror falls into an East Anglian Ridge/Chiltern group.

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.

The small fort of the promontory type with which this report deals lies in the parish of Lezayre, on the shore of Ramsey Bay on the brooghs which form the eastern edge of the undulating Andreas plateau towards the sea. Here, in the northern part of the bay, the cliffs are built up by warped stratified sands with reddish sandy and loamy bands. Where springs caused or initiated erosion the straight north–south line of the broogh is intersected by short valleys with steep slopes and marshy bottoms. Where, as occasionally happens, two of such valleys lie near to each other, the gullies create small peninsulas with level surfaces connected only by a narrow neck with the plateau. Ideal sites for habitation above the broad sandy beach are formed by natural agencies, sites which need only a small amount of adjustment to make them easily defensible. A certain disadvantage arises from the fact that both the platform of the promontory and the surface of the plateau lie in the same level, in the present case 60 ft. above the high-water mark.

The third and fourth seasons of excavations at St. Oswald's Priory, Gloucester, have led to the discovery of two further pre-Conquest building phases, including evidence of a separate building to the east of the ‘New Minster’ founded by 909. It has also been established that the church occupies the site of a late Roman cemetery.

Part of a decorated standing stone cross was found built into the early tenth-century church, and a report is provided on a carved slab from an early tenth-century context. A summary of the evidence from the Saxon grave-yard is given. The parish of the ‘New Minster’ and Free Chapel Royal is plotted and its origins discussed.

In 1967 the Winchester Excavations Committee was again joined by the University of North Carolina and Duke University in excavations on five sites in the city, while a sixth site was excavated by the Winchester College Archaeological Society. The main season lasted ten weeks from late June to early September and an average of 165 people took part, about £17,500 being spent.

In 1971 the British Museum bought a fourth-century silver spoon with Christian symbols. An undated document acquired with the spoon showed that it was the survivor of a hoard from Biddulph, Staffordshire. In 1973 notes made in January 1886, about the discovery of the spoon, were found in a notebook compiled by A. W. Franks. The newly acquired spoon proves to have been one of a hoard of four spoons found at Whitemore Farm, Biddulph. The find-place of the spoon suggests a possible direct link between Chester and Buxton, while its dating adds to the sparse testimony for late-Roman life in the north-west of the province. The style of the lettering may indicate that the spoon was made in the East Mediterranean, and the Christian symbolism adds to the stock of evidence about the cult in the western Roman Empire.

On 29th March 1770, Sir Joseph Ayloffe, Vice-President of the Society of Antiquaries, read a learned paper to his colleagues on a painting, then at Windsor Castle and now preserved at Hampton Court, depicting the interview of June 1520 between Henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Ayloffe presented a long and minutely circumstantial account of the painting, which, in view of the considerable deterioration of the canvas over the last 200 years, is of inestimable value for details concerning colour and design. He also compared the painting with such documentary evidence as was available at the time, and concluded that it was an accurate representation of major features of the Anglo-French interview. Since Ayloffe's time a mass of contemporary descriptive source material has come to light, and it has even been thought that the profusion of seemingly inconsistent details relating to the Field of Cloth of Gold renders impossible any attempt to reconcile the documentary records either one with another or with the pictorial representation. However, a close examination of the sources reveals several fundamental consistencies which enable us to reconstruct, with reasonable certitude, both the scene and the events at the Field of Cloth of Gold: and this synthesis may be used to check the value and authenticity of the Hampton Court painting as an historical document.

Very manifold and multiform are the materials from which ecclesiastical history is compiled. Sometimes from the great chronicle of an ancient abbey, in whose annals the zealous scribe has set down the minutest details, from the erection and endowment of the sumptuous church itself to the smallest payment at the celebration of an obit; sometimes from a dry catalogue of names without a single incident to vary the monotony; sometimes from the life of some great prelate, of heroic virtue and of saintly grace, towering above his fellows as Saul amongst the men of Israel; and sometimes from some petty quarrel about precedence between two officers so unimportant that the utter abolition of the offices which they held would seem the best and simplest settlement of the dispute; sometimes from manorial records, dreary and repellent at first sight, but full of precious information as to the history of property, the relative position of tenant and of lord, the value of labour and of money; and sometimes from a mere inventory or catalogue of goods, a list of plate, ornaments, jewels, vestments, a bare document full of wearisome iteration, a collection of the driest of dry bones.

The Roman town of Silchester, and the traditional site of Calleva Atrebatum, after a respite from excavation for some eighteen years, was again investigated during 1938-9. In 1937 the Duke of Wellington handed over to the Ministry of Works and Buildings for restoration and preservation the stretch of the north wall of the town from the amphitheatre gate to the north gate. After a preliminary clearing of undergrowth and timber, work was started on the masonry during 1938. As this involved trenching along the bank behind the wall, a procedure which inevitably destroys dating evidence, it was felt that before this was completed a series of trenches should be cut through this bank at right angles to the wall to determine what dating evidence and structure existed. Mr. P. K. Baillie-Reynolds, on behalf of the Ministry of Works and Buildings, asked me to supervise this work. Excavations were started in June 1938 and continued for seven weeks. During this time the work on the inner defences was completed, except for the ditches outside the wall which involved a further season's work in April 1939, lasting for five weeks.

During the builders' excavation for Bucklersbury House, Walbrook, in the City of London, carried out in 1955, an immense clearance was made to a great depth in the natural soils underlying the man-made levels of London. Before this took place, scientific excavation in a limited area by Professor W. F. Grimes, on behalf of the Roman and Mediaeval London Excavation Council, had attracted a great deal of attention to the site, both from archaeologists and from the general public. His most spectacular discovery was the Temple of Mithras, which lay on the eastern edge of the site, adjoining the modern street of Walbrook. Almost of equal interest, however, to the student of Roman London, was his location of the Roman streambed of the Walbrook, which flowed in a southerly direction immediately to the west of the Temple of Mithras, about 30 yds. west of the street of Walbrook. The stream was subject to silting and its bed steadily rose, forming a thick deposit of black mud, which had an extraordinarily preservative effect on objects of metal which had been dropped in it from the banks. Iron was completely unrusted, while copper and bronze remained shining and bright.

This article reports excavations undertaken between 1990 and 1994 on a small cliff terrace, at Tintagel Island in Cornwall. This terrace (the Lower Terrace) lies below Site C (the Middle Terrace), where a building was excavated by Dr C.A.R. Radford in the 1930s. The remains uncovered on the Lower Terrace comprise several phases of ephemeral stone and turf structures with associated hearths, floor deposits and stakeholes. These are separated by periods of shillet (tiny flakes of slate in sandy clay soil) levelling. With the collapse of the last structure the terrace was buried by layers of scree and slate slip from the slope above. Artefact groups of fire-lighting stones, whetstones and worked flint and quartz were recovered predominantly from earlier phases, together with Romano-British Native pottery. Later phases mainly comprised sherds of Imported Mediterranean pottery (84 per cent of all finds) and slate disc pot lids. The results of an extensive programme of environmental sampling clarified that a wide range of probably locally growing trees and shrubs were exploited for fuel, as well as for wattles and larger posts and beams. Tiny burnt fragments of animal and some human bone were found scattered through a handful of deposits, but the material is probably residual. A programme of radiocarbon dating was possible with the availability of charcoal material from hearths and stakeholes. This programme, using innovative mathematical modelling techniques, produced three distinct date ranges of structural activity on the Lower Terrace: 395–460 cal AD for one of the earliest phases of hearths, floors and stakeholes pre-dating the occurrence of Imported pottery; 415–535 cal AD for a later structural phase with hearths and first occurrences of Imported and Native pottery together; and 560–670 cal AD for the latest and best surviving structure, with hearths, stakeholes and a large assemblage of Imported pottery.

The Isles of Scilly, situated in the Atlantic Ocean twenty-eight miles south-west of Land's End in Cornwall, have long been noted for their number of chambered tombs. Borlase bears witness to this, and has often been quoted by later writers. He dug into some of the tombs with disastrous results and many another must have done the same. For in general appearance the tombs of Scilly are like their fellows in many other parts of Britain; their chambers are completely empty. G. Bonsor was fortunate in finding one partly intact on Gugh which he excavated carefully, as is shown by his drawings, published in these pages by Dr. H. O'Neill Hencken. It should be noted that he found evidence of many cremations, but as secondary burials, following a primary inhumation. There was no direct dating evidence available, but the finds included that which until 1948 was the only piece of bronze recorded as found in an English chambered tomb.

The existence of the Coleshill helm had been a mystery for so long that its rediscovery by the Duke of Rutland, who exhibited it before the Society on 24 November 1932, was quite unexpected (pls. XXI, XXII).

The scene of my inquiries in Attica in 1955 was the coastal plain south of Athens, on the very doorstep of the city. The background was formed by the magnificent profile of Hymettos, with its long, impressive, but not forbidding skyline. The bare rounded mountain sides are steep but towards the foot they give place to gentler slopes composed of soil washed down from above; and even the narrow plain itself is tilted towards the sea. The soil of this zone is notably rich, terra rossa and rendzina—some of the best soil near Athens. The importance of this fact would have been as obvious to ancient farmers as it is to those who today are restoring large-scale cultivation to the zone.