In 1912, when I undertook a survey of the distribution of the Anglo-Saxon saucer-brooches, I endeavoured to bring that survey into line with the historical records of the period, and thus was compelled to use the campaign of A.D. 571 as the pivot round which the results of my examination of the material must be made to revolve. Certain deductions in regard to distribution of types and decorative motives ensued, but the main result attained was the demonstration of a wider diffusion of the saucer-brooch and the ‘applied’ or ‘composite’ form than had been previously appreciated, and, further, the Saxon character of the material from a large group of cemeteries eastwards of the Thames-Ouse watershed.

The work of 1971–3 has produced a variety of important results. The Roman defences and defended area sequences set out in the first report have been confirmed with modifications of detail. New evidence has been found for the nature and extent of the Roman city outside the defended area: there are now the first hints of Roman planning in the St. Catherine Street—Hare Lane area and in Lower Northgate Street there was at least one monumental building and a street-side colonnade. Sub-Roman occupation has been recorded at 13–17 Berkeley Street. New evidence has been obtained for the possible first phase of Gloucester castle and the development of the medieval defences. The excavated evidence for the medieval occupation at 13–17 Berkeley Street has been combined with, and partly reinterpreted in the light of documentary evidence. At 82–4 Northgate Street the standing remains of a sixteenth-century and later building were recorded and its site excavated and related to documentary evidence. In the light of new discoveries, accounts are also given of St. Bartholemew's Hospital, the river Severn, and its two main medieval bridges within the city bounds.

The third season of excavations at Verulamium, inaugurated by the Research Committee of this Society, lasted from 4th July to 24th August 1957. The main area investigated lay along the edge of the allotment field between the theatre and the forum; this area was not accessible previously for reasons mentioned in last year's report, and in consequence much work had to be fitted into the time available, and even so, the lowest levels were not completely explored. But in addition further work was done on site K. VII at the rear of the defences beside the river, and a new site S was explored north-east of the river Ver on the brow of the rise above the millstream. Here a large extra-mural building, or buildings, with a cellar came to light; but its complete excavation had to be deferred. Work by contractors on the new road began during the excavations, and this work was watched; after the excavations closed, the staff of the museum rescued an important new deposit of Belgic mint debris.

Discovered at the height of the Second World War, the Mildenhall treasure has been a cornerstone of the national collections of the British Museum ever since its acquisition in 1946. But the circumstances behind its discovery have always been problematical. Although it is indisputable that it was found by tractor-worker Gordon Butcher, and then hidden away by Sydney Ford, is there more to the story? Archaeologists such as Tom Lethbridge and Gordon Fowler certainly thought so. A fascinating set of documents in the archives of the British Museum, discussed here for the first time, helps to provide the answers.

The parish of Skee, in western Bohuslän, has a wide variety of ancient monuments, among which is a small rock at Döltorp that displays a range of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age rock carvings. The new recording presented here identifies a number of hitherto unrecognized images and details. Some of the carvings are now considered to be of the late second millennium bc, while the bulk of the images are of mid-first millennium bc date. They include a particularly large decorated boat, with its crew finely detailed, as well as a number of carvings of warriors, discs, horses, spirals and smaller boats. The site lies in a landscape well inland from the Bronze Age shoreline, and its selection for carving was probably related to the existence of an earlier cairn high on a ridge to the west of the rock-carving site, perhaps linked to it by additional stones. Other sites in the immediate lowland region suggest that we should not view such sites as static creations; rather, we should consider them to have had long and episodic lives, maintaining and augmenting a societal awareness over many generations.

Vienna's Museum für Völkerkunde holds in its collections a rare sixteenth-century Taíno cotton belt from Hispaniola (today's Dominican Republic/Haiti) – one of only two surviving Taíno cotton artefacts to feature European ‘exotics’, including mirrors, jet beads and brass. This complex woven structure – a wearable work of art – offers a rare window on to one of the most prestigious of Taíno valuables, a personal ornament that literally wrapped the wearer in wealth, status and spiritual power. The paper charts the original context and use of Taíno belts, and provides a detailed account of the Vienna belt's collection history, its construction and its chronological placement (radiocarbon-dated using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) to ad 1475–1635). The question of how and when the European materials were incorporated into the belt is explored, critically engaging the entangled histories of association between the two.

It has hitherto been argued that Edward the Confessor's Chapel at Westminster Abbey, built by Henry III in 1246–59, was established as the royal mausoleum only from the 1290s. In 2005 a ground penetrating radar survey of the chapel floor revealed many anomalies, some of which can be interpreted as grave cists. A re-examination of the written and physical evidence for subfloor burials in the chapel suggests that, among other early burials, at least five of Edward I's children were interred here in the period 1264–84. It thus appears that the chapel was used as a family mausoleum before 1290 and was not originally exclusively reserved for the monarchs and their consorts. New light is also thrown on the vexed question of the date of the Cosmatesque floor in the shrine chapel, which is here redated to the 1290s.

Discovered in County Antrim and Cambridgeshire respectively, the Dunaverney and Little Thetford flesh-hooks are two of only thirty-six currently known examples from the Bronze Age of the Atlantic seaboard of Europe. Both are impressive and enigmatic objects and are among the most elaborate of later-series flesh-hooks dating to c 1100–800 BC. Not surprisingly, from the time it was found in 1829, Dunaverney was the subject of much antiquarian interest. Yet, despite their rarity and unusualness, the Dunaverney and Little Thetford flesh-hooks have never been adequately studied.

Our investigations have provided an understanding of the technology of these two fleshhooks, as well as new chronological information for the type as a whole. They have also revealed new uses of lost-wax casting in the British Isles, where the use of this technique is otherwise rare. The bird motifs on the Dunaverney flesh-hook remain unique, although it is now possible to set them against a broader background of iconographic representations on Atlantic feasting gear. Moreover, certain recurring design features may suggest that iconographic symbols were originally more often present on flesh-hooks. The findspot of Dunaverney lies at the heart of deposits of other contemporary prestige metalwork and that of Little Thetford within the greatest concentration of finds of the innovative Wilburton-stage metalworking tradition; both re-enforce the social significance of these rare objects.

During recent years a new consensus of opinion seems to have grown up concerning the career of the eighteenth-century antiquary William Stukeley: that his ideas underwent no significant alteration in the course of his adult life, and that Stuart Piggott's famous characterization of Stukeley — that he changed from an objective field archaeologist into a religious crank — was completely wrong. While there is much to commend this revisionist approach, it also presents certain difficulties. It fails to account for the apparent speed and drama of Stukeley's decision to seek ordination as an Anglican minister, or for pronounced differences in emphasis and tone between his earlier and later writings, and it fails to address some important textual difficulties in the dating and interpretation of his manuscript works. This paper is intended to address those problems. It examines the changes in his religious attitudes, and their implications for his scholarship, over the six decades in which he carried out antiquarian researches. In the process, it is intended to make a contribution to the cultural history of the eighteenth century, and also to the early story of the discipline of archaeology.

Sundials belonging to the Anglo-Saxon period have not received much attention from archaeologists, and a complete list of all existing specimens should be of some value; indeed, Professor Baldwin Brown in The Arts in Early England, vol. ii, 1925, says ‘a full list of existing Saxon sundials…is a desideratum’.

Two Migration period finds of gold ‘payment rings’ from south-western Norway are identified as sets of balance weights, carefully adjusted to the old system of aurar and ertogar (pl. of ON eyrir m. and ertog m.), metrologically taken over from the Roman system, with the eyrir equivalent to the Roman ounce of 27·29 gm. The sets can be used for weighing with great accuracy at intervals of eyrir, one being adjusted to an eyrir value of 27·42 gm., the other set ingeniously made to be used for weighing in units of two different eyrir values, one of 27·35 gm. (0·06 more than the Roman standard ounce), and another of 29·13 gm., near the maximum of the accepted standard variation of the eyrir as it can be found in other contemporary gold finds of south-western Norway. A general discussion argues that the Roman weight system and standards were taken over and practised in Northern Europe from the fourth century onwards.

Finds from the interesting pagan Saxon cemetery at Ruskington, 3½ miles north of the better-known cemetery at Sleaford, have been published piecemeal and, for the sake of completeness, it seems desirable to place on record certain objects acquired recently by Grantham Museum under the terms of the will of the late Dr. J. H. Gibson of Aldershot. It appears that the latter was in the neighbourhood of Ruskington in 1917 and acquired the objects from a local farmer who had previously obtained them from the gravel-pit north of the village of Ruskington, where burials have been recorded from time to time.

The recent discoveries in the nave of Westminster Abbey will be described in detail by Mr. A. W. Clapham in the second part of this paper, and he will indicate the architectural conclusions to be drawn from them, and the relationship between the abbey church of Edward the Confessor, and the other eleventh-century abbey churches in Normandy.

Thornbury, in Gloucestershire, rebuilt by Edward, Duke of Buckingham, is a remarkable example of the mixed architecture of the Castle and the Hall; in which, as far as the design was carried into execution, military and civil conveniences were happily united. In the book of the survey of the Duke of Buckingham's lands, we have the following general description of the place, at the time of the tragic death of the noble owner.

Amongst the various methods of transferring inheritances in use with our ancestors was that of conveying them by a Horn, either in Frank Almoigne, or in Fee, or in Serjeantry. Ingulphus, abbot of Croyland, particularly specifies the Horn amongst those things whereby lands were conveyed in the beginning of the Conqueror's reign. His words are too remarkable to be omitted on this occasion; ‘Conferebantur etiam primo multa ‘praedia nudo verbo, absque scripto vel cbartâ, tantum cum dominī ‘gladio, vel gateâ, vel cornu, vel craterâ; et plurima tenementa cum ‘calcari, cum strigili, cum arcu; et nonnulla cum sagittâ. At first ‘(says he, speaking of the Conqueror's time) many estates were ‘transferred by bare word of mouth, without any writing or char ‘ter, only by the Lord's sword, or helmet, or born, or cup; and ‘many tenements by a spur, a scraper, a bow; and some by an ‘arrow.’ It should seem by this account given us by Ingulphus, which is to clear and express, that the implement was always such as was well known to have belonged to the donor or grantor.

About three dozen bronze anvils are known from Bronze Age Europe. They are small in size, probably indicating that they were used for delicate work. Simple, Beaked and Complex forms are distinguished, based on the presence of special features such as work surfaces, beaks, swages and punching holes, which were used in various processes of manufacture and decoration of small bronze and gold artefacts. The anvils are widely distributed throughout north-west Europe, and dated examples belong to the later Middle and Late Bronze Age (c. 1200–700 B.C.). Thirty-six anvils are catalogued and briefly described.

Of the two linch-pins which form the subject of this article, one was found at King's Langley, Herts., in 1937, and has recently been acquired by the British Museum. The second was found in 1938 at Tiddington, near Stratford-on-Avon. It was exhibited at the Exhibition of Recent Archaeological Research, 1933–8, at the Institute of Archaeology, Regents Park, and is now in the New Place Museum at Stratford-on-Avon. To the authorities of both museums I am indebted for permission to publish this article. I have also to thank the curators of the Musée Nationale de St. Germain, of the Musée Municipale d'Évreux, and of the Maidstone Museum respectively for allowing me to illustrate the linch-pins from Nanterre, from Évreux, and from Bigbury. I had hoped to include the specimens from Cirencester and from Chedworth, but circumstances have not permitted. Mr. C. F. C. Hawkes and Mr. M. R. Hull have very kindly put the as yet unpublished material from Colchester at my disposal. Mr. H. N. Savory called my attention to the linch-pin from Merlin's Cave, and Mr. R. R. Clarke to those in the Santon Downham hoard.