The Fitzwarin Psalter (Paris, B.N. MS lat. 765) is one of the most striking English manuscripts of the fourteenth century. Its miniatures are characterized by bold compositional experiment and a mannered figure style of extreme emotional intensity. The conventional name of the manuscript derives from the presence of two shields in the lower border of the Beatus page (fol. 23), which were identified by Francis Wormald as those of the families of Fitzwarin and Clevedon. But he was unable to find any evidence connecting the two families by marriage. He dated the Psalter to the third quarter of the century, and in this has been followed by Lucy Sandler. However, in an important study of the Fitzwarin Psalter and related manuscripts, Lynda Dennison demonstrated that, for stylistic reasons, the Psalter (with the exception of a bifolium, fols. 21-22) must be dated to the mid-1340s. This redating prompts a re-examination of the question of the identity of the original owner.

The Cirencester Excavation Committee conducted two sets of excavations in 1966: at Easter, four weeks were spent excavating the Saxon church and an internal tower on the Roman defences; during the Summer, in a six week campaign, various development sites in the town were examined (fig. 1) and sections were cut across the seating bank of the amphitheatre.

In 1937 Dr. Felix Oswald contributed a paper to the Journal of Roman Studies entitled ‘Carinated bowls (Form 29) from Lezoux’. Twenty years previously James Curie had published a paper in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland which described and illustrated inter alia some early Lezoux decorated ware in the celebrated Plicque collection at the Musée des Antiquités Nationales, Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

From the market-place at Faringdon the Oxford road mounts steadily, passing under the north slope of the hill known variously as Faringdon Clump or Faringdon Folly. The hill is a rounded knoll, the summit of which stands 505 ft. O.D. and, besides being a well-known landmark in the Vale of White Horse, commands an extensive prospect in every direction. Like Cumnor Hurst, Shotover, Brill and others, it is one of a series of undenuded caps of Cretaceous sands overlying Berkshire oolites that crop out at intervals between Faringdon and Aylesbury. The sands are ferruginous, dark yellow with lighter sands below, divided by a layer of sandstone rock. On the summit of the hill is a clump of beeches and Scotch firs, probably planted here, as on so many similar eminences, in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.

This house is shown, from both structural and documentary evidence, to have been built c. 1345 by William Hillary, a rector with Staffordshire connections. Of his work enough remains to show that it was of aisled design, with an open service bay at the lower end; the two-bay hall had a base-cruck truss. The surviving woodwork is of very high quality. The two-storey cross wing, later than the hall and originally timber-framed, is cased in brick, and this brickwork is ascribed, on both docu mentary and archaeological evidence, to yohn Croxby, rector 1460–92 and namesake of the first clerk of works of Tattershall Castle.

The later alterations to the house are worked out from structural and documentary evidence (terriers, probate inventories); later rectors, including two minor Georgian poets, are described. The paper is illustrated by plans, sections, reconstructions and photographs. It concludes with a distribution map of base-cruck halls and comments on the social context of this type of construction. Dr. Rogers has contributed the historical evidence in this paper; the other authors are responsible for the account of the structure.

South Cadbury Castle (N.G. ST 6225) occupies a free-standing hill, some 500 feet high, towards the Somerset-Dorset border. The hill itself is principally, if not entirely, of yellow sandstone belonging to the Jurassic series. To the west there are wide views across the low-lying Somerset basin centred on Glastonbury, an area of great importance in the early post-Roman centuries. To the east, a scarp marks the western edge of the higher ground of Wessex. In cultural terms, South Cadbury lies within the north-western limits of the coins of the Durotriges, but is only a dozen miles from the Glastonbury Lake Village. In the post-Roman period, it is one of the most easterly sites to produce imported pottery of Tintagel type, as well as one of the most inland.

Continued excavations at South Cadbury in July-August 1969 failed to confirm the Early Neolithic enclosed settlement hinted at in 1968, but added Late Neolithic pottery to the known cultural sequence. For the Iron Age, particular interest attaches to evidence for stake-built round houses; to a rich collection of iron and bronze arms and armour perhaps from a workshop; and to a rectangular shrine with animal sacrifices. The moment of the Roman Conquest is represented by a field oven with military bronzes. In the fifth-sixth centuries A.D. the plan of a timber hall was traced, and it was shown that timber and reused Roman masonry had played a large part in the rampart and gateway.

The work of art here to be published was found in the excavations of 1938 at Elmswell, about two miles west of Driffield in the East Riding of Yorkshire (6-in. O.S. Yorks. E.R. CLXISE.). These excavations, following on those carried out by our Fellow Mr. A. L. Congreve from 1935 to 1937; have shown the site to be that of a native settlement of the Parisi, occupied—probably continuously—at least from Flavian times until the end of the Roman period, and again in pagan Saxon times. Of the pre-Roman Iron Age nothing has yet come to light beyond two British coins, one of the Iceni (c. A.D. 25) and one possibly of Cunobelin, but the site is separated by little more than the line of the Driffield—Malton railway from the Eastburn area where, in building operations in 1938, as many as seventy-five Iron Age graves were discovered even in the relatively small plots of ground excavated. These contained the remains of flexed inhumation-burials, each originally covered by a small barrow, exactly as in the well-known Danes' Graves and Arras cemeteries; and the date within the three centuries directly preceding the Roman Conquest was confirmed by several finds of grave-goods, notably an iron sword of La Tène type, bronze ornaments, an ‘involuted’ brooch, and several vessels of pottery. Further, in another part of the same site, Parisian pottery of Roman age was found, the earliest of which agrees exactly with the earliest from Elmswell. There can in fact be little doubt that this whole area was an important centre of settlement in the east Yorkshire equivalent of La Tène times, where ‘the Iron Age B’ culture of the Parisi passed directly into the romanization that was introduced at the Flavian conquest of the early seventies A.D.

In the past, although many discoveries of early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries have been made in Northamptonshire, no detailed record exists of any series of burials larger than the thirty-seven graves explored by Sir Henry Dryden at Marston St. Lawrence at the southwestern end of the county. The following report of the cemetery at Nassington therefore constitutes a most important addition to our knowledge of the archaeology of the period.

In considering the question whether London did or did not survive as a substantially intact administrative unit throughout the Pagan Saxon period, Sir Laurence Gomme and others have laid stress upon the supposedly Roman origin of the wide territorial rights of the medieval Londoners. These rights, it has been claimed, take us ‘behind the Norman conquest, and behind the Anglo-Saxon rule also, for there is nothing in Anglo-Saxon institutions to which [they] can be referred’: they represent the old ‘territorium ’ of Roman London and are good evidence, therefore, of an unbroken civic tradition from Roman times. The doubtful details with which enthusiasm or fantasy have tended to enrich this theory do not necessarily deprive it of essential validity; and I venture to think that it is in fact rather more securely founded than Gomme's own statement of it would lead us to infer.

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.

Mercury gilding is a well-known decorative technique that was applied to both silver and a range of copper alloys from the third century AD until the introduction of electroplating in the nineteenth century. The process is well understood but, until recently, there has been no good archaeological evidence for it. Excavations in Southampton have discovered two rather different objects that were used to produce gold-mercury amalgam, the first stage in mercury gilding. One is a block of stone and the other a reused amphora sherd. The stone comes from a ninth-century context, while the amphora sherd's findspot is less well dated: it could have been reused in the late Roman or the Saxon period.

This article offers an account of the components, the structure and the history of the so-called casula and velamina of Sts Harlindis and Relindis preserved at the Church of St Catherine at Maaseik in Belgium as relics of the two sisters who founded the nearby abbey of Aldeneik (where the textiles were kept throughout the Middle Ages). The composite casula of Sts Harlindis and Relindis includes the earliest surviving group of Anglo-Saxon embroideries, dating to the late eighth century or the early ninth. Probably similarly Anglo-Saxon, a set of silk tablet-woven braids brocaded with gold associated with the embroideries offers a missing link in the surviving corpus of Anglo-Saxon braids. The ‘David silk’ with its Latin inscription and distinctly western European design dating from the eighth century or the early ninth offers a rare witness to the art of silk-weaving in the West at so early a date. The velamen of St Harlindis, more or less intact, represents a remarkable early medieval vestment, garment or cloth made up of two types of woven silk cloths, tablet-woven braids brocaded with gold, gilded copper bosses, pearls and beads. The velamen of St Relindis, in contrast, represents the stripped remains—reduced to the lining and the fringed ends—of another composite textile. Originally it was probably luxurious, so as to match the two other composite early medieval textile relics from Aldeneik. As a whole, the group contributes greatly to knowledge of early medieval textiles of various kinds.

This subject was not considered in any great detail in the work of Mr. Johnson and myself upon Court Hand because in the medieval period Arabic numerals do not appear to any considerable extent in English Archives—indeed their appearance there at any date before the late fifteenth century may be taken as fairly strong evidence of foreign influence—and concerning Roman numerals there was little to say. Moreover the subject had been recently dealt with by Dr. Hill. But in the period after 1500 Arabic figures begin slowly to fight their way into English Archives—i. e. into business writings; and since this (the Archive) class of documents is precisely that which was more or less closed to Dr. Hill it seems worth while to indicate in a preliminary sketch the types of document which may be of use to any student interested in further research along these lines; and to give the results of some tentative examination of them by the present writer, even when these are negative. The questions of interest are—where and when do Arabic figures make their entry into English Archives ? how far are they affected by being used in conjunction with the special Set Hands which were such a feature of Archive writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? how far do they retain any of the primitive forms ? and can these be used at all as criteria for dating ?

The value of MS. 129 in the library of the Society of Antiquaries of London, bought by the Society in 17902 has already been brought to the attention of scholars and students by H. A. Dillon, who published in an earlier volume of Archaeologia the inventories of the ordnance, arms and armour at the Tower of London, Westminster and Greenwich (Dillon, 1888). The manuscript is an inventory of the effects of Henry VIII compiled in the reign of his successor, Edward VI. A large section (ff. 250–374r) is concerned with details of the ordnance and other munitions in castles and towns, and the artillery fortifications built by Henry VIII in response to the threat of an invasion by Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France in 1538–39. The English possessions in France are also included. It was originally planned to omit the inventory of the Tower of London from this article, but for the sake of completeness and as there are a few errors in Dillon's transcription it seemed fit to include it.

In the course of last year I exhibited to the Society two swords, and some other fragments said to have been parts of an image found in a bog at Cullen, in the county of Tipperary, in Ireland, on the lands of Lord Milton. These are now in the posession of that noble lord; and his politeness gave me an opportunity of communicating them.