This paper reassesses the early Anglo-Saxon assemblage from Hardown Hill, Dorset. Wingrave excavated the objects in 1916 but apart from his 1931 report, and Evison's 1968 analysis, there has been little subsequent discussion. Despite a lack of human remains, the assemblage has been interpreted as representing an early Anglo-Saxon cemetery – our westernmost burial site by a considerable distance and one that pre-dates the historically attested seventh-century expansion of Wessex. The following typological reclassification and contextual analysis casts serious doubts on a funerary context. Instead, an alternative interpretation is presented that views the assemblage as a useful collection of metalwork, intended to be reforged and recycled, which was presumably deposited for safekeeping and never retrieved. Such a reinterpretation highlights the need for a critical reappraisal of material from older excavations. It also has implications for our understanding of post-Roman Dorset, and for the distribution of fifth- and sixth-century Anglo-Saxon material culture more broadly.

During the second part of the season 1926–7 the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania was engaged in excavating a cemetery, or rather cemeteries, lying inside the temenos wall and at the south-east end of the enclosure. In 1922, during the early days of our first season at Ur, we had dug here a trial trench of no great depth and had found several groups of pottery and some jewellery which, owing to its nearness to the surface, I had assumed to be of late date (see Ant. Journal, vol. iii (1923), pi. xxix). Work of this sort, however, could not be done satisfactorily with the absolutely untrained gang which we had just enrolled, and the discovery of the temple E-Nun-Mah in another part of the temenos enabled me to abandon what the men named ‘the Gold Trench’. Now, after four years, the time had come to complete the topography of the temenos by clearing up what was the only large area within its walls still untested. The negative results of our original trench—negative so far as walls were concerned— and the evident denudation of the site, did not inspire confidence, but the ground had to be proved, and there was at least the prospect of further discoveries of small objects.

Copyhold tenure for a number of lives, regulated by manorial custom, was by far the most common form of landholding throughout much of the West Country during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was only gradually replaced by leaseholds for a term of years during the eighteenth century. Manorial custom, the body of local law and traditional usage, hallowed by long use and enforced in the manorial court, governed all aspects of farming practice, transfer of holdings, entry fines, rents, heriots, rules of cultivation, access to common grazing, wood, stone, fuel and the rights of widows. This paper uses examples from Wiltshire and Dorset to show the great variety of manorial customs, the effect these had on the lives of copyhold tenants and the problems which some long-established customs could cause for landowners.

A transcript survives of the oath sworn in 1465 by the lay sacristan of the collegiate church of St Mary at Warwick on the occasion of his taking office. His duties are spelled out in detail, and include the striking requirement that he spend each night in the sacristy for the better security of the treasures. This paper prints the oath and aims to place it in its institutional context. The medieval sacristy at Warwick survives and details of the oath illuminate details of the architecture. Similar first-floor vestries are known elsewhere, and the suggestion is made that some other churches might also have had inhabited sacristies.

Beyond the borders of Egypt, the British Museum has the largest collection of granodiorite statues and fragments of statues of the goddess Sekhmet produced in the reign of Amenhotep iii (c 1390–1352 bc; eighteenth dynasty). With so much new material being uncovered in recent years at the site of Amenhotep iii’s funerary temple at Kom el-Hettan in Luxor (Egypt), a reassessment of the British Museum statues was inevitable. The British Museum statues are an ideal sample group for study, offering variations in type, proportions, stone colouration, decoration and state of finish. The group also includes a formerly uncatalogued head fragment with an unusual uraei crown, which relates to surviving examples found at the Mut Temple at Karnak and at Kom el-Hettan in Luxor.

When Queen Mary was dying, according to Mistress Rice as quoted by Holinshed, she declared, “When I am dead and opened you shall find Calais lying in my heart.”

In her letter of January 7, 1558, to the gentlemen of every shire, urging them to raise men for the succour of that town, which though she was not then aware of it had already fallen; the Queen spoke of Calais as the chief jewel of the realm. That it was so in the opinion of many there is no doubt, and the delineations of the English possessions in France of those days always present the district as viewed from this country, that is with the actual south at the top of the map.

A re-examination of the fragmentary remains from Cerrig-y-Drudion suggests that they belonged to a pair of similar vessels which may have been lids but were certainly not hanging bowls. The recognition of a mistake in the previous reconstruction allows some of the pieces to be rearranged to produce a more or less symmetrical reconstruction of the design on one of Britain's most important pieces of Early Celtic art.

In the year 1456 a certain English parish priest, making the pilgrimage to the great shrine of St. James at Santiago de Compostela, took with him an English retable of wood with panels of carved alabaster, and gave it to the cathedral containing the shrine, A document, written in Gallegan Spanish and still in being, sets forth how there appeared before its writer, with witnesses, at the high altar, on the 25th day of May, 1456, ‘a man who said that he was of the nation of the Kingdom of England, by name called Johanes Gudguar, rector of the church of Cheilinvvintour diocese ’, who, for service of God and reverence for the very holy Apostle ‘Sebedeu ’, and for the benefit of his sins, gave to the Compostelan church a retable of wood with figures of alabaster, painted with gold and blue, setting forth the history of the said holy Apostle.

This paper traces the practice among early modern antiquaries of describing Roman bricks as ‘British’. The term originated in the 1530s in the notes of John Leland, who based his nomenclature on material first encountered at Verulamium. He may either have regarded the settlement there as British, or have adopted a local folk-attribution. Others who followed his usage, including William Camden, recognized that the bricks were actually Roman, but the terminology was not properly discussed until the end of the seventeenth century. While Leland's designation was flawed, his identification is of significance as an exceptionally early exercise in archaeological typology.

The conservation and repair of the west front of Tintern Abbey church, undertaken by Cadw between 2005 and 2010, provided an unrivalled opportunity to survey, record and analyse the design, construction and alteration of a much-celebrated example of medieval architecture. This paper considers in detail the moulding profiles and ornament of the west front and offers a developmental history for this part of the abbey church. Comparisons are made with ecclesiastical architecture elsewhere in England and Wales, and with the contemporary programme of work being undertaken at nearby Chepstow Castle. Two appendices outline the history of its conservation since 1900 and assess some Victorian drawn records of the west front.

The Anglo-Norman French indenture discussed in this paper is apparently the first medieval English building contract to be discovered since L F Salzman published almost all the known examples of this kind of text in the 1967 second edition of Building in England Down to 1540: a documentary history. A short commentary sketches the significance of the document for architectural history.

In 2002, the National Trust commissioned a detailed survey of the timberwork of the moated manor house at Baddesley Clinton, coupled with an extensive dendrochronology programme. The results have radically revised our understanding of the house and of the way that its complex development reflects the changing circumstances and social expectations of its occupiers from the medieval period to the nineteenth century. The integration of documentary sources, structural analysis and tree-ring dating has enabled the house to be portrayed as the product of a quest for greater comfort and privacy, of social responses to changing family circumstances and of the exercise of dower rights by widows, resulting in several periods of joint occupancy.

It is but a very imperfect account I can give you of a late discovery, in the antiquarian way, made in Ireland; however it is the best I am able to offer. About the year 1780, two pieces of antiquity were found in a bog in West-Meath, unaccompanied with any thing else of note. Lady Sharborne, having been in that kingdom this summer, the pieces I mentioned happily came into her hands, and her Ladyship, on her return to England was so obliging as to make me a present of them.

The study of British personal seals, particularly those that are non-armorial, is oneof the n neglected areas of sigillographie research; these seals, however, provide the widest range of desi and the largest number of extant examples in the entire field. This paper focuses upon one aspee such seals, the Christological designs and legends used on them, and integrates them into the broa area of the study of late medieval Christocentric devotion in order to demonstrate both the rich source of new material provided by personal seals, and the way in which they can add to understanding of more general issues of a historical period.

Dr. Joan Evans wrote in 1953 in her book The History of Jewellery: ‘While it may exceptionally be possible to name the patron who ordered a Renaissance jewel, it is nearly always impossible to determine its nationality, except on purely stylistic grounds.’ It is precisely into these difficult waters I wish to venture, in order to clarify, in the light of the evidence of several newly discovered jewels, what kind of historiated jewellery the English goldsmith was creating for his rich patrons in the second and third quarters of the sixteenth century. The field in this paper is restricted to gold work executed in relief and covered with enamels, translucent and opaque—a technique commonly called ‘encrusted enamelling’. This restriction is due partly to the accident of survival and partly to the fact that the sculptural affinities, together with the iconographic and stylistic aspects of this group, offer a firmer basis for the determining of a national style. England in the first two decades of the sixteenth century was just beginning to see and feel the effects of the Italian Renaissance style in the Arts, and this is reflected in the minor applied art of the English goldsmith in the following years.

In 1960 and 1961 Ole Klindt-Jensen published two short notes about a golden statuette of a Celtic warrior, soldered to a fine brooch. He was convinced that the warrior did not belong to the brooch, and thought that they had been combined fairly recently. J. M. de Navarro added a comment to the 1961 note, concluding: ‘My impression (from photographs only) is that the brooch might date from the fourth century BC and the figure not before the latter half of the third or the second century BC, i.e. that it was added later.’ Klindt-Jensen's notes were accompanied by plates, and at the same time another photograph was published on the front cover of Celticum, volume I. A decade later the brooch was shown at the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, and at the Hayward Gallery, London, as item no. 35 in the Early Celtic Art exhibition held in 1970. The catalogue entry was based on Klindt-Jensen's note, but no photograph was published. In the mid 1970s R. M. Rowlett prepared a paper on the authenticity of the brooch, including metal analyses and a comparison of its proportions with those of some La Tène II brooches: Rowlett considered that the figure of the warrior was contemporary with the rest of the brooch, which he accepted as an authentic antiquity. His paper was eventually published about twenty years later.

A Drawing By The Antiquarian Edward Lhuyd or one of his assistants, which was made some time before the completion of his Parochialia c. 1699, was recently located in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (fig. 1). It shows a triangular-section wooden box decorated with metal mounts and is captioned Arch Gwenfrewi yn eglwys Gwytherin yn swydh Ddimbech (‘the shrine of Gwenfrewi [i.e. Winefride] in the church of Gwytherin Denbighshire’). This drawing, together with other illustrations of the shrine, and a discussion of its ornament, affinities and dating were subsequently published in an article in this journal. The shrine was thought to have been finally destroyed in the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps when the old church at Gwytherin was demolished in 1867. But in June 1991, while the above article was in press, a piece of wood was discovered by Tristan Gray Hulse in the presbytery attached to St Winefride's Catholic Church in Holywell (Flintshire), which includes the site of the famous holy well bearing her name. The fragment was wrapped in brown paper and labelled in faded black ink ‘From the wooden chest at Gwytherin supposed to have contained body of St Winifrede’. Enough survives for the piece to be identified securely as a fragment of one of the gable ends from the shrine of Gwenfrewi as illustrated in the Bodleian manuscript.