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.

I enclose for your perusal, and if you think proper for that of the Society of Antiquaries, a Disquisition on the member of Architecture called an Oriel, wherein you will find the evidence on that obscure subject classified in a novel manner, and at least a plausible etymology suggested; though, to use the words of Lambarde, “contentinge my selfe to intermedle myne own opinion simplie, without eyther prejudice of any other man's that shall judge otherwise, or pertinacitie in myne owne when I shall hear a better.”

Until fairly recently Worcestershire has yielded very scant evidence of wall‐paintings, either ecclesiastical or domestic, though we know from other evidence that this was not because the county was originally deficient in a sense of decoration. The more likely reason is that no one in Worcestershire has shown much interest in wall‐paintings, and when discoveries have been made during building alterations or demolition they have been destroyed without even photographs being taken.

By the kindness of my friend Mr. John Payne Collier, I am enabled to transmit to you an original MS. belonging to him, of the time of Henry the Eighth, which, as it relates to contemporaneous events of much historical importance, you will perhaps deem sufficiently interesting to be laid before the Society. Though it bears the title of “Instructions to my Lord Privy Seal,” it was evidently intended by the writer, George Constantyne, to serve as his defence against misrepresentations which had been made to Thomas Lord Cromwell, concerning certain verbal communications in which he had recently been engaged with John Barlow, Dean of Westbury, and Thomas Barlow, a Prebendary of that Collegiate Church.

The ‘Prison of Saint Catharine’ is an ancient monument on the outskirts of the ruins of Salamis, on the east coast of Cyprus. It consists of two chambers, of which the inner, rectangular with gable roof east-to-west and door at one end, is cut out of a single block of limestone, and roofed with another, which projects slightly above the modern surface of the ground. The junction of the two blocks is about half-way up the gable roof. The outer chamber is much larger and lies transversely to the inner, with its long axis north and south, and the inner chamber door in the middle of its west wall. Nearly opposite in the east wall is the outer entrance, approached from ground-level by a descent of rough steps, between walls of large squared masonry, now much damaged. The walls of the outer chamber consist of enormous upright slabs, crowned by a massive cornice, of a wide cavetto between two fillets, of which the upper projects considerably beyond the lower. On this cornice rests a semicircular vault of very large stones, the largest of which are set on end and occupy as much as a third of the vault. Within, they are carefully dressed, like the wall surfaces, but outside they were left rough, and have suffered further damage from exposure. They were not, however, intended to be seen, for there are remains of an outer casing of massive squared masonry, consisting of a cornice below, of the same profile as that of the vaulted chamber; and over this a plinth of three courses, the upper and lower plain, the middle bearing a simple cyma moulding, convex above. One course of the wall face is traceable still above the plinth, about half-way up the vault. The ends of the vault above the cornice are filled with rough walling, mostly recent, but including a number of stones from the plinth. A breach in the north wall serves as an entrance now, with a modern flight of steps. The building is now buried up to the level of the cornice and the great roof-slab, in a low mound; but the natural ground-level is only about a metre lower.

The inventory of the jewels of Anne of Denmark, wife of James I of England, belongs to a group of catalogues of personal jewellery of Tudor and Stuart royalty of which one of the most important is that made after the death of Henry VIII in 1550. It is now in the National Library of Scotland (Adv. MS 31.1.10) and was compiled in 1606, the last entry being dated January 1607. It records over four hundred items giving the weight of gold or silver, and the number and nature of the gems in each. The text was written in a neat secretary hand on the recto of each folio, the verso being left blank for later notes. Most of these, together with the marginalia and corrections to the main text, are in the same hand; but two other writers can be distinguished. The presence of these corrections and annotations show it to have been the working copy kept in the Jewel House.

The detailed descriptions make it possible to trace some of the jewels in the earlier inventories of Henry VIII, Mary Tudor and Queen Elizabeth, and, in the case of the latter, to donors such as her favourite, the Earl of Warwick. On his accession James I declared certain jewels to be ‘individually and inseparably for ever annexed to the kingdome of this realme,’ but this did not prevent either their use at Court of subsequent dispersal.

The interest in the unpublished document now submitted to the Society lies, mainly, in three large sepia drawings of a triumphal column, erected by the Emperor Arcadius in honour of his father the Emperor Theodosius the Great. My purpose is to draw attention to the historical importance attaching to these drawings, for, excepting some fragmentary sketches to be referred to presently, they are the only evidence we now possess to corroborate the narratives of contemporary historians who describe an important episode in later Roman history, when Theodosius the Great was engaged in a war on the Danube with a ‘new Scythian people who had not been seen before by any one’. We shall have no difficulty in identifying these new-comers, thus described by Zosimus, with the Tartar Huns, the forerunners of Attila and his host, who now, and for the first time, faced the Roman army in battle and were utterly defeated. The victory thus won for Theodosius and his imperial colleague, the second Valentinian, was considered, and not without reason, to be important enough to merit record in this triumphal column, for the westward invasion of the Huns, though not stopped, received a check from which it did not recover for another half-century.

Keynsham is a village on the high road that runs between Bath and Bristol, and is distant from the latter city about four miles. In the year 1877 the then vicar and churchwardens of Keynsham, rinding the graveyard round the parish church incapable of either receiving any more burials or of being enlarged, purchased two and a half acres of ground to make a public cemetery. This was situated a quarter of a mile beyond the village, on the Bristol side, and was part of the fine stretch of meadow-land that borders the river Avon, being known as the Hams. Two mortuary chapels were built, adjoining one another, in the centre of the new cemetery, and the ground was thickly planted with trees. After the purchase of the land, the owner of a property adjoining it on its western side managed to get an embargo or restriction placed upon the use of the upper part for burials. The part so restricted was about a third of the original purchase. In 1908 the Parish Council, by the payment of a sum of money, had the restriction removed, but it was not until twelve years afterwards that the site was used for interments.

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.

I transmit to you, at the request of my respectable and ingenious friend, Major Rooke, of Woodhouse, a small treatise, which he has drawn up on some Roman Roads, Tumuli, Stations, and Camps, which he has lately traced in the neighbourhood of Mansfield, and which have not hitherto been noticed. I cannot comply with his request that it might be transmitted to the Society, without explaining some particulars which gave rise to this treatise. When I first saw the account, which he sent to the Society, of a Roman Villa which he had discovered near Mansfield, I communicated to him some few sentiments of mine, on which I grounded an opinion, though I was quite unacquainted with the country, that this Villa was probably the residence of some military Roman commander, and that there was probably some Roman camp or station, or some military Roman road running near it. This did not by any means appear by his answer to be the case. And yet it still seemed to me improbable that it should be otherwise.

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.

An examination of at least six views of Lindisfarne Priory dating from the late eighteenth century, at which time most of the nave was still standing, led to the surprising conclusion in an earlier study that the nave was covered by groin vaults. Because of the unequivocal evidence of ribbed vaults in the choir, transept arms and crossing, as well as in the nave aisles, it would be expected that the form of the nave vault was the same. Since the evidence provided by the early views has been greeted with some scepticism, this study documents the collapse and restoration of the nave during the nineteenth century, closely examines the only two points at which the springing of the former nave vault is preserved, and, finally, considers the continued use of groin vaults in England after the appearance of ribbed vaults at Durham Cathedral, c. 1093–-1100. None of these further investigations produced any evidence that contradicts the conclusions based on the early views as initially presented, nor does a consideration of other views from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during which time the nave elevations were gradually collapsing. Whether ‘logical’ or not, the nave of Lindisfarne was covered by groin vaults. This finding leads to the suggestion that groin vaults, not ribbed vaults, may have been used over the choir of Durham.

This paper was submitted for publication in November 1992.

The results of architectural recording within the North Range of the University's Old Schools are described. Argued to have stood independently as a hall in the later fourteenth century, the progressive development of the Schools' quadrangle, and extensive alterations to it – culminating in Wright's neo-classical facade of 1754–58 – reflects upon the historical development of academic architecture. The prestigious display of the complex in the mid eighteenth century, facilitated through the mass levelling of domestic properties, equally tells of the institutional ‘realization’ of the University.

The promontory site of Le Yaudet, on the north coast of Brittany, was occupied from the Bronze Age to the present day, at various stages during this period sharing in maritime exchange systems linking Brittany to Britain. In the Late Iron Age the site, of some 6ha, was surrounded by stone and rubble defences the main cross-promontory defence being of murus gallicus type. The defences are of at least two phases, the later probably dating to the time of Caesar. Occupation continued and in the late third century AD a new wall was built around the defensive circuit at a time when similar coastal sites on both sides of the Channel were being defended. On one site, agricultural activity of the early medieval period was followed by village development in the eleventh century. The present village is a shrunken remnant of the earlier, more extensive settlement.

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.