The Society's library has grown considerably in size and stature during the 270 or so years of its existence. Reflecting as it does the tastes of the Fellows, many of whom have been bibliophiles both as collectors and writers, it has inevitably acquired by various means a large number of early printed books. Exactly how many was revealed when a shelf list of those published before 1700 was prepared in 1967. Of those fifty-one are incunabula, and they were thought to be of sufficient interest to be published in this extended list for the benefit of Fellows in general and bibliophiles in particular.

The old road from Damascus to Baghdad having been blocked by disturbances in Syria, the members of the 1925–6 Joint Oxford University (Weld) and Field Museum Expedition to Kish were compelled last winter to use the more southerly route over which the Nairn convoys were running. This is an eastward extension of the road -from Jerusalem to Jericho, and runs through Amman to Rutba Wells and Ramadi, whence it follows the valley to Baghdad. Having noticed worked flints during our halts on the journey, we asked and obtained permission from the Air Vice-Marshal, Sir John Higgins, to return with the armoured car patrol, under the command of Flight-Lieutenant Sweeny, who with his men rendered great assistance in the search for implements.

The principal authority for the early history of the church of Worcester is the famous Cartulary compiled about the end of the eleventh century by the Worcester monk, Hemming. Written partly in Latin, and partly in Anglo-Saxon, the volume contains for the most part transcripts of the various privileges and charters by which the monastery proved its title to the vast estates which it held at that time in Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Warwickshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, and Oxfordshire. It is not known with certainty when the cartulary passed out of the possession of the cathedral, but it is probable that it was amongst the many manuscripts dispersed after the dissolution of the monastery in 1540.

A reliquary casket known from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century records as that of St Winifrid had been lost by the mid-nineteenth century from the church at Gwytherin in Clwyd. A drawing attributed to Edward Lluyd, published here for the first time, suggests that it was most probably of eighth- or early ninth-century date and was influenced by Anglo-Saxon (JG-C) or Irish (LB) models, if not an actual import into North Wales.

The amulet here described was found in April 1963 by Mr. A. G. Rook on a Romano-British site at Dicket Mead, Lockleys, Welwyn. He has kindly provided an interim description of the site and its associated finds and a discussion of the material from which the amulet was made. The object has now been placed on loan in the Verulamium Museum.

The building of new facilities at the east end of Wymondham Abbey, Norfolk, in 2014–15 involved re-opening a Romanesque arch. This had previously connected the nave’s north aisle with the north transept, and appears to have been blocked at the Dissolution when the transepts and eastern arm of the abbey church were demolished. As works progressed in 2014–15, a remarkable Gothic window tracery design was gradually revealed, incised on the early twelfth-century ashlar of the southern respond. The discovery is one of the most substantial and complete incised designs identified to date and, beyond being an important addition to the emerging corpus of incised designs on walls, it is significant for revealing use of black pigment to make the drawing more visible, for providing an insight into the lost monastic parts of the abbey and, most tantalisingly, for raising the possibility that Wymondham – like its nearby sister priory at Binham – was at the forefront of the development of bar tracery in England in the thirteenth century.

Ashmole's interest in alchemy seems to have begun about 1648. He was strongly drawn to the Rosicrucian movement, whose aims were religious: to attain to a perfect knowledge of Jesus Christ and of God's works, that is of nature. Chymia was the chosen branch of learning. Alchemists believed that by laboratory experiments they could discover the formula for the Philosophers' Stone which would lead them to the discovery of the secrets of nature. Ashmole considered that his best service to alchemy was the publication of alchemical manuscripts. Two of these have been identified as B.L., Add. 10302 and B.L., Harl. 2407. Both manuscripts belong to the fifteenth century and contain miniatures in pen and wash. The Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum included the Ordinall by Thomas Norton and Lydgate's Hermes Bird, both printed for the first time, and works by George Ripley, John Gower, Thomas Charnock, Edward Kelley and John Dee; also the Tale of the Chanon's Yeoman with Chaucer's portrait. Ashmole's chief engraver was Robert Vaughan. The engravings to the Ordinall show the quasireligious initiation ceremony and the alchemists with their equipment; those from B.L., Harl. 2407 show the emblems representing the theoretical aspects of alchemy, the serpent, the eagle and the basilisk; the sun and the moon; the young couple bathing in the Elixir, symbolizing eternal youth. At some time after 1658 Ashmole abandoned his delusions.

Ightham Mote in Kent is one of the most beautiful of English country houses; it is also one of the most important. It stands at the foot of a steep hill, four-square and surrounded by the moat that gives it its name. Directly from the water rises the picturesquely irregular exterior. Most of the lower courses and the whole west or gatehouse front are of Kentish ragstone; much of the upper storey, however, is half-timbered. This mixture reveals the chief fact in the history of the house. It is a late medieval building, extensively remodelled in the early sixteenth century (pl. LII).

The works were carried out by Sir Richard Clement, a minor Tudor courtier (pl. LIII a), and they embody his political and social ambitions with remarkable faithfulness. At the same time, the clarity of Clement's statement reflects back on his own society and raises important questions about the nature of both early Tudor art and politics and the relationship between them. I begin by tracing Clement's career to the time of his purchase of Ightham Mote; then the rebuilding of the house is described and its decorations placed within the context of the early Tudor court style; finally, the possible political significance of the style is explored, partly in terms of its origins and partly through an account of Clement's later career as a Kentish gentleman.

Corfe Castle is situated in the centre of the Isle of Purbeck, about ten miles SW. of Bournemouth, and midway between Wareham and Swanage. The Isle of Purbeck is bounded on the north by Poole Harbour and the river Frome, on the west by the stream called Luckford Lake, and on the south and east by the English Channel. It is bisected by a range of chalk hills which stretch across the isle from east to west and attain a height at one point of over 600 ft. In the middle of the range is a great gap forming the natural pass from the northern portion of the island to the coasts of the southern portion and called by the Anglo-Saxons Corvensgeat or Corfe-Gate. Commanding this pass, and set in the midst of it, is a precipitous hill which rises to a height of about 200 ft. and is almost surrounded at its foot by streams forming a natural moat. Upon this hill the castle of Corfe is built (figs. 1, 2, 3).

I have the honour of sending you for the inspection of the Society a model of the remains of the amphitheatre of Flavius Vespasian at Rome, which from the minuteness and accuracy with which it is executed, I flatter myself will deserve their attention. The purposes to which a Roman amphitheatre was appropriated are so generally known, and particularly to the Society of Antiquaries, that I shall here beg leave only to offer a few remarks, which occurred to me on the spot, and which you will do me the honour of communicating to the Society.

A severe and tedious fit of inflammatory rheumatism has hitherto prevented my acknowledgment of your last favour, and the completion of my promise respecting the communication of the discoveries of Roman antiquities made lately at Wroxeter. This communication I hope will not have been made too late for your design of presenting them to the Society of Antiquaries, before it shall rise for the ensuing season.

In 1901 Léon Heuzey wrote in his Catalogue des Antiquites chaldeennes that we possessed at that time only one complete statuette of early Sumerian art. He referred to the remarkable marble figurine of a priest or priest-king excavated at Lagash and published on plate 6 bis oi Découvertes en Chaldée. Although this object, of unusual height for a statuette in the early period (it is about 18 inches high), came from the hand of the sculptor with the details of the skirt unfinished, its artistic merits are so great that it must be placed at the end of the period, probably as late as Urukagina, priest-king of Lagash about 2900 B.C. The arms of this figure are finely delineated and free from the body. The head and features are delicately cut and the neck is of normal length (fig. 1). In earlier statuary the neck is always unnaturally short and the whole figure has a squat appearance. Here, too, the execution of the eyes is of a new school, the eyeball being cut in the stone itself, whereas the earlier artists cut a deep socket and inset the eye with a ball of nacre or shell by means of bitumen. De Sarzec the excavator of Lagash had, however, the good fortune to purchase a statuette from an Arab of Chattra in the vicinity of Telloh, the site of ancient Lagash. It is the figure of a woman, and the appearance is so squat, the execution so rude, and the details so archaic, that it henceforth served as the standard specimen of early Sumerian sculpture. The balls have fallen from the eye-sockets. She wears a heavy woollen garment, with false frills, the costume already known from bas-reliefs and shell etchings as the early national dress of the Sumerians. On the earliest bas-reliefs, this petticoat is usually worked plain from the hips to the knees, and the lower part ends in a flounce of parallel tassels. These represent locks of wool, and on the primitive designs the tassels simply end in a point and are not scalloped as on other monuments published here (see fig. 2). In the case of male figures the body is nude from the waist upward. The dress consists of nothing but this woollen petticoat, which Heuzey calls a kaunakes. But the woollen garment worn by women is longer and is hung from the left shoulder, so as to cover the left breast.

Worcester House in the Strand, the most famous of all the houses so named, was situated in what the Ordnance Surveyors of 1871 called ‘St. Clement Danes Parish, Detached Area No. 2’, where now stands the Savoy Theatre (pl. XVII c). The other mansions of that name associated with the Earldom of Worcester were in the City or neighbourhood of London—in Bishopsgate Street, Anchor Street (at the foot of Garlick Hill) in Vintry Ward, Clerkenwell, Tower Street, Stepney, and Southwark, Acton, Ewell Park, and Enfield.

This paper is intended to supplement, and in the light of fuller information to modify, the communication regarding recent archaeological discoveries in Jersey that I had the honour to lay before the Society of Antiquaries last year. The new matter relates to two sets of excavations undertaken by the Societe Jersiaise, in both of which I was privileged to take part. Neither site was altogether virgin. But, whereas the cave known as La Cotte de St. Brelade could be counted on as rich in objects of antiquarian interest, Green Island, or, to call it by its more ancient and authentic name, La Motte, had yielded little, at all events of late. Fifty years ago a human cranium of ancient appearance had been found low down in its basement of loess or brick-earth; but since that time nothing more had come to light here, except a rough neolithic implement or two from the higher levels of the islet. Even now, perhaps, it can scarcely vie with the St. Brelade's cave as an attraction to the student of prehistorics; for I am afraid that he is apt to rate the neolithic in general all too cheaply, owing to the glamour that enshrouds the more remote, if hardly more inscrutable, palaeolithic. Yet, as the sequel will show, La Motte has at any rate given birth to a crop of problems, which, I venture to think, may prove of more than local importance.

I should be much obliged by your submitting the several articles that accompany this letter to the inspection of the Society of Antiquaries, if you think them deserving of attention: and I much wish it were in my power to furnish any better account of them, than that of mere description, and the mode and place of their discovery.

During the past summer a number of parts of ancient English astronomical instruments were found in the University Observatory at Oxford, during the refitting of certain rooms for the new programme of work of Professor Plaskett, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy. Professor Plaskett was kind enough to draw my attention to the find, and, on my expressing the opinion that it was of historic value, was gracious enough to present the instruments to the Oxford Museum of the History of Science in the Old Ashmolean.

The idea, long since accepted, that the English alabaster-carvers of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries depicted in their reliefs things times has, I believe, not seriously been questioned. As Prior, writing in 1913, put it, ‘since the scenes [as they appeared in the carvings] were those of contemporary representation in passion-plays and mysteries, the pasteboard make-ups of the religious stage, which were on view in every great city, were at hand as models to the shop-carvers. We may take it that in table-sculpture we…find…as it were, stage soldiers and property virgins’; ‘the blackening of the faces of the ruffians and executioners and heretics, as seen in many of the tables, was no doubt a stage trick’; and ‘The feather tights on angels…have the unmistakable appearance of a stage outfit’. Émile Mâle, discussing (in 1904) the effect, on medieval art, of the religious plays, had already observed that, although les érudits had posé mille questions concerning how the mystery-plays had been staged, the answer was clearly to be seen in numberless paintings, stained-glass windows, miniatures, and altar-pieces, which ‘nous offrent sans cesse l'image exact de ce qu'on voyait au théâtre’.