The narrative of the deposition and murder of King Edward the Second, as delivered by both early chroniclers and recent historians, so far fails to realise the full interest of its subject, that it leaves in obscurity the subsequent history of the chief mover of those fearful events. The ambitious Mortimer expiates his crimes on the scaffold. Isabella, the instigator of sedition against her king, the betrayer of her husband, survives her accomplice; but, from the moment that her career of guilt is arrested, she is no more spoken of. The name which had before been so prominent, and had moved in us such deep and changing interest, disappears at once and entirely from the narrative. It is briefly intimated that the fallen Queen passed the remainder of her days in seclusion, and we can only speculate in what spirit she bore her humiliation and met the reproaches of her conscience in her long retirement; how far her withdrawal from public life was compulsory; and whether, or to what extent, she recovered her influence over the son she had so inhumanly set against his father. After mentioning the execution of Mortimer, Froissart proceeds to tell us that “the King soon after, by the advice of his Council, ordered his mother to be confined in a goodly castle, and gave her plenty of ladies to wait and attend on her, as well as knights and esquires of honour. He made her a handsome allowance to keep and maintain the state she had been used to, but forbade that she should ever go out or shew herself abroad, except at certain times, when any shows were exhibited in the court of the castle. The Queen thus passed her time there meekly, and the King, her son, visited her twice or thrice a year.” All that was added to this account by later historians was, that Castle Rising was the place of her confinement; that after the first two years the strictness of her seclusion was relaxed; that she surrendered her dowry into the King's hands, and received from him, in lieu of it, manors and rents of the yearly value of, at first, 3,000l. and, subsequently, 4,000l.; that she died at Castle Rising, on the 22nd of August, in the year 1358, and was buried in the church of the Grey Friars, within Newgate, in the city of London.

The rarity of Celtic tumuli in the eastern part of Kent contrasts strongly withthe comparative abundance of Anglo-Saxon sepulchral remains which have beendiscovered in that part of the county. One of the former, explored by Douglas,and a large and interesting barrow in Iffins Wood, near Canterbury, opened aboutthirty years ago by Mr. Bell, are, as far as I know, the only recorded instancesof Celtic tumuli in East Kent.

The excavations of 1907 were begun on 29th April, much earlier than usual, and were continued till the beginning of October, under the direction of Messrs. Ashby, Hudd, and H. L. Jones (assisted by Mr. F. King and Mr. F. G. Newton, as architects). The whole of the work has been carried out upon land belonging to Viscount Tredegar, F.S.A., President of the Caerwent Exploration Fund, to whom the warmest thanks of the Committee are again due.

Implements fashioned from the antler of the red deer have long been known to have formed part of the tools with which primitive man and his successors in much more recent times carried on the varied industries that claimed his care and skill, enabling him to turn to good account the many products of soil and chase which thoughtful Nature had placed at his disposal. Almost every part of the antler was utilized; the tines being removed in order to form gouges, punches, hand levers, and piercing instruments, while the beam, when deprived of its tines, was cut up into sections from which adzes and such-like cutting implements wrere formed, or hammers were devised. A useful instrument which served as a rake, or scraper, was made from the branching points at the cup; while a clever combination of beam and tines produced a tool which served the double purpose of pick (or lever) and rake (or scraper). Much ingenuity was shown in devising and considerable skill in forming such implements, but in no case is this more evident than in that of the deer-horn pick. Generally speaking, the pick was formed from an antler by severing the cup end and removing the bez and the trez tines, thus leaving the beam to form the haft and the brow tine to form the pick (fig. 1), while the burr remained in position in order to give strength to the weakest part, the angle of intersection between the handle and the “blade”, and to add weight to the blow. The “false brow”, or undeveloped bez, was sometimes left in place (plate XVI, no. 1), but this was rather the exception than the rule. The upper portion of the beam or the longest point beyond the “cup” was often left in position to form an elongation of the shaft which assisted greatly in directing the blow, while it added very materially to the leverage of the pick. Fig. 1 offers a very good example of a double-handed pick with an elongated shaft, and with blunted point and stem worn smooth by usage.

The title which has just been read to you will shew that it is not my intention to enter into the inquiry which has been so learnedly conducted by others, into the various substances which have been used for the purposes of writing, and the times when one substance became superseded by another which was found more suitable to the purpose.

In July, 1902, one of the images on the upper part of the north tower at Wells suddenly fell to the ground and was broken into many pieces. There had not been any reason for supposing that this or any other of the many images that adorn the west front was in a dangerous condition, but the Dean and Chapter at once took the wise and prudent course of ordering an inspection of the images, so far as this could be done without scaffolding. The report of the Surveyor to the Chapter, Mr. Edmund Buckle, was far from reassuring, and he recommended the substitution of proper bronze holdfasts for the decaying iron cramps by which most of the images were then secured. As a consequence of this report the Dean and Chapter ordered a section of the work to be taken in hand, beginning with the north tower, and when this was finished the scaffolding was moved to another section, and so eventually across the whole of the front and to the gable of the nave. All the images have thus as far as possible been made safe, and a deep debt of gratitude is due to the Dean and Chapter for thus helping to prolong the lives of these priceless sculptures, many of which were found to be in a very precarious state.

In the month of September last whilst staying at Brighton I examined nearly the whole of the ancient earthworks which occupy the summits of the highest eminences of the Downs between Beachy Head on the east, and the neighbourhood of Chichester on the west.

In the early summer of 1902 a large and important discovery of Byzantine silver plate and gold jewellery was made at Karavás, a village close to the ancient Lapithos, about six miles west of Kyrenia on the north coast of Cyprus. The spot was not far from the monastery of Acheiropoietos, close to which another find of silver of a similar period had been made a few years previously, the objects being acquired by the British Museum and described in Archaeologia.

The human remains from Tomb 1 at Ghain Tiffiha comprise the more important bones of two skeletons. They are generally well preserved, though very light and brittle, as would appear from the almost entire destruction of the animal matter. They are uniformly stained of a dark reddish-brown hue, and here and there incrusted with a tufaceous or stalagmitic deposit of the same colour. The bones from Tombs 2 and 3 are, on the contrary, of a pale or drab clay colour. The dark colour of the former is attributed by Captain Swann to the percolation through cracks in the limestone rock of water tinged with the highly-coloured soil with which many fissures in the upper limestone of Malta are filled. The Tombs 2 and 3, on the contrary, had become filled with clay from “Clay-bed No. 3,” and hence the difference.

The site is in the parish of Playden, near Rye, Sussex, about 300 yards south-east of Mockbeggar House, and covers the top of a detached knoll which projects from the watershed between the Tillingham valley and the levels of Romney Marsh. The knoll is about 150 ft. above sea-level. No fewer than five springs rise within a short distance of the site (fig. 1).

The subsoil belongs to one of the geological formations of the Wealden series, viz., the Hastings Beds, represented at Mockbeggar by the Wadhurst Clay which contains extensive patches of sand and, in particular, pockets of a very fine white sand. One of these pockets is quite close to the site. It is of special interest that while the soil of the spur is mostly sand there is one protruding patch of hard yellow clay, and it is precisely on this patch that the prehistoric people formed their settlement.

Under the Wadhurst Clay, which here is only a few feet in thickness, there is over a hundred feet or so of sandstone forming the Ashdown Sands, well exposed at Point Hill in the parish.

Baroque artists were so concerned at the changeability of contemporary fashion that they employed Roman, Arcadian and informal dress in portraits in an attempt to be timeless.

An isolated building in the Wadi al-Qarn below the castle of Montfort has attracted the attention of travellers for over two centuries. Various explanations have been suggested for it. A detailed survey, however, carried out in September 1982, now allows its character to be understood more fully than hitherto. It is suggested that the earliest part of the structure was a mill-house, associated witha masonry dam built across the valley. This phase may be dated to the twelfth or thirteenth century before 1228, when it is possible to identify it with a mill dependent on the village of Trefile, which belonged at that date to the Teutonic Order. The second phase represents a domestic hall, built over the top of the mill-house, which then went out of use. The hall's architecture and masonry marks allow it to be associated with a later phase of the castle itself, datable to some period between 1229 and 1266. It is suggested that it was a guest house, dependent on the castle of the Teutonic Knights, and intended for the use of important secular or ecclesiastical visitors and their households.

In the Beauchamp Chapel of St Mary's, Warwick, lies the body of Lord Denbigh, son of Robert, Earl of Leicester, and of his wife, Lettice Knollys (pl. XXXVIIa). The tomb, unlike those of his parents, his uncle, Ambrose Dudley, or the original denizen of the chapel, Richard Beauchamp, warrants little mention in guides and histories, and yet the child who was buried there was for the course of his short life one of the greatest heirs in England, and his tomb embodies the contradictions and ambiguities of the English Renaissance attitude to children.

The Alfred jewel, found in 1693 in Newton Park near the Island of Athelney in Somerset, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, is one of the most famous pieces of late Saxon jewellery. It is an intriguing object which has never been satisfactorily explained. The main facts and theories about it are conveniently summarized in the booklet by Miss Joan Kirk (now Mrs. J. R. Clarke) published by the Ashmolean Museum. This present note is mainly concerned with the use of the Alfred jewel and the Minster Lovell jewel, an object of similar character also described in Miss Kirk's booklet, and with the interpretation of the human figure contained in the Alfred jewel.

As the intensive study of the medieval rolls of arms continues it is becoming ever more clear that, even in the thirteenth century, the general rolls were drawing material from existing collections—often in blocks of entries. One of the features of many of the general rolls, both in England and on the continent, is a section devoted to the arms of emperors and kings; sometimes with a selection of oriental and African potentates (Appendix I). Such series were also used in decoration; as in the windows formerly in the great hall of the Bishop's Palace at Lincoln, in wood carvings at St Mary's, Barton on Humber, and the early fifteenth-century painted ceiling in St Alban's Abbey. These appear, in most of the rolls, as self-contained units, and vary in number and content. There was, therefore, no single source from which the compilers drew their material. In the present study the author proposes to examine some of the problems and to introduce two newly discovered English medieval rolls of arms relevant to the subject.