Palaeolithic flint implements from the Severn gravels are very rare, and therefore attention is here drawn to the series found in the neighbourhood of Barnwood, Glos. Some of these have already been published with comments by the Abbé Breuil and Reginald Smith, but others are here published for the first time.

This paper demonstrates that the five Irish early medieval church types have markedly differential distributions. In particular, most of those with antae are in the east, while most of those without antae are in the west. It is shown that this regionalism cannot be interpreted as a deliberate strategy of material differentiation on the part of particular politico-cultural groups. A reconsideration of the chronology suggests that many of the antae-less churches are relatively late, and so the division is primarily indicative of differences in the period and rate of mortared church construction, something that is influenced by both environmental and cultural factors. It is suggested that differences in church dimensions between east and west are indicative of subtle economic differences; and a range of archaeological evidence is used to sketch other economic and cultural variations. These patterns highlight the importance of exploring regionality, even when studying relatively cohesive entities such as early medieval Ireland.

Such information as we possess about the king's sport in the twelfth century is derived mostly from the Constitutio Domus Regis, which, it is now generally agreed, was drawn up in England soon after the death of Henry I, presumably for the information of his successor. This Establishment of the King's Household enumerates all the officers of the household, from the highest to the lowest, with their daily pay and allowances in kind; details which make it possible to assess the comparative importance of their respective offices.

Six prehistoric bronze phalerae in the London Museum are published and other examples from Britain and Ireland are discussed. The phalerae are of continental manufacture or inspiration and show contacts with central Germany in Ha B I; Alpine Lake Pillages in Ha B 3; Austria, Bavaria, and Belgium in Ha C. The possible uses of phalerae as personal ornament, horse-gear, and shieldbosses are considere

Recently, Mr. Roger Notcutt of Woodbridge showed me a beautiful flint implement (figs, 1, 1 a, and 1 b), and it is through his kindness that I am able to describe it. The specimen was found when spreading out a large mass of material carted to the seaplane station at Felixstowe for making a football ground, and this material was derived from the making of a new road in the eastern part of the town. The flint blade contains in its interstices, on both faces, remains of an easily recognizable reddish sandy loam, and this loam is present over a wide area beneath the thin surface humus in the district of Felixstowe where Looe Road is situated. I have visited the site of this highway, and have compared the loam there exposed with that attached to the implement. This comparison shows that the deposits are, so far as an examination with a high-power lens is concerned, identical. The flint blade has attached to its surfaces small patches of what appears to be manganese, and the sandy loam present at Looe Road contains similar small inclusions. There cannot therefore remain much doubt that the implement was derived from the sandy loam. This deposit represents, probably, the upper part of the Red Crag, relaid by wind action. The loam rests upon the latter bed, and the site of the find is on a low plateau bordering the North Sea and lying at a height of about 50 ft. above O.D.

Termoli is a small city of the Molise, on the Adriatic coast of Italy just above the junction of the ‘spur’ of Gargano with the main coastline. Like the whole of the lower Molise, it had in the middle ages a troubled history, always in dispute between the duchies of Benevento and Spoleto and the successive masters of Apulia, and on at least two occasions the victim of disastrous sack, at the hands of the Venetians in combat with Frederic II and in 1566 at the hands of the Turkish fleet under Ali Pasha. In 1943 it re-emerged characteristically into history as the scene of a successful flank-landing by the Eighth Army. Its most notable monuments are the remains of the castle built by Frederic II and the cathedral church of S. Basso, built under the same monarch and the most northerly outlier of the northern branch of the great Apulian school of Romanesque architecture. The façade, with its elaborate scheme of recessed arcading, derives directly from that of the Collegiata at Foggia, with which it shares the unusual characteristic of the use of a pronounced horseshoe arch. Within have recently been exposed the remains of the pre-Romanesque church and fragments of a mosaic pavement in the style of those at Otranto and Trani.

In March 1961, while inducting Mr. Inigo Jones into the wardenship of the Fyfield Down National Nature Reserve, I showed him the cup-markings I had found in the preceding spring on a sarsen in Delling Penning, not far without the reserve but on the same Wiltshire high ground. Appreciating his interest in these recondite prehistoric sculpturings and in the published account thereon that followed my report to the Society of Antiquaries, I asked Mr. Jones to let me know of any comparable or other markings that might strike him while patrolling the downland as outside the range of natural pittings and scorings that occur on so many of the Grey Wethers.

In the last number of this journal (pp. 9–27) there appeared an article by Dr. Gordon Ward on ‘The Iron Age Horseshoe and its Derivatives’. Dr. Ward has a wide practical knowledge of his subject and a stimulating method of approach, but on some important aspects of his subject there is scope for considerable difference of interpretation. In suggesting certain modifications to the position which he has stated, I should like at the outset to make it clear that I am able to do so largely as the result of the work of publication and analysis undertaken by Dr. Gordon Ward himself, and by his predecessor in this field, Dr. R. W. Murray. I have also to thank Mr. C. F. C. Hawkes for much useful criticism and information.

I do not propose on this occasion to make any contribution to the exceedingly obscure and difficult question of the origin of the law of treasure trove. The writer who has most recently discussed the subject, Mr. Cecil S. Emden, states the object of his article as being ‘to emphasize that, the law of treasure trove being indefinite, the practical difficulties in its administration which may arise are due not so much to the complexity attaching to particular cases as to the haze in which the origin of the law rests, and to the casual manner in which the rules have taken shape’. Where many better qualified writers have too often, like the celebrated ‘Mr. Parker, made the case darker, which was dark enough before’, further discussion by one who has no legal qualification is hardly to be encouraged. I shall confine myself therefore to a consideration of the definition of the subject, of the rules governing the administration in recent times, with especial reference to this country, and to the bearing of these rules on the interests of archaeology. Such references to older law and usage as cannot be avoided are made without any claim to original research.

Our ancestors were making horseshoes of a characteristic type at the very beginning of the Roman occupation. It was a highly developed type, and its elaboration, whether here or upon the Continent, presumably occupied many preceding years. It is this first type which it is proposed to describe as the Iron Age horseshoe. Its various characteristic features were slowly modified during succeeding centuries, but they were not finally lost until about the twelfth or thirteenth century A.D. From a survey of the various specimens which seem to have been in use during this long period there emerge derivatives of the Iron Age shoe, some of which are sufficiently distinctive to deserve the status of subtypes. Towards the end of the period we begin to meet with shoes which are medieval in their general characters, but which show that the technique of the Iron Age was still not wholly forgotten. Such specimens are conveniently described as transitional, but it is sometimes difficult to be sure whether individual shoes are genuine derivatives of the Iron Age shoe or examples of an entirely new, and possibly Norman, pattern, modified by traditional methods of manufacture.

In 1713 Sir Christopher Wren, then in his 81st year, reported on Westminster Abbey and took the opportunity to enunciate a theory of great importance in regard to the origins of Gothic architecture. Referring to the new church of Henry III he wrote:

This we now call the Gothic manner of architecture … I think it should with more reason be called the Saracen style, for these people wanted neither arts nor learning: and after we in the west lost both, we borrowed again from them, out of their Arabic books, what they with great diligence had translated from the Greeks.… The crusado gave us an idea of this form, after which King Henry built his church.… The Saracen mode of building, seen in the East, soon spread over Europe, and particularly in France, the fashions of which nation we affected to imitate in all ages, even when we were at enmity with it.

The linear dyke known as Dray's Ditches, about half a mile long, runs at right angles to the Icknield Way, whose modern track approaches it near its mid-point. The name ‘Dray's Ditche’ first appears on a map engraved by Thomas Jeffrys in 1765, and its course is marked, between Great Bramingham and the Old Bedford Road, on a map of 1774. In 1540 Leland wrote that ‘in the hye way I saw hard on eche syde 3 longe trenches, as they had been for Men of warre’. Davies referred to a ‘treble row of ditches, which run in a straight line from Bramingham to Warden Hill, where they run aslant up the hill’; whilst Beldam described ‘several trenches called Gray's Dykes which run down in irregular lines of two ditches between three banks, from a tumulus on the Warden Hills, a little to the south of the Icenhilde Road, and traverse it exactly at its junction with the old Luton and Bedford Road, but now disappearing in the cultivated fields on the opposite side of the road’. A subsidiary earthwork which runs along the western foot of Galley Hill for about half a mile, enclosing a flat area of some hundred acres, has also been described as part of this system. This earthwork, however, was considered by Crawford, in 1934, to be ‘merely an old enclosure around an arable field’, and excavation has proved his view correct.