A number of ecclesiastical buildings in Norfolk and northern Suffolk show a common repertoire of distinctively elaborated mouldings, which in several cases involves such precise repetition of formations that the same templates must have been used repeatedly. On the evidence of the mouldings, and of other detailed similarities between the buildings, it is argued that they may all be seen as the work of the same designing mason, and the documentation suggests that his active career was centred on the second quarter of the fifteenth century. The range of his personal manner of design in parochial churches is best seen at Wiveton, near the north coast, but he was also able to work on a more expanded scale, as in the Erpingham Gate into Norwich Cathedral close; the connecting link between the two scales of his work is to be found in the parochial west tower of Wymondham abbey.

It has long been understood that if any definite connexion could be proved between Stonehenge and the barrows of admittedly Bronze Age date which surround it, an approximate dating would be possible of Stonehenge itself. The common, first-sight belief that the barrows and the monument represent a necropolis encircling its sanctuary has been opposed on the ground of the irregular grouping and distances of the barrows. It may, however, be suggested in passing that if the Plain was parcelled out among clans or families into territories nearer and further and of varying sizes, and if the known custom obtained of burying the important dead where they had lived, this irregularity is explicable.

Although in the work of conservation and reconstitution of upper stories new lines have been recently struck out at Pompeii, at Ostia, and elsewhere, it may be fairly said that they have followed the example already set on the site of Knossos, where the work has now proceeded with successively improving methods for twenty-six years.

In a recent account of the sixth-century Anglian cemetery at Londesborough in the Yorkshire Wolds, one curious piece of bronze from a female's grave was inadequately described merely as ‘perhaps an unusual type of buckle’. Too late for publication in that report a small group of parallel objects came to my notice, the existence of which has since been corroborated by Dr. Roes's recognition of a complete class of early continental quoit brooches, of which this group forms one variant. In fact, the fragmentary Londesborough piece (fig. i (4)) appears to be identical with an uncommon early Alamannic or Marcomannic group of thistle-shaped annular brooches.

On the printed title-page to the Monasticon are the names of Roger Dodsworth and William Dugdale. The main body of the work was divided into sections, each dealing with a monastic order and the edifices which had belonged to it. It was Dugdale who commissioned Wenceslaus Hollar and his pupil Daniel King to make views of the cathedrals and churches for this enterprise. Since the development of the monasteries and the Church of England were inextricably mixed, this vast book in three folio volumes became a history of the foundations of all the principal churches in the kingdom.

The group of small bronze models which forms the subject of this paper entered the British Museum in 1854 with the purchase of the Croften Croker Collection. They were said to have been found in a tumulus in Sussex, without any further details being given.

The ‘Celtic Cabinet’, acquired from John Britton when the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society and Devizes Museum were founded in 1853, is published for the first time. The cabinet, with its watercolours and plaster models, is described. The megalithic subjects of the watercolours which decorate it are identified; two of the paintings are ascribed to John Sell Cotman; the others are related to topographic artists in John Britton's employment. The models in the cabinet of Stonehenge and Avebury are identified as standard products of Hen Browne, the first guardian of Stonehenge. The meaning and associations of ‘Celtic’ as a name for megalithic antiquities are explored. It is shown that the cabinet was made, probably about 1824, for George Watson Taylor of Erlestoke Park, Devizes; the circumstances of its making are discussed, together with the intellectual context of the piece and its relation to Britton's plan for a Druidical Antiquarian Company.

The Monkton brooch was found in 1971 when mechanical trench digging disturbed a large Anglo-Saxon cemetery north of Monkton village on Thanet, east Kent. It is a large composite disc brooch made of electrum, silver, and gilded bronze, set with garnets, blue glass, and shell Consideration of its design, construction, and very pale, silver-debased, gold suggests that it was made no earlier than c. A.D. 640–50 and is amongst the latest of Kentish composite brooches.

The work of the Price family, William known as ‘the elder’, Joshua, and William the younger, is of considerable interest in the history of glass-painting in England, not merely because they lived during a period in which, for lack of patronage, glass-painters were few, but from the degree of accomplishment, both artistic and technical, shown in their work.

The excavation of Roman Alchester, begun in 1925—6 under the auspices of the Oxford branch of the Classical Association, was continued for nearly four weeks during August and September, 1927. The object of this year's work being to discover something of the plan and lay-out of the town in its successive periods, the region selected for this purpose was the vicinity of the east gateway of the town, and several points along the line of the rampart between that and the north-east corner mound.

To deepen our understanding of early medieval exile, the present study characterizes ways in which scholars have studied cave use in Britain and Ireland. As key figures in the history of archaeology, Sir Daniel Wilson and Sir James Young Simpson were crucial for establishing Scotland’s cave sites as subjects for study. Triggered by these two, a century and a half of research has related these places to the flowering of Gaelic monasticism. Nonetheless, fundamental similarities between early Christian communities in Britain and Ireland are at odds with this northern distribution, and bring the question of cave use beyond Scotland sharply into focus. Our paper therefore targets two questions: (1) to what extent were cave sites used by early Christian communities elsewhere in the Insular world; and (2) is our perception of cave use as a particularly north British phenomenon skewed by the long history of Scottish interest in the topic?

Building 2, insula xxvii, at Verulamium is a large townhouse of three wings fronted by a corridor (porticus), facing the north side of the forum. Sheppard Frere, who excavated it between 1956 and 1960, concluded that it was constructed around ad 380, and was replaced during the fifth century by a large buttressed building, which in turn was cut by a water-pipe trench. This paper offers a reinterpretation of this site, suggesting a construction date in the late second rather than the fourth century.

Physical evidence of weapon trauma in medieval burials is unusual, and evidence for trauma caused by arrowheads is exceptionally rare. Where high frequencies of traumatic injuries have been identified, this is mainly in contexts related to battles; it is much less common in normative burials. Osteological analysis of one context from an assemblage of disarticulated and commingled human bones recovered from a cemetery associated with the thirteenth-century Dominican friary in Exeter, Devon, shows several instances of weapon trauma, including multiple injuries caused by projectile points. Arrow trauma is notoriously difficult to identify, but this assemblage shows that arrows fired from longbows could result in entry and exit wounds in the skull not incomparable to modern gunshot wounds. Microscopic examination of the fracture patterns and spalling associated with these puncture wounds provides tentative evidence that medieval arrows were fletched to spin clockwise. These results have profound implications for our understanding of the power of the medieval longbow, for how we recognise arrow trauma in the archaeological record and for our knowledge of how common violent death and injury were in the medieval past, and how and where casualties were buried.

The publication of the curious Chronicle relative to the latter part of Edward the Third's reign, so ably illustrated by you in the last portion of the Archæologia, has led me more particularly to examine the volume in which that Narrative, together with many other historical and legal Tracts, is bound up, forming Nos. 6215—6232, of the Harleian Collection. The greater part of these Tracts, as you are, no doubt, aware, were certainly once in the possession of Stow (several of them being written with his own hand), and after his death [1605] passed, with his other papers, into the hands of Sir Simonds d'Ewes, whence they were transferred to the noble library of the Earl of Oxford. So far all is void of difficulty. But there is yet another possessor to be accounted for, between the period of Stow's decease and the acquisition of these MSS. by Sir Simonds d'Ewes—I mean, the person who has numbered, and prefixed a title to, the greater part of the contents of the volume in question, and who simply signs his initials R. ST. with the date 1615. I am unable, I confess, satisfactorily to ascertain the individual alluded to, but in No. 6219, I find a paper on the affairs of Scotland, headed by Stow thus: “Out of a great boke of Records borowyd of Master Stevenson.” I conjecture, therefore, that it is to this Master Stevenson we are chiefly indebted for the collection and preservation of the tracts, all of which are more or less valuable to the historian.

When Constantine the Great transferred the seat of his empire from Rome to Byzantium he not only preserved that empire from destruction, but he established it at a centre from whence it derived new life and energy. Menaced by the barbarians from the north and the Persians from the east, the empire was in constant danger of overthrow. Now it is often of the greatest importance rather to anticipate an attack than to await its onslaught, rather to be ready for your enemy near his gates than to await his arrival at yours. Constantine therefore removed his base of operations nearer to the source of danger and established himself at the very gate of his enemies. At New Rome new conditions of life had to be faced; new methods of building, suitable to the climate, the skilled labour, and to the materials available, had to be devised. But in the very solution of these difficulties lay the germs of salvation. By his bold and sagacious action a new life and vigour was infused into his people, a new force which not only preserved the empire for over eleven hundred years, but maintained a progressive civilization during what was probably one of the darkest periods in the history of the world. But it was in the selection of the particular site that the emperor showed the greatest prescience. At Byzantium he commanded the great line of communication between east and west through Asia Minor and Thrace, and also controlled the maritime passage between the Euxine and the Propontis, the Straits of Bosporus. He secured at once the most potentially wealthy and the most strongly situated position in Eastern Europe.