In the year 1789 I communicated to this Society some account of the remains of a Roman building which had been discovered in 1770 and 1787 at Comb-End Farm, in the parish of Colesbourn, belonging to Samuel Bowyer, Esq. about six miles distant from the Roman station of Corinium, now Cirencester; which account is printed in the ninth volume of the Archaeologia. In the year 1794 I had an opportunity of investigating another part of the same remains, when in the month of October an opening was made about fifty feet east of the pavement discovered in 1779, at a place where the inequality of the ground seemed to Indicate the remains of some building underneath, and the foundation walls of a room thirty-eight feet in length and fifteen in width soon appeared; the walls were of stone, somewhat more than two feet thick.

The roof of the nave of Tewkesbury Abbey belongs to the first half of the fourteenth century; the bosses are carved in stone. Those down the central rib represent scenes from the life of Christ; those on the sides are angels, some with censers, some with musical instruments, and some, at the east end, with instrumentsof the Passion; there are also the four evangelistic symbols. For purposes of reference I have numbered the central line of bosses from the west end C 1, C 2, etc.; those at the side are numbered from the east end, on the north side N 1, N 2, etc., and similarly on the south side. I have numbered them thus as the central bosses obviously begin with the Nativity at the west end, while the side series have the most important figures at the east end.

In considering the regulations which governed the scoring of the different points in joust or tourney we have certain materials preserved to us which are at once interesting and useful but at the same time confusing in the extreme. These materials consist of written or printed rules and regulations, either of a general nature or framed for some particular contest, sample ‘cheques’ or score sheets, and also actual scores of the points made at certain jousts.

The bronze brooch illustrated from photographs on pl. xi (and here also from drawings by Mr. F. Cottrill), was found a number of years ago by Mr. T. W. Armitage of Trent Lock, Long Eaton, on the high ground known as Red Hill, above the steep right bank of the river Soar just south of its confluence with the Trent in southern Nottinghamshire, between the villages of Thrumpton and Ratcliffe-upon-Soar and on the west side of the main L.M.S. railway line from Leicester to Nottingham, Long Eaton, and Derby. The site is habitually arable land, and Mr. Armitage has collected a number of antiquities from its surface, including besides this brooch several Roman coins and Romano-British bronze brooches along with some amount of mainly Romano-British pottery, to which, in the winter of 1943, he drew the attention of the Society. In subsequent correspondence he readily gave permission for the publication here of this unusual brooch, which he had himself recognized as a Celtic product of the pre-Roman Iron Age; and in lending it to the present writers for the purpose, he allowed it also to be cleaned and examined at Oxford, under Mr. Jacobsthal's direction, by Mr. V. R. Rickard in the laboratory of the Ashmolean Museum. The photographs were taken in the studio of the same museum.

Excavation within part of the former library at Audley End House, Essex, in 1979 brought to light debris from the plaster ceiling erected between 1753 and 1762, and much workshop debris relating to the decorative plasterwork executed throughout the new Great Apartments by Joseph Rose senior, to the designs of Robert Adam, in 1764-6. The latter material is used to demonstrate in detail the technology of decorative gypsum plasterwork. This is contrasted with the methods used by the stuccoist Thomas Clayton at Châtelhérault, Hamilton, Lanarkshire, c. 1742-6, and the eclectic technology evidenced in the earlier library ceiling at Audley End. Finally, the development of the technology of decorative plasterwork in Britain between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is reviewed in the light of information currently available.

The appearance of a joint paper more than ten years after the death of one of its authors demands a few words of explanation. Our late Fellow, Herbert Chitty, read before this Society on 21st May 1925 a paper on ‘Fromond's Chantry at Winchester College', printed in the 75th volume of Archaeologia. It was his intention to offer to the Society a companion paper upon the other chantry in the college, that of Warden Robert Thurbern, and from 1926 onwards he devoted time to research into its history, and to the collection of a series of lantern slides, made for him by the late Sydney Pitcher. Other occupations forced Chitty to lay aside this project, and it remained unfinished at his death on 28th December 1949. The basic materials survived him, however, as well as the collection of slides. Meanwhile, the years 1950–60 have seen momentous changes in the appearance of Thurbern's Chantry, adding a new chapter to its history. These functional, architectural, and decorative changes are now complete, and this seems a suitable time to present the results of Chitty's researches, followed by some account of recent happenings.

In the early summer of 1919 a memorable discovery was made on Traprain Law in the county of Haddington, a hill on the East Lothian estate of the Rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour. From the natural advantages for defence which the hill presents, as well as from the plentiful surface indications of occupation, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland had concluded that the site was well worth excavating, and had begun work on it in the summer of 1914. This was continued during the following summer till operations were suspended by the war. One of the results of these two seasons' exploration was the revelation that beneath the turf were four welldefined floor-levels referable to periods of occupation dating from the first to the fourth, or commencement of the fifth, century of our era. In May last year the latest of these floor-levels had been removed, and the second was just being loosened with the point of the pick when a remarkable hoard of Roman silver plate was discovered buried in a hole some two feet in diameter and two feet in depth. No evidence remained of any sack or box in which it might have been contained, but the pieces lay jumbled in a mass as if they had been thrown in disorder into the hole. Few of them resembled silver—to such an extent had the treasure been affected by its long burial in the soil—and a dull leaden hue with a tinge of purple best describes its colour. Its condition otherwise bore eloquent testimony to the treatment it had received at the hands of its owners previous to its concealment.