On 29th November 1950 workmen employed by the Merseyside and North Wales Electricity Board were relaying a cable on the west side of Castle Esplanade, Chester. In cleaning up the western side of the trench with a spade, 18 in. below the present pavement level and 29 ft. to the south of St. Martin's Court, one of the men cut through a small earthenware vessel and a shower of coins and silver bullion poured into the bottom of the trench. It is distressing to record that although the Grosvenor Museum is only 100 yards from the site, the discovery was not reported. No significance was attached to the find; one of the men stated later that they thought they were milk checks. Three of the men put handfuls of coins into their pockets; others were distributed to children near, and the rest shovelled back into the trench. The engineer-in-charge took several to his office for thepurpose of identification, but later forgot about them. One of the men sent some of the coins to Hunter Street Girls' School, by his niece, for identification, and the mistress immediately sent them to the Curator of the Grosvenor Museum.This happened on 10th December, and the Curator at once appreciating the significance of the discovery, set to work to recover as much as possible of the hoard, and reported the matter to the City Coroner. As a result he recovered a hundred coins, twelve ingots of silver, and a fragment of the vessel.

The kilns were first discovered by the owner of the land, Mr. W. Nicholson, in the autumn of 1942 while ploughing the field for the first time in living memory. Potsherds and lumps of red clay were noticed in the wake of the plough, and Mr. F. T. Baker, of Lincoln Museum, was notified and excavation arranged and completed by December of the same year.

The bronze forepart of an ibex (pls. xv, xvi), now in the collection of our Fellow Mr. Oscar Raphael, was previously in the Paytel collection. M. Paytel originally bought it in Cairo about thirty years ago, and it is known to have been ultimately obtained from a man who had brought it from Mesopotamia. This history may be regarded as reliable, and an Egyptian provenance is thereby rendered unlikely.

Early medieval spoons are sufficiently rare to make any addition to their number a matter of interest. The specimen illustrated on pl. lxi, a and fig. I was found in London and is now in the Guildhall Museum, to the authorities of which I am indebted for permission to publish it. Dr. P. Nørland, whose publication of the double spoon from Ribe underlies much of what follows, provided the original of pl. LXII; and Dr. S. Grieg has allowed me to reproduce pl. LXV from his invaluable work, Middelalderske Byfunde fra Bergen og Oslo (figs. 52 and 53). I have also to thank Mr. T. D. Kendrick, Mr. R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford, and Mr.G. C. Dunning for several helpful suggestions.

The area-excavation towards the centre of the fort has shown that well-defined traces of occupation exist, ranging from the Roman period to the early nineteenth century. The nature of the Roman occupation, though still uncertain in many aspects, is becoming much clearer and can now be divided into phases tentatively linked to a broad historical framework. Early in the fifth century settlement of Germanic type appeared, with which was associated a gilded bronze disc of apparently sub-Roman form. Then followed more regular Saxon occupation, beginning in the late fifth or early sixth century and probably continuing to the eighth or ninth century. The late Saxon period provides a very detailed picture of a hall with its ancillary buildings, land boundaries, and rubbish-tipping area, all of considerable potential significance on more than a local scale. The later periods are more sporadically represented, but interesting correlations can be made between the archaeological evidence and contemporary documentary and graphic accounts.

To understand the internal landscape of the fort more clearly it is evident that much more of the central area will have to be fully excavated and this will occupy most of the effort throughout the next five seasons' work. At the same time it is planned to continue with the investigations of the Priory and the Castle, and to devote some time to the outstanding problem of the defences.

On 26th March 1926 a cist burial was discovered by the grave-digger in the cemetery of Penllwyn Calvinistic Methodist Chapel, near Aberystwyth, Cardiganshire. Notice of the find was sent to Mr. George Eyre Evans, of Aberystwyth, and the buried cist was examined by him and the minister of the congregation, the Rev. M. H. Jones, B.A. I cannot do better than quote the account of the cist and its contents written down by the former immediately after the discovery.

This street is close to the area of Folkestone which suffered severely from enemy action; indeed certain of the houses, which were once at its southern end, no longer exist. Examination of the remaining houses, several of them shaken by blast, was undertaken with a view to the removal of any fittings of value, should it be decided to demolish them.

This examination led at once to the realization that nearly all of the remaining houses, nos. 13 to 49 (on the western side) and 16 to 44 (on the eastern), are of seventeenth-century type with but one room on each floor, ground, first, and attic. Many hundreds of this type of seventeenth-century house have recently been studied at Great Yarmouth, where some dated examples belong to the first half of the century. At that town certain features occur in all houses of that half-century so far studied. They are (1) a front door and a back door opposite to one another with connecting passage, off which opened the ground-floor room; (2) a fire-place on the side of the room opposite to the passage, flanked on one side by a cupboard with a small window lighting it and on the other side by a winding stair, closed at the bottom by a door; and (3) the continuance of this stair to the attic floor with small windows lighting it between each floor. Stop-chamfered beams are, of course, very frequently found.

Newly discovered evidence, here printed, from the proceedings in an equity suit in the Exchequer shows that le Sueur's statue of Charles I was indeed buried underground in the Interregnum, and illuminates the circumstances of the burial. This fills a lacuna in the documentary history of the statue.

Mr. A. Wright, in a letter to our Secretary of 8th November 1923, called attention to a number of medieval tiles found in the church of Llangattock-nigh-Usk, a few miles from Abergavenny. With one exception they belong to the well-known Great Malvern series, made there and at Droitwich about the middle of the fifteenth century, as we know from the discovery of kilns at those places in 1833 and 1837 respectively, still containing some of the tiles. The Malvern tiles have been described in the past by two Fellows of this Society: Mr. Albert Way in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1844, pt. ii pp. 25–31 (reprinted in Nott's Malvern Priory Church), and Canon A. S. Porter in the Antiquary, vol. xxi (1890), pp. 71, in, 155. But a good deal remains to be said about them, and it may be worth while to take this opportunity of adding some notes about the types which occur at Llangattock.

York Minster once contained a relief bronze effigy to Dean William de Langton who died in 1279, the earliest known example of such a monument in this country. The effigy was probably destroyed in 1645 though remnants of the tomb survived until 1829. Its appearance is known from antiquarian sources. It is not clear that the expertise to cast a full-size effigy existed in England at that time and the tomb may have been made on the Continent, possibly in France.