Charmy Down is a plateau three miles north-east of Bath (fig. 1, 1), east of the Bath-Tetbury road. About a square mile in extent it has a general height of well over 600 ft. To the north the scarp falls swiftly, on the east more gently, to the wooded valley of St. Catherine's Brook, a tributary of the Bristol Avon and the modern Somerset–Gloucester boundary. At the foot of the steep western scarp a second stream flows south to the Avon. On the south Chilcombe Bottom separates Charmy Down from Solsbury Hill, distinguished by its Iron Age earthwork. The underlying rock is oolite, a southward continuation of the Cotswold formation.

The early years of the fourteenth century were memorable ones in the history of Exeter Cathedral, for work on the new presbytery, or novum opus as it is called in the Fabric Rolls, was in progress. When Bishop Bytton died, in 1307, building operations had reached an advanced stage, and the task of completing the work devolved upon his successor, Walter de Stapledon, a Devon man and at the time of his election precentor of the cathedral. At that date the presbytery vaulting was finished, with the exception of its colouring, and the windows were glazed. The transformed chancel of the Norman church was nearly ready to receive the stalls, but the Norman apse still separated the old and new parts of the building. In 1309–10 ‘John of Glastonbury’ was engaged in removing the stalls to the new quire, but we find no record of the date when the linking-up of the Norman building with the new work took place. The Fabric Roll of the following year records a visit of ‘Master William de Schoverwille’, master mason of Salisbury, to inspect the new work: from this we may infer that a stage had been reached when important decisions were pending—the furnishing of the chancel, the building of the altar-screen, and the addition of a triforium arcade and clerestory gallery to the newly built presbytery—and it may have been these undertakings which prompted the chapter to seek expert advice.

The present paper was prepared because the career of Hugh, Lord Willoughby—President of the Society from 1754 until his death in 1765—had been largely overlooked by historians, and denied even the briefest of general summaries. Yet it was a career characterized by industry, by versatility, by probity; and if in political areas it was impaired by Willoughby's diffidence, so that the opportunities arising from his own undoubted abilities and from Chancellor Hardwicke's patronage were scarcely ever taken up, it seems to have reached much more complete fruition intellectually in this Nonconformist peer's association with the Society of Antiquaries, the British Museum, the Royal Society, the Society of Arts, and the Warrington Academy. Most particularly it epitomizes the close involvement of Dissenters in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

Investigations into a later prehistoric ditch system in an area of Wessex about 15 km. south-west of Salisbury are described. The main objectives were to study the past environment of the earthworks at various stages in their history and to investigate their form and how they may have functioned. The two parts of the system studied were just south of Blagdon Plantation, Pentridge, Dorset, and on Knoll Down, Damerham, Hants. Excavations, study of soil and sediment macromorphology, and molluscan analysis were the main techniques used.

At Blagdon Plantation the earthwork lay in an area in which there was no trace of earlier fields. The bank was of simple dump construction, the ditch shallow and flat-bottomed, possibly unfinished. The molluscan sequence prior to the construction of the earthwork indicated a succession from closed woodland to stable grassland. The ditch sequence showed no trace of shading, and there was no indication of a former hedgerow on the bank crest. At Knoll Down, the earthwork crosses lynchets of an Iron Age field system, dated by potsherds from the ancient ploughsoil sealed beneath the bank. In one profile, lynchet deposits with an open-country molluscan fauna preceded the bank, and in some sections clear ploughsoils were present. A short episode when the area was under grass immediately preceded the earthwork. At one point, where there was no accompanying buried soil, deeply incised ploughmarks were present at the base of the bank, interpreted as clearance- or marking-out lines, possibly of a symbolic nature. The bank was of simple dump construction, the ditch deep, steep-sided, and with a narrow, flat bottom. There was no indication of a hedge. An earlier, smaller ditch, which may have held a wooden palisade, had been backfilled deliberately. These changes, which may reflect friction between different groups of people on various scales, took place in a prevailing environmental background of open country.

In the years 1899, 1900, and 1901 Mr. George Bonsor, a British subject residing in Spain, visited the Scilly Isles, the archipelago of tiny granite islands 28 miles south-west of Land's End, for archaeological research. Mr. Bonsor was long a profound student of the archaeology of his adopted country and was interested in the history of the ancient tin trade. It was in this connexion that he visited the Scillies, for he wished to test the hypothesis that they were the Cassiterides, the fabled tin islands of the Atlantic. With regard to the tin trade, his researches proved entirely negative, but in the course of his visits he excavated and planned some of the numerous megalithic tombs that abound in the islands. Mr. Bonsor, however, never published an account of his work in Scilly, but kept the notes and finds at his castle at Mairena del Alcor near Seville for many years. There he was visited in 1926 by Mr. T. D. Kendrick of the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities at the British Museum, and through him sent a part of the finds to the Museum. At the same time the writer had become interested in the archaeology of the islands, and with the help of Mr. Kendrick was able to obtain more of the finds for the British Museum as well as plans of the more important tombs and some notes with regard to their excavation. The most important plans and an abstract of the notes the writer has included in his Archaeology of Cornwall, but space prevented the use of all of Mr. Bonsor's material. Mr. Reginald Smith, Keeper of British and Mediaeval Antiquities at the British Museum, had for a long time urged Mr. Bonsor to communicate the results of his excavations to the Society of Antiquaries, but the latter died without having done so. Subsequently Mr. Smith obtained Mr. Bonsor's plans and the full account of the excavation of the most important tomb, and these he has kindly permitted the writer to publish.

In November 1924 Professor A. Kingsley Porter gave to the William Hayes Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a medallion of stained glass which was alleged to have come from Canterbury Cathedral. The foreman of the cathedral glassworks has now identified this panel as one which was given or sold without authorization to a collector early in the 1920's. Now the panel must be attached to a series in the cathedral. This provides an occasion for a brief reconsideration of the style and date of the Canterbury windows.

The prosecution in Cyprus of an Italian citizen for illicit excavation in 1878 is a very early case in modern cultural heritage law. In taking over from the Ottoman empire the administration of Cyprus in June 1878, Britain inherited the Ottoman legal system, including its 1874 law on antiquities. Four months later, the British arrested Alessandro Palma di Cesnola for flouting a newly announced ban on excavation. The evidence of official, confidential records reveals the steps leading to the Italian’s arrest, trial and conviction in court. His trial followed Ottoman legal procedures, but the verdict was decided by the district commissioner, a British military officer unfamiliar with local law and languages. Alessandro Palma di Cesnola’s claims of American citizenship and a diplomatic status are shown to have been invalid. A closing review suggests that the British Museum was influential in prompting the ban on excavation and that moral and financial pressures led Alessandro Palma di Cesnola to ignore it.

Three watercolours painted by Thomas Telford survive within the Society's archives. Two of these watercolours are a plan and sections of an excavation of a Roman bath suite, supervised by Telford at Wroxeter, and the third is an elevation of the medieval Mardol gate over the Welsh bridge, Shrewsbury. The paintings provide an insight into his interest in archaeology and ancient buildings whilst practising as an architect in Shropshire, before he began his engineering career. Further, their deposition helps confirm the standing of the Society at the time, as the place where important archaeological discoveries from across the country were brought to public attention, and how it acted as an archive for their primary records.

The three copper-gilt and enamel plaques from Warden Abbey are the most important examples of late medieval metalwork from an English Cistercian abbey. They are currently exhibited at the British Museum and dated to the mid-fifteenth century. A reinterpretation of the monograms decorating the plaques allows their patron to be identified as Abbot Walter Clifton (c 1377–97). An analysis of the plaques’ style and iconography also suggests a late fourteenth-century date. Clifton's personal devotions and an unusual aspect of the plaques’ iconography can be explained by reference to the spirituality of the Cistercian Order. The plaques’ closest parallel is a roundel decorated with the badge of Richard ii. Evidence from inventories and comparison with Continental material suggests that the Warden plaques were, in all probability, morses, used to fasten a cope.

In England, crosses on commemorative carvings are unusual in the two centuries after the Reformation. In south-east Wales, however, there are numerous examples, in a range of styles, suggesting the work of several groups of stonemasons. A number have the IHS trigram, in the square capitals format popularised by Ignatius Loyola as the emblem of the Jesuits. Some of these memorials commemorate known recusants, but most seem to exemplify the characteristic Welsh combination of traditionalism and loyalism. There is plenty of other evidence for Welsh communities in the early modern period continuing with traditional ‘Catholic’ practices (pilgrimage, veneration of relics and wells) while still regarding themselves as members of the Established Church. Some similar stones are found over the border into Herefordshire, but there are very few in north and west Wales, suggesting that this was a purely local fashion.