The bronze palstave here figured was found, in 1934, in digging a hole for a wooden post in the yard of a small holding known as ‘Mount Pleasant’ in the parish of Curland, 6 miles SSE. of Taunton and about 600 ft. above sea-level. ‘Mount Pleasant’ is not named on the 6-in. Ordnance Sheet (LXXX, S.W.), but it is the building 530 yards SSE. of Curland Church, and, as the crow flies, it is only 680 yards NNE. of the ‘Beacon’ of Castle Neroche. The implement was found about 3 ft. deep by the owner of the holding, Mr. D. G. Dicks, who gave it to Dr. Richard A. Fawcus of Chard. Through the instrumentality of Capt. W. S. L. Henderson, Dr. Fawcus presented it to the Somerset County Museum in April 1935, in which collection a similar implement, having two loops (from South Petherton), had been exhibited for many years.

Investigation of this site in July 1935, reported in the Antiq. Journ. xvi, 165, was severely limited by time, and, since certain problems still remained unsolved, advantage was taken of the presence of the University Camp for Unemployed at Eynsham in July 1936 to endeavour to clear up some of these problems. For this purpose additional radial trenches were driven at various points of the compass and the ground immediately south of the tower was also examined. Although the weather was less favourable than in 1935, nevertheless a fair amount of work was done, resulting in an appreciable addition to our knowledge of the construction of the fortification.

Bound up with other additional matter in the heirloom copy of Wren's Parentalia, on which I read a short paper on the 17th June, 1909;, is an engraving by Hulsbergh. It is an emblematical design of a pyramid dotted with medallions, on each of which is written the name of a Wren building and a reference number. At the sides are two tables giving the costs of each building, set out to the uttermost farthing. No doubt many students of Wren have wondered, as I did, where Hulsbergh got these detailed figures, and by good fortune I have found their source in Bodley's Library, Oxford.

The reign of Mary i (24 July 1553–17 November 1558) is widely seen as a disaster for both the woman herself and her devout faith. It can be argued that she did more than anyone to make England a Protestant nation. When we seek to find any trace of her patronage of the arts or of major building projects, we find that little survives. Eamon Duffy called such traces the ‘disjecta membra’. Yet each piece, each surprising survival, demonstrates an awareness of the latest fashions, embracing a forward-looking form of Renaissance arts rather than a backward-looking, conservative Gothic. To discover and emphatically assign a major new piece of work to this catalogue of relics is justifiably a cause of celebration. In 2011, Charles Tracy FSA re-assessed the Marian choir stalls now in Holy Trinity church, Sutton Coldfield (in Warwickshire), rightly calling them the ‘refugee choir stalls from Worcester’, for it was from Worcester cathedral that this magnificent suite was evicted in a fit of Victorian vandalism. In this article, the author demonstrates that these choir stalls were created through the patronage of Mary i, and their makers evoked in their creation ideas and fashions that emanated from Hans Holbein and Sebastiano Serlio, to create what is a unique set of work.

In 2007, near Harrogate, in North Yorkshire, a Viking-period hoard was discovered with a Carolingian silver-gilt cup. This article examines this cup, highlighting Oriental, Central Asian and classical parallels in both metal and pottery for the cup’s form and decoration. The overall significance of the cup’s iconography has already been thoroughly discussed by Professor Egon Wamers, who proposed that the scenes on the cup are paralleled in the early ninth-century Stuttgart Psalter. This article proposes that Oriental forms and decorative elements in metalwork were channelled to the West through diplomatic contacts and trade by way of a complex of routes by land and sea, as well as possibly by refugees from Islamic conquests.

This paper is based on the authors’ longstanding interest in Northumberland House and follows two previous papers by Manolo Guerci, which appeared in this journal in 2010 and 2014 respectively. The first paper explored the house as originally built by the 1st Earl of Northampton between 1605 and 1614, while the second looked at both the ownership of the Earls of Suffolk, in the years between Northampton’s death and 1642, and the transformations of the 10th Earl of Northumberland, from that year to 1668. The changes initiated by the 7th Duke and Duchess of Somerset in 1748, and completed by the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland (third creation) in the 1750s and 1760s, finished the process of shifting the public side of the house from the Strand to the river side, begun by the 10th Earl of Northumberland. Never before fully investigated, this period is crucial in the long history of the house, as a large body of renowned craftsmen and builders (presented as supplementary material to the online edition of this paper) experimented with lavish interiors, which became a model for contemporary enterprises. In addition, Northumberland House acted as the showcase of the couple’s taste and patronage, as well as the venue for the private ‘Musaeum’ of the Duchess, within a larger remarkable collection, and probably functioned as a proto-academy for selected artists and connoisseurs.

Building on the pioneering work of Edward Croft Murray, this paper investigates a painting in Chichester Cathedral depicting Henry VII and Henry VIII and executed by the Netherlandish artist Lambert Barnard. With close attention to the chronology of Henry VIII's reign, it explores the painting's rich religious, political and cultural context, proposes a date for its execution, and reveals its links to Arthurian legend. The painting emerges as a sophisticated work of political theatre and propaganda with important implications for our understanding of early Tudor image-making.

Though Britain was the predominant European power in India from the middle of the eighteenth century, British scholars at first lagged behind their European contemporaries in the study of Indian antiquities. There were, quite simply, no British counterparts to such celebrated figures as Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron and Carsten Niebuhr. This paper investigates the efforts made by the Society of Antiquaries of London to remedy this situation, as demonstrated in particular by the publication of two early eighteenth-century accounts of the cave temples at Kanheri and Elephanta near Bombay in volume 7 (1785) of the Society's journal, Archaeologia. It argues that the impetus for the Society's efforts was provided by its Director, Richard Gough, who had family reasons for an interest in India and the East, but that the Society's role was largely superseded when Sir William Jones founded the Asiatick Society of Bengal.

St Wystan’s at Repton is one of the most important churches of the Anglo-Saxon period because of its royal connections, the extent and character of its surviving Anglo-Saxon fabric and the historical puzzles it presents. Our understanding of the building has been transformed by the investigations undertaken by Harold Taylor, Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle. The paper begins with a brief summary of the evidence discovered and the conclusions reached by the three scholars, and then analyses what in those conclusions can be debated concerning the function and date of the columns and vaults inserted into the crypt.

Tattershall Castle (Lincolnshire, UK) was built for the Lord Treasurer of England, Ralph Cromwell, in the mid-fifteenth century. Cromwell was a skilled politician who rose from relative obscurity via royal service; however, he never attained high social rank and made significant enemies in the royal council. He is noted to have been a prickly and self-righteous individual who wore his new-found status in society with towering pride. The architecture of Cromwell’s major building project at Tattershall offers clues towards his personality. Architectural details – grouped and repeated motifs such as ancient family armorials, the Treasurer’s purse and the truculent motto ‘Have I not right?’ – may reveal fault lines and anxieties about Ralph’s relative place in society as he struggled for political survival.

Sutton Place, in the county of Surrey, has for many years been misunderstood following an account of the history of the house published in the late nineteenth century. Long believed to be a precocious and little altered building of the early English Renaissance, the house has a very much more complex history than previously supposed. It is shown here that it has been radically altered at least twice, and that its existing symmetrical facade is probably the result of remodelling in the early eighteenth century, incorporating terracotta detail of c 1525–30. Few documents relating to the history of the house survive from before the mid-nineteenth century, and the account given here derives from an examination of the fabric undertaken during repairs and alterations in 1993.

It has hitherto been supposed that, north of the Alps, the elaborate medieval mosaic work known as Cosmatesque was confined to Westminster Abbey. An example with glass tesserae, however, has now come to light from Wimborne Minster, Dorset. This paper explores the circumstances of the rediscovery there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of pieces of ‘rich mosaic’, describes the surviving fragment and compares it in style and function to counterparts in Rome and in the Confessor's Chapel at Westminster. It concludes that it dates, like those at Westminster, to the 1270s or 1280s. It suggests that it adorned the shrine of Wimborne's Saxon founder, St Cuthburga, and that the patron who commissioned it was most likely Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, lord of the nearby manor of Kingston Lacy and close associate of Edward i.

It is suggested that the name generally accepted as the Romano-British name of Cirencester, *Corinium, the traditional spelling deriving from a Latin rendering of that in Ptolemy's Geography, is mistaken, and that for philologically sound reasons the authentic name is more likely to have been Cironium, as recorded in the Ravenna Cosmography.

Historians have long been aware that the vicious feud between the monastery of Glastonbury and its bishop in the early thirteenth century was responsible for turning Glastonbury’s scriptorium into the most astonishing and inventive manufacturer of forged documents. In what Julia Crick has memorably termed ‘the marshalling of antiquity’, new documents were produced and older ones annotated, all tending to demonstrate the antiquity of Christian Glastonbury, and its right to self-government and autonomy, free from external interference. The monastery’s chroniclers were equally partisan, but historians and archaeologists alike have tended to accept their account of Glastonbury’s more recent history at face value. Correcting the chroniclers’ anti-Savaric bias allows for some fresh thinking on the construction of both the Glastonbury mythos and of the abbey building itself. It also raises questions about the remarkable reverence with which scholars continue to treat Glastonbury’s ancient texts.

This paper discusses a hitherto overlooked printed missal of Cistercian use at York Minster Library. Deletions to the calendar and text show that it must have been in England during the Reformation. Four manuscript leaves have been bound at the end of the missal; the last leaf has prayers for the pregnancy of Queen Mary i that are known from only one other source. The presence of these prayers raises questions about the continued use of the missal after the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Catholic hopes for Mary’s reign.

The hoard which has given its name to the type was found in 1735 on Arreton Down in the centre of the eastern half of the island. Part was exhibited to the Society that year and a further ten pieces in 1736, drawings being made of the last exhibit. In 1855 Mr. A. W. Franks (later Sir Wollaston Franks) described in detail the hoard as then known, i.e. six pieces in the British Museum and the remainder recorded by the drawings made in 1736 (Archaeol. xxxvi, 326–31). In 1909 the well-known socketed spear-head and a tanged one were acquired by the British Museum from Canon Greenwell's collection. The hoard consisted of ten spear-heads, two daggers, and four flanged axes. They are referred to below as ‘Franks, no. —’; ‘B.M.’ if in the British Museum, ‘D’ if now known only by a drawing.