The method of manufacture and application of plaques is discussed, also the use and length of life of moulds, in modern ceramic factories; together with the results of experiments in laboratories on the colour and content of clay slips. In Parts I and II respectively are described and illustrated thirty plaques and twelve moulded beakers.

The (lost) Oundle Form 64 by LIBERTVS in red samian is discussed; and there are further comments on the black ‘cup’ from Colchester mentioned in the 1957 paper.

The object of this paper is to invite attention to some early treatises on English heraldry in the hope of stimulating interest in that somewhat neglected phase of this study. None of the manuscripts in question has been printed, but first it may not be amiss to recall briefly the half-dozen tractates which have been printed.

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.

The genesis of this paper lay in the 2007 Tercentenary celebrations of the Society of Antiquaries and the challenge of compiling a tour of the premises used by the Society for its meetings prior to the Society’s move into a permanent home at Somerset House in 1780. The first part of the paper deals with the competing claims of the Bear in the Strand and the Young Devil taverns as the location for the foundation meeting of the Society of Antiquaries in 1707. The second part examines the evidence for the precise locations of these two taverns, a subject curiously neglected by antiquaries, together with an attempt to determine the character of the taverns. The paper then considers the demise of the 1707 Society and examines the evidence for the claim that 1707 marks the foundation year of the present Society of Antiquaries. Reference is also made to the other known meeting places of the Society up to 1718.

The Royal Armouries possesses two scythe blades of pre-mechanised manufacture, mounted axially on straight hafts to form weapons. An inventory of 1686 lists eighty-one scythe blades at the Tower of London (by 1694 described as booty captured from the Duke of Monmouth’s rebels at Sedgemoor) and the surviving pair was probably among them. The Duke’s shortage of standard-issue equipment made improvisation essential, and the choice of re-hafted scythe blades owed to their widespread, well known and effective use by irregular forces in Britain and Europe since the late Middle Ages. Monmouth’s ‘sithmen’, some hundreds strong, took part in skirmishes and in the battle of Sedgemoor itself. Of interest to the Tower authorities as curiosities and for their propaganda value, the scythe blades were displayed, in diminishing numbers, from the seventeenth until the nineteenth century, and these two until the 1990s. In the future they will be displayed again, representing Monmouth’s rebels and countless others, and a weapon type that deserves a greater level of study and recognition.

Parramatta was the second British settlement established in mainland Australia, and for a time was the largest. Its burial ground and monuments, the oldest surviving British cemetery in mainland Australia, provides important evidence for the aspirations, attitudes and practices within this fledgling community. It reveals the role of improvement concepts and practices in popular as well as governmental culture, representing an experiment in secular control over burial decades before the urban non-denominational cemetery first appears in England. The primary chronological focus here is from the foundation of settlement in 1788 to c 1840, by which time free settlers as well as emancipists had transformed Parramatta from a convict settlement into a colonial town.

As I send you inclosed a drawing of some of the figures in the painted cieling of the Cathedral of Peterborough, which I sketched out, I will accompany my description of this cieling with some observations on the Art of Paintings as practised in early times of England.

The paper which we have to lay before the Society marks a stage in, we will not say the end of, a long story. The exploration of the site of St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, has now been proceeding for over twenty-five years, and writing in 1901 on a group of early churches connected with St. Augustine's mission, one of us expressed the hope that his own church of St. Peter and St. Paul, and that of St. Mary built to the east of it a few years later, might one day be added to the list of those of which actual remains have come down to us. This hope is now happily fulfilled, even more completely than we had reason to expect, and the occasion is one for congratulation to antiquaries generally, but particularly to the bursar of St. Augustine's College, our Fellow the Rev. R. U. Potts, who has superintended the work for the last thirteen years, and to whose devotion and unremitting energy its success is chiefly due.

By the Gothic I mean the light style of Architecture which has been long known by that name, and was the mode of building most in use, all over Europe, during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.

When it received this appellation, has been much disputed: Torré intimates that it was first so called by Cesare Cesariani, in his Commentary on Vitruvius. But it seems to have been the custom, upon the revival of antique architecture, and classical learning, to give the name of Gothic, by way of reproach, to every thing in the arts, as well as in literature, which differed from, or was not formed upon ancient models.

In the spring of the year 1781 lord Moira; having ordered a survey to be made of a farm on his estate, his surveyor brought me a plait of hair, informing, me that it was, taken from the scull of a skeleton that had been long dug up by the tenant in the autumn of 1780. I lost no time in making an inquiry into the particulars of such a discovery, and the result of that inquiry was as follows:

The great chapel of Saint George within the royal Castle of Windsor, founded by King Edward IV for the most honourable and noble Order of the Garter, stands immediately to the west of the original chapel of the Order, formed by King Edward III within the older building of King Henry III.

Recent excavations made within the church of St. Bartholomew the Great, exposing the sites of the first Lady chapel and of the south side chapel, have thrown new light on the plan of Rahere's church; and excavations on the south side of the church have uncovered the foundations of the sacristy, chapter-house, and the Prior's house. The object of this paper is to lay the results of these excavations before the Society.

The further examination of the site in the meadow at Bidford-on-Avon, belonging to the Bidford Co-operative Society, and the adjoining garden, the property of the Stratford-on-Avon Brewery Company, was carefully carried out during the summer of 1923. The survey plan (pl. LIX) made by Mr. Wellstood shows the direction of the trenches, and the position of each interment.

The monument of which a drawing is presented to this learned Society, (see Pl. VI.) is the only one of the kind that has been hitherto discovered. It is interesting not only from its singularity, but as illustrating various doubtful points of antiquity.

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.

Excavations at Grime's Graves, Norfolk, during September 1920, revealed a new chipping site (Floor 85), and resulted in the discovery thereon of two pieces of engraved flint crust, associated with a series of flint implements of Le Moustier type, bone tools, and pottery, upon a living level immediately overlying glacial sand.

This paper is a study of a fragment of folklore that became assimilated into serious academic discussion; it investigates the story that John Lord Hussey, who was executed in Lincoln following the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536, was dragged to his execution through a window. If it were true, this would be an early example of the iconography of ‘defenestration’ which, by the seventeenth century, connoted the martyrdom of adherents of the Old Religion by Protestant extremists. On examination, however, the persistent story of Lord Hussey's defenestration would seem to be a post hoc fabrication. It is argued here that the story may have been invented in the early eighteenth century, at a period when there was, once again, strife between High and Low Church, and when accounts of previous religious controversies were being recruited by antiquarians as weapons in their contemporary disputes. It is further suggested that the power of the image was still strong in the nineteenth century and it might have played a role in the preservation of a window in Lincoln Castle, even though it had no documented association with Hussey and is too small to climb through.