In 1960 and 1961 Ole Klindt-Jensen published two short notes about a golden statuette of a Celtic warrior, soldered to a fine brooch. He was convinced that the warrior did not belong to the brooch, and thought that they had been combined fairly recently. J. M. de Navarro added a comment to the 1961 note, concluding: ‘My impression (from photographs only) is that the brooch might date from the fourth century BC and the figure not before the latter half of the third or the second century BC, i.e. that it was added later.’ Klindt-Jensen's notes were accompanied by plates, and at the same time another photograph was published on the front cover of Celticum, volume I. A decade later the brooch was shown at the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, and at the Hayward Gallery, London, as item no. 35 in the Early Celtic Art exhibition held in 1970. The catalogue entry was based on Klindt-Jensen's note, but no photograph was published. In the mid 1970s R. M. Rowlett prepared a paper on the authenticity of the brooch, including metal analyses and a comparison of its proportions with those of some La Tène II brooches: Rowlett considered that the figure of the warrior was contemporary with the rest of the brooch, which he accepted as an authentic antiquity. His paper was eventually published about twenty years later.

Part of an Iron Age shield has recently been identified amongst the collection of Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum, Warwickshire, adding another example to the corpus of Iron Age shields recently published in this journal. The newly recognized remains are in three parts and were recorded in the museum's accessions register as ‘3 pieces of horse armour’. These pieces were re-identified as the boss, spine and terminal discs of an Iron Age shield in the course of a project carried out between September 1992 and March 1994 to fully document and record on a computer database the whole of the museum's collection. Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum is managed by Warwick District Council and the three pieces have the accession numbers M1092.1928.1–3.

The concept of Central Europe is understood here to cover the geographical centre of the European continent (i.e. the territory between the Elbe, Bug and Neman rivers, that is, eastern Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia and Lithuania), formerly treated in much of the English-speaking world as ‘Eastern Europe’. In the past six years, however, this area has been moving closer to the West. This paper shall concentrate on the region north of the Carpathian mountains, particularly the Vistula river-basin and Scandinavia (without Norway), in other words the territory round the Baltic Sea.

That architecture makes social statements is obvious in grand buildings from Norman castles to country houses. In smaller houses, such statements are often muted by our ignorance of their historical context and their date. This paper examines a small but sophisticated medieval house in which the combination of precise dating and informative documentation surmounts simple architectural analysis, to reveal something of its social importance to the family who built it. In the early nineteenth century, the status of Hall House, Sawbridge, was the lowest possible. It belonged to the Sawbridge Overseers of the Poor and was rented to families receiving parish support; later it became farm labourers' cottages. Most of the stages in the decline of the elegant medieval house to this lowly state can be documented, and links established to the only family in fifteenth-century Sawbridge with pretensions to sophistication. These clues lead to the identification of John Andrewe as the builder of Hall House in 1449, and to the recognition of it as a concrete expression of a family pride that was also being fostered by the invention of a distinguished ancestry.

Wolsey's significance as a patron of the arts has received considerable attention in recent years, but although modern studies have recognized that displays of plate and valuable materials played an important role in the demonstration of his wealth and power, his tapestry collection has never received detailed analysis. In fact, contemporary descriptions indicate that Wolsey's tapestries were one of the most striking aspects of his notoriously ostentatious lifestyle and an inventory of his possessions taken in the early 1520s shows that by this date he had amassed a collection of more than six hundred pieces. It is the purpose of this article to re-assess the evidence relating to the history, content and use of this vast collection.

Surprisingly little attention has been paid by scholars of Henry VIII to the heraldic ceiling of the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace (fig. 1). Study of its decoration has fallen somewhere in between surveys of Tudor architecture and painting. In this article specific problems relating to the ceiling will be addressed: when it was made, the iconography, the reasons for the iconography, the visual source of the ceiling and how it was transmitted, and who made it. The ceiling warrants attention because its programme of Henrician heraldry is a key to the understanding of the political iconography of the Royal Supremacy. In addition, the ceiling's dependence on a contemporary Italian architectural treatise for its design is unusual for its time.

Discovered in a potato barn in a small Devonshire village in 1827 (fig. I), the ‘Armada Service’ is one of the most important groups of English silver to have been found in England. It consists of a set of twenty-six parcel-gilt dishes, engraved with the arms of Sir Christopher Harris of Radford, Devon (c. 1553–1625), and those of his wife, Mary Sydenham (fig. 2). The dishes form part of the dining silver accumulated by Sir Christopher between 1581 and 1602, whenever cash or metal was available to be converted by London goldsmiths into this recognized, tangible evidence of wealth and social status. The ‘Armada Service’ is the unique survival of a type of utilitarian plate which is listed in the inventories of the gentry and aristocracy of the late Tudor and early Stuart periods. Undecorated plate of this sort would have been particularly vulnerable in times of financial need, since its bullion value far outweighed its decorative appeal.

When, at midday on 13 June 1842, Queen Victoria first boarded a train to carry her on the eighteen-mile journey from Slough to Paddington, she inaugurated a relationship between the court and the railways whose continuity is only now under threat. Less propitiously, that mechanical excursion heralded the decline of one of the most venerable departments of the Royal Household, the Stables. A further diminution in the live horse-power of the Stables was ushered in sixty years later with the acquisition by King Edward VII in 1901 of a Daimler motor car – the first such machine to cross the threshold of the Mews. Today the contribution of the Stables to ceremonial occasions is impressive, immaculate and professional, while transportation of the royal family remains the first duty of the Mews. However, while the scope of the department undoubtedly has broadened dramatically, with respect to their primary role, the Stables today present scarcely a shadow of what was once a pivotal element in the everyday life of the court.

The discovery in the Society's library of James Theobald's manuscript history of the foundation of the Society of Arts is a satisfying conclusion to a search which has been pursued since the early years of the twentieth century. This search had been stimulated by a statement in a rare eighteenth-century tract entitled: A Concise Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Society For the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce Instituted at London, Anno. MDCCLIV. Compiled from the Original Papers of the first Promoters of the plan; and from other authentic records. By a Member of the said Society. London: Printed for the AUTHOR, and sold by S Hooper, at Caesar's Head, the corner of the New Church in the Strand. MDCCLXIII. The author, who has been identified as Thomas Mortimer, wrote in his introduction:

Several particulars relative to the origin of this Society having been lost to the public for many years, it may not be improper to mention, least the authenticity of the following narrative should be disputed, that the substance of it was drawn up by the late James Theobald, Esq; one of the first Vice Presidents of the Society, from a verbal relation given him by Mr Shipley; and that the same gentleman afterwards presented a copy of that relation to the Antiquarian Society.

The ‘Esquiline Treasure’ is one of the prize exhibits in the British Museum; two small objects from it are to be found in Paris and Naples. A contemporary account of its discovery in 1793 was published by the leading antiquarian of the day, Ennio Quirinio Visconti. He described the operation as a chance excavation near the monastery of the Minims on the Esquiline with a further footnote specifying that the site was a little beyond the Subura in the remains of some ancient rooms of good construction but filled later with ruins.