Towards the end of the twelfth century the Carthusian monastery of Lugny or Luvigny, near Langres in Burgundy, contained a lay brother named Viard. In him the fire of religious enthusiasm burned so bright that he obtained leave from his abbot to retire into a cave in the Val des Choux—Vallis Caulium, the ‘Kail Glen’ as we call it in our homely Scottish speech—a sequestered glen amid the neighbouring wooded hills. Here he led a life of such austere devotion that his fame waxed great through the land of Burgundy, and in the end drew to his lonely hermitage Duke Odo III, then about to start on the Fourth Crusade. So impressed was the duke by his interview with the recluse that he vowed, should he return in safety from the Holy Land, to establish a monastery in the Kail Glen, and to place Viard at its head. In this way, shortly before 1200, was founded the monastery of the Val des Choux. Odo's first grant, making over the Kail Glen to the brethren, was made in 1203; and by 1206 the new order of monks—for such it was—had aroused the interest of Pope Innocent III, who by a Bull issued in that year recognized the Valliscaulian Order and confirmed their rule. It was one of exceptional severity. All the brethren, prior included, were to dine in the common frater, sharing the same fare, and abstaining from meat and gravy. They were not allowed to work, save in tending the monastic gardens, and were therefore enjoined to live off their own revenues. They were bound to silence, and prohibited from leaving the cloister save on the business of their Order. They were to wear hair shirts, and to sleep fully clothed and in their shoes, and on beds without a mattress. Small wonder that so drastic a rule was found untenable, and in 1223 a second Bull allowed the monks of the Kail Glen a considerable measure of relaxation.

To one whose working life has been in large measure focused upon our Society, and whose thoughts have been often enough drawn to it from remote parts of the world and sometimes in strange circumstance, the presentation of his first Anniversary Address is an emotional moment. I say that in all deliberation. For the most part I do not much believe in emotion; I prefer hard outlines to my thinking and regard sentiment as a rare and perilous indulgence. If I indulge now for an instant, you will I hope infer a gratitude, deeper than I care to say, to you who have entrusted me with your presidency and have so crowned a career of long and (I trust) reasonably faithful service to the discipline for which we stand.

In 1843 Daniel Gurney, Esq., F.S.A., discovered the site of a medieval kiln at Bawsey, near King's Lynn in Norfolk. It is known that local tradition had preserved the memory of such a kiln, because the Rev. J. H. Bloom, writing a history of Castle Acre, which was published in 1843 before he knew of the discovery of the site, remarked that tradition said that the priory of Castle Acre possessed a kiln at Bawsey near Lynn. John Gough Nichols, writing two years later in 1845, describes the discovery as follows: ‘Near Lynn in Norfolk was a manufactory of tiles which occur at various places in that neighbourhood. They are of the ordinary form but small, about 4½ inches square, and generally embossed in relief, no second material being inserted to restore a smooth surface.… A considerable quantity of these tiles, together with the kiln in which they were made, has been found at Bawsey near Lynn, and many of them have been placed over the fireplace of the inhabited room at Rising Castle, to which they were presented by Daniel Gurney, Esq., F.S.A. of North Runcton.’ The tiles at Castle Rising are still there, others recovered at the same time are in King's Lynn Museum, and still others found their way to the British Museum in 1855 as the gift of Sir Henry Ellis.

One of the techniques employed by the Anglo-Saxon jeweller has hitherto been ignored, or at least passed over as being foreign, and the intention here is to bring it to more general notice. The relevant material is more plentiful than has been suspected, and a closer examination of objects already in museums or now being taken from the earth will aid investigations, and perhaps increase the value of the objects themselves as exhibits. Further studies in the subject may provide useful additions to the defective criteria perforce used in dating early Anglo-Saxon objects.

There are, or at least are known formerly to have been, in Italy a somewhat surprising number of alabaster carvings produced in medieval England, some of them in their original gaily-painted frameworks, in churches or in museums; others, detached from their initial wooden supports and now more or less isolated, preserved in public museums or in private collections. How and when these carvings came to be in Italy would seem to have remained as yet almost uninvestigated, although examination of contemporary archives concerned with Italian churches in which English alabasters exist, or from which it is known that they have been removed, might well bring to light information of signal importance to historians of the once vigorous English alabaster industry. Despite the abundance of surviving English alabaster carvings—they may well number some thousands—it is to only a minute percentage of them that we are able to assign with reasonable certainty a date more than broadly approximate; or, at least for those carved after about 1400, with more than moderate assurance the locality responsible for their production. Although records there are, some foreign but for the most part English, of matters connected with the English alabaster industry, co-ordination between individual carvings and the documentary evidence is almost completely lacking. While there is strong probability that some of the English alabasters in Italy reached there as refugees expelled from England, or smuggled out, because of the religious disturbances resulting from the English Reformation, it would appear correspondingly probable that many of them passed to Italy in the ordinary course of trade, as seems indeed to have been the case with the St. Peter and St. Paul, and their two accompanying alabaster carvings, cited infra. Most of the English alabasters still in Italy or recorded as having come from there are presumably attributable to the fifteenth century. I think it by no means unlikely that examination of Italian ecclesiastical records could in at least some cases inform us where those alabasters had been purchased, when and whence they were shipped, by or through whom they were presented, and perhaps of other matters of interest in connexion with the English alabaster industry.

In the summer of 1954 the archaeological investigation of a habitation-site of the second half of the first millennium A.D. began on a little island about 30 kilometres west of Stockholm in Lake Mälar. The island, known as Lillö, lies in Ekerö parish in the province of Uppland. The resultant finds were extraordinarily rich and interesting, and the outcome of the investigations now in progress, which will take in also a number of small burial-grounds connected with the habitation-site, is awaited with some excitement.

The ‘reliquary’ of the Resurrection which Henri II of France gave to the cathedral of Rheims on his coronation in 1547 still survives. It was long considered to have been made for that occasion, but recently M. Pierre Verlet has recognized both it and the ‘Nef de Sainte Ursule’, given to the cathedral by the same donor, as being works of earlier date furbished up for the occasion. The whole of the Resurrection ‘reliquary’, indeed, is late medieval except for the initials and crescent devices which Henri II caused to be added to it.

Halangy Down (fig. 1) is the lower precipitous slope of the decline from Telegraph Hill (Ordnance Survey B.M. 166. 3 ft.) to the sea at Halangy Porth and Point. Halangy Down and the earlier chambered tomb upon the crest are often referred to locally as ‘Bants Carn’. The true ‘Bants Carn’ is a considerable rock outcrop dominating Halangy Point. This escarpment faces Crow Sound, which separates the north-west part of St. Mary's from the neighbouring island of Tresco. The hill-side is sheltered by the mass of Telegraph Hill from inclement weather from the north-east and east, but is fully exposed to the south-west and west.

The existence of an ancient village site here has long been known in the islands. At the close of the last century, the late Alexander Gibson cleared away the underbrush from one of the more prominent huts and made a photographic record of its construction. Shortly after, the late G. Bonsor, of Mairena del Alcor, near Seville, in addition to excavating the chambered tomb, noted a considerable midden together with traces, of prehistoric occupation exposed in the cliffs of Halangy Porth just below the village site. Dr. H. O'Neill Hencken noted Bonsor's description of the midden, and, as nothing was known at the time of the material culture of the ‘village’, he associated the two.

Bantham is a small hamlet in the parish of Thurlestone, South Devon, five miles west of the market town of Kingsbridge. During the summer of 1953, to celebrate the Coronation, the people of Bantham arranged an exhibition of material illustrating their village history. The organizer, Mrs. Clare Fox, asked me to help in identifying some ‘Roman’ pottery and other objects that had been collected from the sand-dunes at the mouth of the river Avon near by, by Mr. H. L. Jenkins of Clanacombe in the late nineteenth century. The finds had been presented subsequently to the Torquay Natural History Society's Museum by Mrs. M. Radcliffe, his daughter-in-law, and were lent by the museum for the Bantham exhibition. The finds were found to include fragments of imported amphorae of Dark Age date, similar to those found at Garranes and Tintage and therefore to merit wider recognition. I am much indebted to Mrs. Fox for guidance to the site and for the history of the discoveries; to the Council and Curator (Mr. A. G. Madden) of the Torquay Museum for the loan of the objects; to Miss Theo Brown for their illustration; to my husband Cyril Fox for help with the map (fig. 5); and to Mr. G. C. Dunning for his description and drawing of the medieval finds.

The widespread use of coal in Roman Britain has long been recognized. It has been found on many sites in burnt and unburnt state, occasionally in direct association with industrial and domestic use. The fullest account of the subject has been given by the late R. G. Collingwood, and it is the purpose of this note to supplement this with additional information and comment.

The object of this paper is to invite opinions on the purpose of a certain type of heraldic panel which is akin to the hatchment but is, in fact, quite distinct from it. The writers also wish to enlist help in recording further examples, whether lost or surviving, and to urge the preservation of the latter. They also desire to establish the number of cases where a monument of a permanent nature to the same person, as is commemorated by a panel can be found in the same church or churchyard; the only instance of a panel and corresponding memorial, other than the nineteenth-century examples at Lindfield, traced by the writers so far is in Salisbury Cathedral (see p. 83).