During the fourth season of excavation at Fishbourne work was spread over an area of about ten acres, most of it being concentrated on three main sites: the west wing of the main building, the eastern half of the north wing, and the southern half of the east wing. In addition, exploratory trenches were dug through the area to the north of the north wing and several trial excavations were made in gardens to the south of the modern main road. Previously, in December 1963 and January 1964, limited excavations had been undertaken in the garden of no. 65 Fishbourne Road, in the area of the greenhouses to the west of the main site, and in other gardens further west.

The benign personification of our Society as The Old Lady is a homage which endears itself the more as the years increase enjoyment of her service. We endow her with comeliness, and recognize both her caprice and her gift of growing old more gracefully than her critics, while acquiring in the process, after a wild youth by present-day standards, the sovereign qualities of experience and good sense. Nor does she lack the power of innovation which five years ago led her to choose my distinguished predecessor as her first Lady President. The quality of Dr. Joan Evans's scholarship is well known to all, but fortune has bestowed upon her other gifts as well. She is peculiarly fortunate in her ancestral connexions with the Society and in her ability to exercise in our favour an unstinting generosity. Wealth attracts wealth: during her office and indeed within her family orbit, the spontaneous munificence of Miss Minet rescued the Society from penury and made it possible to set our house in order.

In their paper on some buckets and cauldrons of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages published in this journal, our Fellows, Professor Hawkes and Mrs. Brown (then Miss M. A. Smith), stated that they had been unable to obtain information concerning a certain bucket listed by Leeds. In his earlier study Leeds had quoted Armstrong, saying that the bucket (Leeds's no. 14), ‘formerly in the possession of the Rev. W. F. Falkiner, of Killucan, Co. Westmeath, was removed from Ireland and is now in private hands in Scotland’. There is a bronze bucket of the Irish-British type, as defined by Hawkes and Smith, in the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow. It was acquired by the museum in 1914 and forms part of the Bishop Collection. A. Henderson Bishop of Thorntonhall, Lanarkshire, was an active collector and several prehistoric artifacts in his collection, including this bucket, are labelled as having come from Ireland. Nothing more is known of its provenance but there is evidence to suggest that it is almost certainly the bucket referred to by Leeds.

During excavations carried out for Letchworth Museum with the support of the Ministry of Public Building and Works in August 1961, the iron rim of a cauldron was discovered in the ditch of an Early Iron Age enclosure (fig. 1). The latter formed part of a large settlement site at Blackhorse Road which is situated about a mile from the centre of Letchworth (Nat. Grid. Ref. TL/233339). The cauldron-rim was joined to an iron collar and still retained its two ring-handles: the fragment was fairly complete (pl. XLV a).

Ring-brooches, which probably were a Celtic invention, started as very simple objects. They consisted of an open ring and a pin ending in a loop which could move along the ring. As ornaments they were not very showy, as their only decoration lay in the shape of their terminals, but as dress-fasteners they were no doubt practical. They seem, however, to have had one drawback: when the ring was too thin or made of poor metal the terminals could be wrenched apart and the brooch could be twisted out of shape when roughly handled. That this possibility existed can be concluded from one of its subsequent developments: the penannular brooch was sometimes turned into an annular one.

The British Museum acquired in November 1961 a Roman marble portrait head (pl. XLVI) found at Broadbridge, three miles west of Chichester (fig. 1). It was given to the museum by the late Captain A. W. F. Fuller through the National Art-Collections Fund.

A small round barrow near Knob's Crook, Woodlands, Dorset, covered three pits, the largest containing a cremation burial accompanied by samian ware dated to C. A.D. 70–85, broken metal and steatite objects, and an unburnt trepanned roundel. A section was cut through the bank and ditch around one of the supposedly Roman barrows at Badbury Rings, Dorset (Appendix I), in re-examining the evidence for Roman barrows in Wessex (Appendix II). For comparison, details of three of the most recently excavated Roman barrows in England have been summarized (Appendix III).

Between 1919 and 1931 a large amount of medieval pottery, objects of metal, jet, and bone, and coins and jettons were found at Rievaulx Abbey in the course of clearance by H.M. Office of Works (now the Ministry of Public Building and Works). The collection includes two examples of heraldic metalwork and a decorated strip which are sufficiently remarkable to merit detailed publication. The pendant (pl. xxi a) was found in 1922 at the east end of the Church, in the filling of the second from the south of the five chapels in a row against the east wall. The mounting and roundel (pl. xxi b–d) were found in 1924 in the filling on the west side of the Frater, south of the flight of steps leading to the pulpit. The third object, the metal strip with inscription (pl. xxi e), was found in 1925 between the Frater and the Reredorter. No significance can be attached to these findspots, since small objects were found in nearly every part of the abbey. No doubt some were lost during the period of occupation, but the majority seem to have been scattered about by despoilers at the time of the Suppression in 1539.

Rather more than forty years ago the late Francis Henry Cripps-Day compiled a county-by-county survey of the weapons and armour still to be found in English churches, either as parish armour, kept there originally against a moment of national emergency, or as a memorial to some person of quality. It appeared as an appendix to the Record of European Armour and Arms which had been left unfinished by Sir Guy Laking at the time of his death, and which Mr. Cripps-Day completed and saw through the press. The information in this appendix was gathered in from various sources, and the editor gave due credit to the individual observers who had had the perception to notice odd helmets or swords in this church or that, and had taken the trouble to communicate with him upon the subject.

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 fortifications of Berwick-upon-Tweed, begun in 1558, are one of the earliest bastioned systems surviving in Europe. The original design was made by Sir Richard Lee and modified by him during the course of building. The fortifications were left incomplete in 1569; further works were carried on until the eighteenth century.

Thomas Jenkins was born in Rome in 1722, a son of William Jenkins about whom little is known. Thomas was in England during his early life and, as a young man, studied painting with Thomas Hudson (1701–79), portrait painter in London. He returned to Rome as a student-painter in 1753, though whether through his own resources or under the patronage of others, remains doubtful.

The Excavation Committee have been aware for some time that building development was likely in the extensive grounds of St. Mary's Abbey. In 1964 the planning authorities granted permission for a limited amount of new building work, and although this was subsequently withdrawn, it brought matters to a head. A major excavation was planned and carried out on the supposed site of the Abbey Church, and thus for the first time since its formation the Committee have undertaken work on an important medieval site. Our grateful thanks are due to Mr. Richard Chester Master for allowing the work to take place and for his keen interest during its progress. The excavations at the Abbey prevented continuation of research excavations at the Amphitheatre, but did not halt the rescue excavations at present habitual in the town, involving the following four sites. A vacant garden in Chester Street, which was scheduled for building, and was excavated by kind permission of Mr. Sutton, yielded information about both fort and town; the site of the old Gaumont Cinema at the corner of London Road and Victoria Road was excavated by kind permission of its present owners, who for the time being wish to remain anonymous, and produced interesting information about late changes in the Roman town-plan; a single trench in the garden behind Lloyds Bank, where excavation was made possible by the kind offices of the Manager, Mr. J. K. Hollinghurst, tested the line of a postulated street; while the garden of Ashcroft House, excavated by kind permission of the Pinnacle Development Company, produced, in a limited area, three mosaic pavements and part of an extensive town house. Excavation on this scale could only be carried out with large resources and the sum of nearly £3,000 was expended,1 while about 150 people gave their services in one capacity or another.

In 1964 the Winchester Excavations Committee was joined by the University of North Carolina and Duke University in excavations on seven sites in the city. The work lasted thirteen weeks from the end of June to the end of September and an average of 160 people were employed for the greater part of this period, slightly under £10,000 being spent. A special debt of thanks is owed to Professor U. T. Holmes of the University of North Carolina who was responsible for the initial contacts with the American universities which have resulted in the notable contributions of the universities in finance and personnel to the 1964 and future excavation seasons. Work on this scale involved a great deal of administrative work, the brunt of which was borne by the City of Winchester and the Hampshire County Council, to whose officers and staff warmest thanks are due. We are most grateful to the Army and to the Ministry of Public Building and Works for the quarters provided at Bushfield Camp, and to the many officers who helped in these arrangements.