I have to thank you very sincerely for once again electing me to preside over our Fellowship, and no less sincerely to thank you for again electing the officers whose steady and generous support makes my tenure of this chair possible. To them, as to the Assistant Secretary and the Staff of the Antiquaries, I am deeply indebted.

The group of medieval pottery described in this paper was found at Lesnes Abbey in June 1959, when the smaller of two stone-lined pits added against the west end of the Reredorter was cleared. The pit measured 8 ft. by 5 ft. internally, and was about 10 ft. deep. The greater part of the filling, about 7 ft. in depth, consisted of chalk and stone rubble, fragments of sandy mortar, a few pieces of worked stone, and broken roofing tiles. Below this filling was a layer of dark soil, about 2 ft. in depth, at the bottom of the pit. All the pottery was found in the layer of dark soil; there is thus no doubt that it is contemporary, and was absolutely sealed by several feet of building debris. I am indebted to the officers of the Historic Buildings Section of the London County Council for these details, and for permission to examine the pottery and prepare this report for publication.

By this communication to the Society, the author aims at drawing attention to the Palaeolithic archaeology of Boyn Hill, the western and highest part of the Berkshire town of Maidenhead. The name of this area is of course familiar to all geologists and to many antiquaries because it has so long been applied to most significant features of the Thames valley. Curiously enough, although Boyn Hill is held as classic ground, the Pleistocene deposits here have only been broadly studied, and of their archaeological contents little has been made and no specimen ever illustrated. Recently the place has given scope for more intensive researches than before, and if the work in the field, which will be described, has not been very rewarding, it has at least been the means of bringing together several loose threads. In a sense, too, this paper is a record of eleventh-hour rescue operations undertaken for information and for securing specimens to relate with past discoveries.

Circumstances of discovery. In August 1959 workmen laying a drain on the north side of the cattle-market (the Smithfield) at Welshpool, Montgomeryshire, discovered a number of Roman objects. The most striking were taken home, and the rest were left on the trench-side, where they served as targets for children throwing stones. That the find ever came to notice is due entirely to Mr. G. H. Shepherd, a tutor at Kingston-upon-Hull, whose home is near Oswestry. On being shown one of the articles, Mr. Shepherd immediately went to Welshpool, persuaded the workmen to hand over to him what they had, and searched through the filling of the trench, since completed, discovering some massive ironwork in situ. After furnishing the local authority (as land-owner) with a list of the articles, Mr. Shepherd then took all the portable items into his custody, and later showed one of them to Mr. J. Bartlett, F.S.A., Director of the Hull Museums, who kindly informed the Department of Archaeology of the National Museum of Wales. Finally, after representations had been made by the Museum, the Borough Council most generously agreed in March 1960 to deposit the material in the National Museum of Wales for three years.

The Rose Ash bowl was found by Mr. B. M. Ayre of Munson Farm when he was cutting drainage channels in the corner of a marshy field in September 1959. It came up in the shovel of a mechanical digger and Mr. Ayre noticed it as soon as the load was turned out: it lay bottom upwards on the heap of sticky grey clay and ‘shone as though it were gold’. He took it back to the farmhouse, washed it under the tap, and the next day, since he was going to Barnstaple, took it into the North Devon Athenaeum and asked the Curator, Mr. A. Blackwell, to identify it. Mr. Blackwell very properly sent it to the British Museum, and kindly told me about the discovery.

The linear dyke known as Dray's Ditches, about half a mile long, runs at right angles to the Icknield Way, whose modern track approaches it near its mid-point. The name ‘Dray's Ditche’ first appears on a map engraved by Thomas Jeffrys in 1765, and its course is marked, between Great Bramingham and the Old Bedford Road, on a map of 1774. In 1540 Leland wrote that ‘in the hye way I saw hard on eche syde 3 longe trenches, as they had been for Men of warre’. Davies referred to a ‘treble row of ditches, which run in a straight line from Bramingham to Warden Hill, where they run aslant up the hill’; whilst Beldam described ‘several trenches called Gray's Dykes which run down in irregular lines of two ditches between three banks, from a tumulus on the Warden Hills, a little to the south of the Icenhilde Road, and traverse it exactly at its junction with the old Luton and Bedford Road, but now disappearing in the cultivated fields on the opposite side of the road’. A subsidiary earthwork which runs along the western foot of Galley Hill for about half a mile, enclosing a flat area of some hundred acres, has also been described as part of this system. This earthwork, however, was considered by Crawford, in 1934, to be ‘merely an old enclosure around an arable field’, and excavation has proved his view correct.

Bronze Age and Iron Age burials are occasionally surrounded by ditches which are, in origin at any rate, functional in that they serve as quarries for the material used in the mound. Such ditches may also have had some ritual significance, particularly those which are covered by the body of the mound. Further proof that they were not always functional is given by barrows whose ditches form a square, which is obviously not the easiest way to make a quarry for a circular barrow. Square-ditched barrows must be carefully distinguished from barrows within secondary square inclosures connected with plantations or land inclosure; however, there is a considerable number whose squared ditches are clearly original, and these can be shown to be a feature of the La Tène culture.

This paper is intended to examine in detail certain problems concerning the binding of the Victor Codex (MS. Bonifatianus I)in the Landesbibliothek at Fulda (pl. xxxv). It is hoped to show that the metal mounts of the binding are of Northumbrian manufacture; that, in all probability, the leather binding was executed at the same time and in the same area, and that the binding is of late-seventh or eighth-century date.

A half-century of research and discussion has advanced our knowledge of the Pharos of Alexandria without, however, eliminating all the uncertainties that enshroud its architecture, ornament, and technical character. In his monumental study of 1909 Hermann Thiersch worthily prepared the ground, by collecting into a single volume nearly all the evidence then available; but his architectural conclusions must now be read in conjunction with Don Miguel de Asin's essay of 1933 based on an Islamic source which Thiersch had overlooked. More recently, in 1952, Professor Charles Picard has published some important observations which refer particularly to the summit of the Pharos, with its projecting Tritons and crowning statue.

One of the most spectacular sections of the great mound, which embodies the rampart and town wall of Roman Cirencester, is visible in the grounds of St. Mary's Abbey Estate (pl. XIX). The exploitation of this area of the estate for building, bordering upon the London Road and Grove Lane, required excavation on as large a scale as possible, since the total area involved was about 11 acres. Accordingly, excavation took place during March and April 1960 for a period of seven weeks. It was, however, obviously impossible to trench the whole area with the available resources, and it was decided to concentrate upon a detailed study of the town defences, which, with the exception of a single section cut in 1952 by Miss M. Rennie in the Watermoor Recreation Ground at the south-east corner of the town, had not hitherto been systematically examined. This policy implied that any buildings in the immediate vicinity of the Wall would be left unexplored; but it was vindicated by a resistivity survey made by Mr. Anthony Clark, F.S.A., after the excavations had finished, which recorded only one stone building in the whole area. The walls of this building are only a few inches below the surface, and are being uncovered and planned by Mr. Peter Broxton, so that not all is lost.

The sixth season at Verulamium lasted a period of five weeks from 20th July to 24th August 1960. As the last full season of the current programme, it was designed to test one or two specific questions and to complete work already begun. Trenches were cut in insulae XIX and XXVIII in an attempt to define the south-east and south-west sides respectively of the suspected Claudian fort, but met with no success. In insula XIV a small area still outstanding was excavated down to the level of the Antonine fire: in insula XXI further work was done on building 2, to complete the plan and to salvage some painted wall plaster still remaining. In insula XXVII the stoke-hole, added perhaps as late as the early fifth century to building 2, room 15, was examined and trenches were cut to trace the further course of the fifth-century pipe-line. The main task for 1960, however, was to test the results of the proton-magnetometer survey carried out in 1959, by cutting sections across the line thus suggested for the ‘1955 Ditch’. This was done at two points, the first in insula VIII and the second just south-west of insula V, and the existence of the earthwork on the course predicted was confirmed. Later in the autumn the north-west side of the enclosure was defined by a further magnetic survey by Dr. M. J. Aitken.

Excavations have recently been conducted at the Saxon-Shore fort of Reculver (Regulbium) by Mr. Brian Philp, through whose kindness the writer is able to comment upon the inscription here discussed (fig. i). Eleven fragments comprise a substantive part of an inscribed rectangular slab, of local calcareous sandstone, now 11½ in. high. All the margins except the bottom one are in evidence, and exhibit plain edges, as if the slab had either been set into walling or framed by ornamental features.

The purpose of this paper is to record three stones recently brought to my attention. The first was found about twenty years ago by Mr. Benjamin Wyles when digging a dyke in a field called the Long Liner near Slate House Farm, in the parish of Wilsford near Grantham. It is preserved in Wilsford church and is published by the kind permission of the Rector, the Rev. J. D. Smart. The other two, which are fragmentary, were found in the core of the north-east buttress of the east of Ancaster church in the course of reconstruction during August 1960. The wall, which is of the late twelfth century with flat plain buttresses, has had a fourteenth century window inserted into it, and has been repaired and refaced possibly at same time as the insertion of the window. There remain traces of the jamb-shafts and arch-springing of the original triple twelfth-century window. The wall developed serious settlement-cracks, and these were bonded by inserting concrete tie-beams behind the face of the wall, and at the same time grouting the loose core. Both stones are likely to have been built into the buttress in the twelfth century. I am indebted to Mr. L. H. Bond, L.R.I.B.A., for bringing them and the above facts to my notice, and to the Rev. L. W. B. Bacon, Vicar of Ancaster, for permission to publish.