Survey and sampling at the classic single-entranced henge monument at Castle Dykes, in North Yorkshire, has revealed traces of circular timber structures, interpreted as later prehistoric roundhouses, in the immediate vicinity and within the henge. Coring of the waterlogged silts of the internal ditch has produced considerable environmental data: plant, insect, pollen and charcoal remains. A small jet bead was also recovered. Radiocarbon dates from short-lived materials unexpectedly indicate that the monument was constructed in the Iron Age, which prompts a review of other potentially Iron Age ‘henges’ further afield.

The potters’ wheel was reintroduced to England in the late ninth century. It spread rapidly throughout eastern England, yet little is known about the mechanisms that facilitated its dissemination and success. This article presents the results of multidisciplinary research into the diffusion of this technology. Focusing on pottery production in late Saxon Newark, Nottinghamshire, an industry thought to have been founded by a potter(s) who had relocated from Torksey, Lincolnshire, this study offers a rare opportunity to examine the movements and craft practices of an individual artisan(s). By considering their manufacturing choices in the context of pottery distribution networks and the contemporary political, social and economic climate, it is demonstrated that the supply of pottery to Newark from regional production centres was restricted, creating a gap in the market and providing an incentive for a potter to relocate, encouraging the spread of the potters’ wheel throughout eastern England.

The area around the north end of the medieval London Bridge in the City of London has attracted much archaeological attention. This article summarises the main findings for the period 1100–1666 from four excavations, recently published. In doing so, it explores a number of key issues: the main characteristics of this waterfront area in the medieval and Tudor periods; the sources of the pottery and artefacts incorporated into reclamation units, and any significance in their locations behind waterfront revetments or on the foreshore; what the medieval and post-medieval artefacts say about culture, fashion and religious beliefs; the functions of the buildings and open areas, and to what extent these can be linked to owners or occupiers specified in the documentary record; and how the port of London fits within its European trading network. The article also examines if and to what extent the area south of Thames Street was an industrial suburb of the medieval City. Here also lay the parish church of St Botolph Billingsgate, destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and not rebuilt, many details of which can be reconstructed from archaeology and rich documentary evidence. Sixty-nine human burials in the church include one of a man in his sixties who may be John Reynewell, mayor of London in 1426–7. The several thousand artefacts and several hundred kilos of English and foreign pottery (the latter now analysed into over 100 separate wares) from the four sites in the study deserve further research by scholars, who can use this article as a stepping stone into the archive held at the Museum of London.

Here is described a most intriguing metal object in the possession of the author, with heraldic features that date stylistically to the twelfth century, and likely from the first half century of heraldry in England, when the possession of arms was largely restricted to the baronial class. It is argued that the piece links to the court of Henry ii of England (r. 1154–89) and might preserve the lost arms of that monarch.

This article looks at a fountain basin that is of outstanding art-historical interest as a surviving example of secular Romanesque sculpture. The fountain basin is signed by the Italian sculptor Drudus de Trivio and is dated c 1240. The article situates the fountain basin within Drudus’s oeuvre – most notably the ciborium in Ferentino and the choir-screens at Cività Castellana – and relates it to the recently completed cloister sculpture of the Lateran and San Paolo fuori le mura, of which Drudus had close knowledge. Possible sources are explored, and chronology, classical precedents and the innovative use of garlands are discussed. A new translation of the inscription, which has been rather neglected in previous studies, is offered. The translation places the inscription within the wider context of Italian fountain inscriptions and is used to suggest that the fountain was secular in purpose with the aim of querying the long-standing view that Drudus carried out only liturgical sculpture, thereby adding to our understanding of the work of the Cosmati.

Works to the south side of the Gothic cloister at Norwich Cathedral in 1900 produced a series of finely sculpted double-capitals, which have long been identified as deriving from the Romanesque predecessor that was progressively demolished and replaced in 1297–1430. Additional discoveries in 1900 included twelfth-century voussoirs and jamb stones, which probably came from one of the larger doorways – perhaps to the chapter house – that opened off the cloister. These fragments have attracted considerable interest since 1900, almost entirely focused on art historical analysis of the subjects, style and date of the historiated double-capitals. Discovery of further fragments from the Romanesque cloister during works to the easternmost bay of the south walk (Bay 15) in 2018, however, allows us to understand more of its architecture. Although lacking the impressiveness of the earlier finds, these newly revealed sculpted stones include voussoirs and a shaft from the cloister arcades, and allow reconstruction of the overall form of the twelfth-century cloister. Moreover, the discovery of the use of calc-sinter – a faux marble sourced from the Eifel aqueduct – for the shafts of the arcades reveals that the Romanesque cloister had a hitherto entirely unsuspected lavishness.

Since its foundation in 1072 Durham Castle has served as a fortress, palace of the prince bishops of Durham and, from 1837, as a college of the University of Durham. Durham Castle was the bishops’ home and a symbol of their secular authority, whilst its proximity to the bishops’ ecclesiastical centre, Durham Cathedral, established spiritual and ceremonial roles for the castle. This paper will examine the major alterations made to Durham Castle by Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall (bishop from 1530–59), including a new first-floor gallery, stair turret and chapel. A hitherto un-noted gunloop in the stair tower suggests that the turbulent political and religious events of his bishopric, particularly the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, caused Tunstall to provide some defensive capability within what has previously been considered a purely domestic building programme. Analysis of the documented progress of building also dates the visit to Durham of the antiquarian John Leland to 1543, not 1538 as stated in the Victoria County History.

The reign of Mary i (24 July 1553–17 November 1558) is widely seen as a disaster for both the woman herself and her devout faith. It can be argued that she did more than anyone to make England a Protestant nation. When we seek to find any trace of her patronage of the arts or of major building projects, we find that little survives. Eamon Duffy called such traces the ‘disjecta membra’. Yet each piece, each surprising survival, demonstrates an awareness of the latest fashions, embracing a forward-looking form of Renaissance arts rather than a backward-looking, conservative Gothic. To discover and emphatically assign a major new piece of work to this catalogue of relics is justifiably a cause of celebration. In 2011, Charles Tracy FSA re-assessed the Marian choir stalls now in Holy Trinity church, Sutton Coldfield (in Warwickshire), rightly calling them the ‘refugee choir stalls from Worcester’, for it was from Worcester cathedral that this magnificent suite was evicted in a fit of Victorian vandalism. In this article, the author demonstrates that these choir stalls were created through the patronage of Mary i, and their makers evoked in their creation ideas and fashions that emanated from Hans Holbein and Sebastiano Serlio, to create what is a unique set of work.

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.

A remarkable controversy raged in the late 1780s concerning the authenticity of the Parian Chronicle, a supposedly genuine carved fragment recording ancient Greek history that was included in the 1667 Arundel bequest to the University of Oxford. Drawing in figures in British antiquarianism, including Richard Gough who, as Director of the Society of Antiquaries of London, intervened in the debate with a pamphlet that came out in support of the artefact’s authenticity, this was an important moment in eighteenth-century antiquarian study. Hot on the heels of the now much more well-known Ossian controversy of the 1760s, the Chatterton–Rowley–Walpole debacle from 1770, Chatterton’s subsequent death and the publication of his forgeries from 1777, the literature variously refuting and supporting the Parian Chronicle’s authenticity strikes at the heart of antiquarianism, in particular opening up to dispute assumptions made about or accepted interpretations concerning the authenticity of the fragments upon which subsequent antiquarian work and interpretation was based. This debate took the form of a very public attack upon, and defence of, the Parian Chronicle’s status as a genuine third-century bc antiquarian fragment, and the controversy within antiquarian circles that it occasioned is reconstructed here.

Following publication in The Antiquaries Journal volume 96 (2016) of ‘Moor Park in the Seventeenth Century’, by Drury, Jeffery and Wrightson, this article presents the results of research by the present four authors on another house by Hugh May – Eltham Lodge, Kent – which survives rather better. Its exterior is often referred to as being relatively unaltered, but analysis of the surviving fabric and much new documentary evidence have nevertheless revealed many interventions, both inside and out, permitting a clearer understanding of the original appearance, layout and setting of this important Restoration house.

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, artists in West Africa made sophisticated ivory carvings specifically for the early Portuguese navigators and their patrons. In researching the history of the ivories, the records of eighteenth-century English antiquarians are a neglected yet important source of information. Such sources help to bridge the gap between the earliest references to Afro-Portuguese ivories in Portuguese customs records (as well as the inventories of royal and princely treasuries of the late Renaissance) and their re-appearance in nineteenth-century museum registers and the collections of private individuals.

Especially valuable in this regard are the eighteenth-century minutes of the Society of Antiquaries of London, which enable us to trace the history of several African ivories associated with Fellows of the Society – in particular, Richard Rawlinson, Martin Folkes, Sir Hans Sloane, George Vertue and George Allan. In this article, the author reassesses two African ivories, an oliphant and a saltcellar, with specific reference to the Minutes of the Society of Antiquaries of London, shedding new light on the history of these beautiful objects.

Kelmscott Manor, the country home of William Morris, houses a remarkable collection of ceramics bearing a singular relationship to one of the most influential figures in Victorian cultural history. This study of Kelmscott’s collection of German stoneware reveals new interpretations of its production history and fascinating insights into its significance for the cultural context of Morris’s work. Based on a complete catalogue, the paper examines the ensemble of approximately thirty pieces of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Westerwald stoneware, or grès de Flandres, as it was known to Morris and his contemporaries. The Kelmscott group is the largest collection of this material known from an English historic house and has a composite and well-documented provenance. Supplementary material provided as an online appendix contains a fully illustrated, descriptive catalogue.

Westerwald pottery of the seventeenth century and earlier has been extensively studied, but its ceramics of the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries have received little attention. Most accounts stress the simplification of vessel forms and ‘degeneration’ of decorative designs during this period, leading towards mass-production c 1900. This paper re-assesses later Westerwald output, drawing attention to a vernacular pottery tradition of significant interest in its own right. This paper suggests that it was this continuing tradition of vernacular production and its naturalistic, decorative schemes that attracted the interest of Morris throughout his adult life, from the Red House experiment to the heyday of Morris & Co. Examining his writing on creativity, the minor arts and labour, the paper interprets grès de Flandres as an expression of Morris’s idealisation of the relationship between labour and craft production.

In 1934 English archaeologist Edith Guest (1873–1942) visited the Alentejo region in south-central Portugal. Though not of the first rank of famous archaeologists, Guest made a contribution to archaeology in the first half of the twentieth century, assisting such luminaries as Margaret Murray (1863–1963) and Gertrude Caton-Thompson (1888–1985) in their excavations in the Mediterranean. But why did Guest visit the megaliths in the Alentejo region of Portugal in 1934? Based on unpublished contemporary sources, such as diaries, letters and photographs, this paper suggests that Guest’s presence on the Iberian Peninsula was linked to the ambitions of Manuel Heleno (1894–1970), the second director of the National Archaeological Museum in Lisbon. Studies on megalithic Alentejo were at this time still in their infancy, and Heleno hoped to raise the profile of such studies and the museum with an enterprising schedule of excavations that would attract notable archaeologists and the ensuing publicity. Heleno’s aspirations were successful: archaeologists such as Hugo Obermaier, Vera and Georg Leisner and, of course, Edith Guest took an interest in the fieldwork, helping to bring it to wider attention in Portugal and elsewhere.

In 1937 R G Collingwood carried out an excavation at King Arthur’s Round Table, a henge monument near Penrith. He wished to test the hypothesis that this may once have contained a circle of upright stones or wooden posts. His interim report, published in 1938, suggested that, on the evidence of excavation, this indeed might well have been the case. Unfortunately, illness prevented Collingwood returning to the site in 1938. In 1939 a second season of excavation was conducted under the direction of Gerhard Bersu. Bersu dismissed all of Collingwood’s interpretations. He argued that there were no post-holes, and that the artificial surface seen by Collingwood was in fact entirely natural. And there the matter has rested – with most later commentators, such as Richmond, Hodder and Bradley, favouring Bersu’s interpretation of the site and only a small minority, including Grace Simpson (the daughter of F G Simpson who worked with Collingwood on Hadrian’s Wall), favouring Collingwood’s. The present review of the two rival interpretations is occasioned by the discovery of a previously unpublished letter in which Collingwood gives his response to Bersu’s interpretations. The author argues that in fact the balance of probability greatly favours Collingwood’s interpretation rather than Bersu’s.