The Isle of Man situate in the midst of the Irish Sea as an intermediate station between Ireland and Cumbria, North Wales and Galloway, has naturally played a considerable part in various phases of western British life in which coastwise maritime movements have had significance. The phase or phases of megalithic construction included, as is generally agreed, a considerable amount of maritime movement along the coasts of western Britain, and monuments of various types were set up. It may be stated at the outset that, since developments even as late as the introduction of Christianity show relations with megaliths, we are not justified, without special local evidence, in ascribing particular megaliths necessarily to an early period, though there is widespread agreement that some must have been in existence at about 2000 B.C., and even possibly earlier.

The head vase, which forms the subject of my first illustration (pl. XXIV, I), was found at Camirus in Rhodes, and has recently been presented to the Manchester Museum. It is the bust of a woman wearing a diadem on her head and a veil. The paint with which the vase was originally decorated has mostly disappeared, but traces of red can still be seen on the dress.

Excavations made in June 1935 for the foundations of a new sub-station of the London Passenger Transport Board at Trinity Place, Trinity Square, E.C., brought to light some remains of the Roman town wall of London. A large portion of the medieval superstructure is still standing on the east side of Trinity Place, and to the north of this the Inner Circle Railway runs in a cutting under the roadway. The construction of this cutting involved the removal of a length of 73 ft. of the wall in 1882 (R.C.H.M. Roman London, 83). The site of the discoveries to be described here was immediately behind the southern retaining wall of the cutting. Both faces of the Roman wall were exposed at this point, and could be examined in detail, and against the external face was a fragment of one of the later Roman bastions (pl. 1). These remains were investigated by the writer on behalf of this Society, and the Passenger Transport Board kindly granted all necessary facilities, and rendered every possible assistance.

Twice during the past year it has been the privilege and duty of the Society to present an address to its Sovereign—once to congratulate His late Majesty, King George V, on the celebration of the Silver Jubilee of His accession, and once to express our deep sorrow at His death and our loyal prayers for the prosperity of His successor, His present Majesty King Edward VIII. I am glad now to be able to announce to you that King Edward has been graciously pleased to continue to the Society the royal patronage which it has enjoyed from His predecessors since its foundation.

To commemorate Queen Victoria's Jubilee a work on the Great Seals of England by Alfred Benjamin Wyon, who died in 1884, was completed and published by his brother Allan in 1887; both had the special qualification that they held the Office of Seal-Engraver to Her Majesty as their father and grandfather had held it before them; and their work has remained the standard authority on the subject. It seems suitable in the present year to see how much the discoveries of nearly fifty years have added to it.

Archaeologists in France have for many years recognized hand-axes of St. Acheul facies in association with flake-implements of Levallois type, which are contemporary with the mid-Pleistocene deposits of the Somme valley. Their place in the culture-sequence is after the cold period that produced the main Coombe-rock of South-East England, and the Little Eastern or Upper Chalky Boulder-clay of East Anglia. The Coombe-rock referred to overwhelmed the Levallois II factory-site at Baker's Hole, Northfleet, Kent.

In England, however, it has taken much longer to trace these mid-Pleistocene hand-axes in contemporary beds. The first was found by the late F. G. Spurrell on the classic ‘floor’ at the base of the Crayford Brickearth, though it was not until quite recently that the correct age of the Crayford series was determined. This specimen is now in the British Museum (Natural History), but is not figured in the present note.

Alstoe Mount is a fine example of a motte and bailey castle, situated 1 mile north-east of Burley village and 3 miles north-east of Oakham; it is on the east side of the road from Burley to Cottesmore, and immediately north-west of Alstoe House (fig. 1). The mount is on the level summit of the long ridge running northwards into Lincolnshire, at a height of 490 ft. O.D., and is about 150 ft. above the vale of Catmose. Towards the south the high ground terminates in a spur running to Burley, and possibly the mount was placed to safeguard the passage of traffic from this direction, near the point where it branched, either south-east to Stamford or northwards to Lincoln.

The discovery of the Roman amphitheatre at Chichester was made by a local resident, Mr. Raymond Carlyon-Britton, to whom the writer is indebted for permission to use that knowledge.

Believing that an amphitheatre would be a normal adjunct of a Roman town of the size and importance of Chichester, Mr. Carlyon-Britton began an examination of the outskirts of the city in 1934, with the result that, early in 1935, the writer was shown the site which has since proved to be that of the amphitheatre. It lies outside the city on the SE. (fig. 1), just over 200 yards from the walls and divided from them by the now covered course of the Lavant stream, and about 250 yards from the East Gate, where Stane Street branches off north-eastwards. The line of approach from the East Gate to the amphitheatre has not been determined; a road may have led to it directly from the East Gate, or branched off, beyond the Lavant stream, from the road which no doubt ran eastwards along the coast.

It may be recalled that the excavation of Maiden Castle, Dorset, has been undertaken by the Society of Antiquaries and the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society for two main reasons: first, because Maiden Castle is typical; and secondly, because it is at the same time exceptional or even unique. It is typical as representative in position and kind of a very large number of prehistoric fortress-towns in and about the region of Wessex, and its extensive exploration may be expected, therefore, to provide a firm basis for a further inquiry into this notable manifestation of urban development in the later prehistoric period. It is exceptional and, as to its great double entrances, unique in the scale and complexity of its defence-system; and in this respect may be regarded, not merely as the product of an era, but as the monument of some intensely individual and remarkable mind—in Thomas Hardy's words, ‘some remote mind capable of prospective reasoning to a far extent’. Indeed, the hackneyed word ‘personality’ can perhaps be applied more easily to Maiden Castle than to any of the many earthworks which in other regards have an equal claim to investigation.

The history of the invasive movements associated with the diffusion of Deverel-Rimbury pottery during the Late Bronze Age in Britain can be studied from two main points of view. We may seek to discover the continental sources of the various components of the general complex, and in this way arrive at the origins of the movement and its chronology in terms of continental cultures; or we may adopt the less spectacular, if no less interesting, course, and see what can be learnt of the impact of the alien on the indigenous culture of the period in Britain. As Dr. Curwen's work on the Plumpton Plain site in Sussex has demonstrated, in conjunction with Mr. Hawkes's analysis of the pottery, the continental affinities of the Deverel-Rimbury folk are best studied within an area of primary diffusion. The mutual relations of the invasive and the indigenous folk, can, on the contrary, be appreciated most easily by working on sites peripheral to the Deverel-Rimbury distribution, such as the one in Mildenhall Fen, West Suffolk, to which attention is drawn in this paper (fig. 1).

Dr. Cecil Curwen's discovery in the Late Bronze Age settlement on Plumpton Plain, Sussex, of decorated pottery of the same class as the Park Brow globular vessels, and the recognition of these as being of north French origin, provides a suitable opportunity to draw attention to two urns of British origin found abroad, one of which helps to emphasize this connexion with France. The pottery consists of fragments of overhanging-rim urns which have been found in Holland and north-east France.

On 24th November 1932 our Fellow Major C. J. ffoulkes exhibited a mysterious object that had been found during the restoration of Pevensey Castle. Almost immediately afterwards H.M. Office of Works produced from the same site an object about which there can be no doubt whatever. It is a visor of what is possibly the most striking of all medieval headpieces, the hounskull or pig-faced bascinet. Furthermore, it is the first recorded from an English site.

I have the permission of Captain Pitt-Rivers and Mr. Trelawney Dayrell-Reed to describe anew the ‘Temple Pyx’ that is in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Farnham, Dorset. It has been published in line-drawings, and its existence is well known, but photographs (pl. ix) of such an interesting piece of metalwork have been wanted for some time.

From the market-place at Faringdon the Oxford road mounts steadily, passing under the north slope of the hill known variously as Faringdon Clump or Faringdon Folly. The hill is a rounded knoll, the summit of which stands 505 ft. O.D. and, besides being a well-known landmark in the Vale of White Horse, commands an extensive prospect in every direction. Like Cumnor Hurst, Shotover, Brill and others, it is one of a series of undenuded caps of Cretaceous sands overlying Berkshire oolites that crop out at intervals between Faringdon and Aylesbury. The sands are ferruginous, dark yellow with lighter sands below, divided by a layer of sandstone rock. On the summit of the hill is a clump of beeches and Scotch firs, probably planted here, as on so many similar eminences, in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.

References to palaeolithic implements from the Pleistocene deposits in the Buckinghamshire parish of Iver have appeared from time to time in the Proceedings of learned societies. The British Museum Guide to Antiquities of the Stone Age, 1926, p. 46, mentions artifacts from this district, where palaeoliths have been collected for nearly half a century, but a general summary has not been made showing the sequence of cultures and the significance of the relics from the local deposits. The author has had the commercial workings in the Iver gravels under observation for a number of years, and thinks that the archaeological evidence, now made available as a result of continuous supervision, may perhaps assist in the revision of published material.

The area under review measures almost two miles from east to west and a mile and a half from north to south (map, fig. 1). It may be taken as bounded on the east by the Colne Brook, one of the branches of the River Colne, and on the west by a line passing through Parsonage Farm south-west of Shreding Green, which stands, like the eastern end of Iver village in the north-east corner of the rectangle, at an altitude of 120 ft.

The fine large church of St. Andrew, Biggleswade, in Bedfordshire, is described in the V.C.H. of that county (i, 213). In the course of last century it suffered a devastating restoration, one of the results of which was the almost total destruction of an interesting monumental brass which was lying in a large Purbeck slab in the midst of the chancel, being the memorial of a distinguished cleric who had the prebend of Biggleswade in Lincoln Cathedral. This brass had attracted the attention of Gough, who devotes a page of his second volume to illustrating it. This page is reproduced without its margin in pl. XLVIII. The margin only shows the reference at top to pl. CII, and to the page 273 of the volume, and below notes that the drawing was done by Schnebbelie and the engraving by Longmate. The slab as shown is very large, being 11½ ft by 5½ ft. Haines in part ii of his Manual (1861) describes the brass, stating that though the effigy and canopy with SS. John Baptist, Anna, Elizabeth, and Mary of Egypt were lost, yet figures of death, angels, etc., inscription in sixteen Latin verses and mutilated marginal inscription in ten Latin verses remained, and that the slab had been powdered with crescents and escallops, all lost but two. Sir A. W. Franks, in Proceedings, vi, 311, notes that the effigy was kneeling.

Larriban or Larry Bane Head is a limestone promontory rising sheer some 150 ft. above the sea in the townland of Knocksoghey, parish of Ballintoy, about a mile east of the caves recently examined by Dr. Jackson. The neck of the promontory has been cut off by a rampart and fosse about 100 ft. from its extremity. The fort thus formed gives its name to the headland, Leath Rath Ban, the Half White Fort. Before the war more than half the enclosed area and a section of the rampart had been quarried away and the original fosse materially altered. According to the report furnished by Thomas Fagan to the Ordnance Survey in 1838 the defended area measured ‘about half a rood’, and the ‘moat was on an average 23 ft. in width’. One of the workers employed at the quarry remembers that the entrance to the fort was near the centre of the rampart. It has now been destroyed. The quarrying has, however, left an instructive section through the rampart. In this section Mr. Blake Whelan found portions of a pot standing in what seemed to be a sort of kiln in the centre of the wall. The surviving portions of building here might outline the back of a guard chamber opening near the main entrance which must have traversed the wall close at hand (P in fig. I).

None of the seven objects seems to have been illustrated before. No. 1 is the earliest, and probably dates from the thirteenth century. It was found at Barnwood, on the outskirts of Gloucester, a site which has produced many prehistoric, Roman, and medieval objects. The material is latten or bronze. The plate is rectangular and bears a raised heater-shaped shield; the surface is covered with a series of minute evenly spaced bosses, presumably to hold the composition, much of which remains. Each of the bottom angles is filled with a fleur-de-lis springing from the shield, and in each of the top angles is a pair of cusps.

The present paper is an account of excavations undertaken in October 1935 at the site of the Roman fort at Brancaster in North-west Norfolk. Thanks are due to the Committee of Section H of the British Association for the award of a grant which largely defrayed the cost of the excavation. The writer has also to thank Mr. F. Wordingham the owner of the site, and Mr. J. Bunkle the tenant, for permission to excavate, and Messrs. May, Gurney & Co., contractors, Trowse, for the loan of implements. Mr. R. R. Clarke and Col. A. C. A. Thackwell assisted throughout the period of the digging.

Every schoolboy knows the name of Clarendon in connexion with the Constitutions of Clarendon 1164; but as regards the importance, historically as well as archaeologically, of Clarendon Palace, as regards its gradual growth to great splendour and magnificence in Plantagenet days, and as regards its subsequent vicissitudes—on all these points I think it may be said without exaggeration that the world at large knows next to nothing; nor have such inquiries as have sporadically taken place into the history and archaeology of Clarendon Palace ever penetrated very deeply into the subject. Having through a variety of circumstances come to give a good deal of thought to these questions, I have developed the conviction that Clarendon Palace offers a field of study which is of prime importance, and indeed, from certain points of view, of unique importance for the medieval archaeology not only of England but of the whole of Europe. I venture to hope that the present paper, though necessarily in the nature of a preliminary summary, may afford grounds for conceding that this is not too large a claim to make.