Amongst the various ceremonies and entertainments which distinguished the reign of King James I. there were none perhaps celebrated with greater solemnity or more costly magnificence than those preparatory to and consequent upon the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth with Frederic the Elector Palatine, which took place on the 14th of February, 1612-13. The joyous exultation and feeling exhibited by the people tended in some degree, we are told, to dissipate the grief which was generally felt at the death of Henry, the young Prince of Wales, which happened in the preceding November, and had diffused a gloom over the kingdom.

The progress of Archæological discovery in France, elucidative of the Merovingian period, though always most important and interesting in itself, becomes yet infinitely more so when considered in connection with the advance we also have been able to make in the study of the remains of our own coetaneous Anglo-Saxon epoch. I therefore feel happy in being able to lay a few details on this subject before the Society, chiefly with reference to the Frankish cemetery at Envermeu, now under investigation by the Abbé Cochet in pursuance of his official duties.

Few of the structural works of former years require more patient and careful investigation than those generally attributed to the Celtic People.

It is very remarkable that, while some classical writers have alluded to their religious rites and ceremonies, they scarcely notice the stone structures, and are silent on their sepulchres and modes of burying the dead.

Malone may be said to have raised the deer-stealing incident in Shakespeare's early life to a degree of importance that it hardly deserved, considering the commonness of the offence about the period when our great dramatist is generally supposed to have left Stratford-upon-Avon for London. Malone's argument, which Gifford thought too long drawn out, was, that as Sir Thomas Lucy had no park, therefore he could have no deer; and consequently that Shakespeare could not have stolen deer which the old knight did not possess. It is evident that this reasoning is inconclusive, because, taking it even for a point established that Sir Thomas Lucy had no park, it is not thereby proved that he had no deer. To shew then that he had deer, or at all events to shew the probability that he had deer, I adduced the fact in my Life of Shakespeare, that when Lord Keeper Egerton entertained Queen Elizabeth shortly before her death, Sir Thomas Lucy made him a present of a buck as a contribution to the feast. Here again the evidence was clearly inconclusive, because Sir Thomas Lucy might have given the buck to Sir Thomas Egerton, without having any deer in his park, or even in his possession. Nevertheless, considering the manners of the time, it was not at all likely that he should have done so; and I believe that of late years it has been generally supposed that Sir Thomas Lucy, if he had not a park, had deer; and that it was possible, therefore, that Shakespeare should have been involved in some poaching affair, and might have quitted his native town for the metropolis to avoid proceedings against him.

In the summer of the present year, a paragraph appeared in the newspapers stating that some ancient weapons had been discovered at Harnham Hill, in the neighbourhood of Salisbury, in a field in the occupation of William Fawcett, Esq. one of the borough magistrates. The description of these relics was sufficiently accurate to assure me that they were of the Anglo-Saxon period. I immediately wrote to Mr. Fawcett, who most promptly and kindly replied to my inquiries, and promised me the requisite facilities for a proper exploration of the site as soon as the crop which the field then bore should be carried. He further stated, that about eight years ago a carpenter, in digging a hole to receive a gate-post on the south side of the field, had turned up a spear-head and part of a human skull. This circumstance attracted no attention at the time, but in June last a further discovery was made by Robert Wallan, “the drowner,” or person in charge of the water meadows in the occupation of Mr. Fawcett, who, when employed in the field, perceived, about two yards from the gate-post, a spear-head protruding from the ground. This induced him to make further search, and in a short time he discovered the iron umbo of a shield and portions of a skeleton. Subsequently, an iron knife and a buckle were turned up with the remaining portions of the skeleton.

I beg to thank you for your kind letter of the 26th Nov., and feel much pleasure in sending you, as you desire, the few notices of any interest I have been able to collect of the fall and present state of the three beautiful Pillars of the Erecthéum, and of the Pillar of the Temple of Jupiter Olympius, which has shared in the same fate.

It cannot have escaped the observation of every person interested in the life of Sir Thomas More, that his biographers, though one of them married his daughter, and another was his great-grandson, are almost entirely silent as to the family from which he sprung. In their statements upon this subject, they ascend no higher than Sir Thomas's father, Sir John More; he being no less a person than one of the superior judges; holding that dignity, too, for a space of at least twelve years, and not dying till after his son had been elevated to the highest legal position in the kingdom.

In the progress of some inquiries into the history of the noble church of St. Mary Redcliffe in this city, I have been much struck to find so trifling an amount of information, documentary or otherwise, relating to the commencement, progress, and completion of this magnificent fabric. This paucity of tangible evidence upon the subject induced a close inspection of the building itself, as the only means of eliciting the intelligence desired; and the remarks which follow are the result of a patient investigation of this interesting topic, and the conclusions arrived at after much anxious thought and solicitude.

In my last letter I endeavoured to give some account of the principal buildings in the ancient county of Poitou. The next place of any importance that I stopped at was Angoulême, which is on the direct road to Bordeaux; but, as I afterwards deviated from the direct route, and the church of Angoulême belongs to a very peculiar class, of which the type is the church of S. Front at Perigueux, I think it will be more convenient for me to begin with that church.

So little is known respecting the sepulchral usages of the early, or rather the middle Christian period, when Paganism still sought to maintain its deeply-rooted superstitions beneath even the very garb of Christianity, that any authentic notice, however imperfect, will, it may be hoped, prove acceptable and possibly useful. In such a hope I venture to beg the attention of the Society to certain mystic practices of Christian interments of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but chiefly to that of depositing written, or rather engraved, formulæ of absolution in the tomb with the remains of the deceased.

I told you I had found the angon, and you will be able to judge of the correctness of my statement from the accompanying notes and drawings, which you can lay before the Society.

As a sequel of your paper, and bearing also on an historical fact, the subject may interest those of our Fellows who do not usually give their attention to this branch of antiquities.

It too often happens, among biographers and genealogists, that erroneous dates and lineages, given by the first writer, are adopted without inquiry by those who follow him. Generations are thus not unfrequently omitted in pedigrees, and members of a family, bearing the same Christian name, become confounded with each other. Puzzling as every one engaged in such investigations must have found this practice in private descents, errors of this description are magnified in importance, when they have reference to persons of note and position; involving as they must do the difficulty of connecting the real parties with the facts that relate to them.

In a former communication read before the Society of Antiquaries in December, 1851 (Archæol. Vol. XXXIV. p. 394–398), attention was called to the existence of two Roman Villas, one in the immediate neighbourhood of Boxmoor Station, on the London and North-Western line of railway, and the other at a distance of about a quarter of a mile from it. On the present occasion an account will be given of the result of subsequent excavations carried on at both these spots, and at one of them, as you are aware from personal observation, with some very interesting results.

Four or five years ago, whilst making some researches in the State Paper Office relating to the time of Charles I., I met with a short succession of Letters from a person of the name of Nehemiah Wharton, addressed to his then late master and honoured friend Mr. George Willingham, merchant, at the Golden Anchor in St. Swithin's Lane. A few of these Letters, which I then, and some which I have since transcribed, I now lay before your Lordship and our Society. They form a graphic illustration of the historical incidents of Butler's celebrated poem, and detail the more than wretched condition under which our country suffered throughout the confused period of the Great Rebellion, wherever the rival forces came, whether to plunder or to protect the unfortunate inhabitants. Another feature in these Letters is the strange and ceaseless union of outrage with religion. Atrocities of the worst kind were constantly followed by “a famous,” “a worthy,” “a godly,” or “a heavenly sermon,” preached by one or other of the spiritual trumpeters of the time, who inflamed the population. After pillaging Sir Robert Fisher's house, near Coventry, on the next day, the soldiers “kept the Fast and heard two Sermons.” Before the third was ended they had an alarm to march.

Mr. Hepworth Dixon's very able and interesting biography of the great Quaker philanthropist, William Penn, contains the best account which has yet been published of the circumstances under which he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in the year 1668. That imprisonment was an event which exercised a most important influence upon the whole of Penn's after life. It attached him to the faith of Quakerism by the strong link of a public persecution suffered on its behalf, and the leisure which it afforded him sobered and matured his mind, and led to the production of a valuable addition to the library of practical Christianity. Up to the period of this imprisonment it seemed not impossible that under judicious treatment William Penn might have been won back to the church from which he had strayed. He had, indeed, openly avowed himself a Quaker, and had published his controversial pamphlets, entitled “Truth Exalted” and “The Guide Mistaken,” but nothing had rendered his adoption of the tenets of “The Friends” too decided to be retreated from with honour. To cut off this retreat was the effect of his imprisonment as a state criminal in the Tower. It pointed him out to the world as one of the heads and leaders of a sect then generally contemned. It nailed his colours to his mast, to borrow a metaphor from the profession of his father, and bound him either to discredit himself by a public recantation under the influence of persecution, or to fight out the battle which was thus openly thrust upon him. Nor was the effect upon his co-religionists more injudicious than that upon himself. The followers of George Fox, disgraced by the wild profanities of such persons as Solomon Eccles, were popularly regarded with scorn. To single out the first man of education and station in the world who had joined their ranks, and to send him to the Tower as a state prisoner, for publishing an ill-considered and abstruse controversial pamphlet, gave importance to what had been previously in the general estimation merely contemptible; and involved the government in a dispute, in which, if it failed to produce recantation, the attempt was sure to recoil with great advantage to the public reputation of both the prisoner and his sect. Viewing this imprisonment as a turning point, both in the personal history of William Penn and in the larger history of the religious community to which he attached himself, I lately received with much thankfulness from my friend and co-fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, Robert Lemon, Esq., of the State Paper Office, some valuable additional information respecting this imprisonment, and I trust it will not be displeasing to the Society of Antiquaries to listen to such an account of these new particulars as I am able to give.

The very intimate acquaintance which your Lordship is known to possess with the characters who figured, more or less prominently, during the reign of Charles II. induces me to call your lordship's attention to a MS. list of the court and household of that monarch, as constituted shortly after he came to reside at Bruges, which I met with amongst the muniments preserved in the Hôtel de Ville of that city, and which I feel assured must be of some interest, not only to your Lordship, but to the Society in general.

In the spring of the past year I received information from my friend the Reverend J. Pemberton Bartlett of the discovery of what appeared to be the site of potteries during the Roman possession of Britain, in the western district of the New Forest. Mr. Bartlett, at the same time, forwarded a hamper of the shards which had been turned up, and also a number of vessels which he had succeeded in obtaining by excavations on the spot. These examples were exhibited to the Society, and excited much speculation among those members who had made the subject of Roman fictile ware their study. At a subsequent period I had the gratification of exploring the localities, and in the succeeding autumn I again paid a visit to the Forest in company with my friend, whose zeal for the acquisition of all possible intelligence regarding these remains I cannot too much commend. But I must give, in his own words, the particulars relating to the discovery, and his account of repeated visits to the spot, which were continued until the close of the past year.

I Beg to lay before your Lordship and our Society a few short Remarks upon the early history of Lord Lieutenants of Counties, introductory to two sets of Instructions granted to the same nobleman, first in the reign of King Philip and Queen Mary, and, secondly, by Queen Elizabeth, showing a gradual and sensible improvement in the details of the lieutenancies, as carried out by the latter queen.

I terminated my last letter with a notice of the buildings of the town of Saintes. I believe that between that town and Bordeaux there are some interesting village churches, but I was too much pressed for time to be able to visit them, being obliged to take advantage of the steam-boat up the Gironde. I propose this evening to give some account of the buildings of Bordeaux, and some others in the neighbourhood, to which I made an excursion.

I am aware of the interest taken by many of our Fellows in all that tends to elucidate Teutonic antiquities, and therefore venture to request you will submit to their consideration these notes on an obscure and difficult branch of the subject.

When in France, during the last summer, I endeavoured to profit by so favourable an opportunity for observing the sepulchral remains of the Frankish race, and comparing them with those of the Saxon. It had not occurred to me that there also I might meet with traces of the Saxons, “that celebrated name in which,” as Gibbon well writes, “we have a dear and domestic interest.” From long habit, Saxon antiquities are apt to appear the exclusive attribute of our own land; yet we possess abundant evidence of the presence of the Saxons in Gaul.