In late antiquity, as under the earlier Empire, Tripolitania was a small and somewhat isolated territory. The creation of a separate province of Tripolitania, in the closing years of the third century, was no more than the official recognition of an established geographical fact. There continued to be important military and cultural links with the provinces to the west; but the natural isolation of the territory was inevitably increased by the decline in public security; and although the church came under the primacy of the bishop of Carthage, the records of the church councils bear eloquent witness to the hazards and difficulties of travel from such outlying districts. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the surviving Christian antiquities of Tripolitania exhibit a robust regionalism; or that artistically, with the single exception of the mosaic in the church that Justinian built at Sabratha, none is of outstanding intrinsic merit.

Every visitor to the temple of Luxor is familiar with the central hall that is described by all the leading authorities as a Christian church, adapted from a Pharaonic building of the time of Amenophis III. The date of the original building is given by the magnificent series of bas-reliefs on the walls, most of which have been revealed from beneath a thick coating of plaster, on the remaining parts of which can still be seen traces of late antique paintings. It is, in the main, these paintings that have attracted the attention of scholars, both of those who saw them immediately after excavation and of those who, since then, have deplored their almost total destruction at the hands of the Egyptologists, who stripped off the greater part of the stucco to reveal the underlying Egyptian sculpture. Somers Clarke had good reason to protest: ‘We may admit that for the purposes of a complete study of the excellent wall sculptures it was necessary to remove these paintings: but it was a piece of unscientific barbarism to break them up without even procuring careful copies.’

St. George's Chapel as it now stands was begun in the reign of Edward IV and finished in that of Henry VIII. It took the place of an earlier chapel. St. John Hope considered that the first part of the chapel to be vaulted was the north aisle of the choir ‘because one of the keys or bosses bears the arms of Thomas Fitzalan as Lord Maltravers, which dignity he held from 1461 until he succeeded to the earldom of Arundel in 1487, while another has the arms of William Lord Hastings who was beheaded in 1483'. But these arguments are of no weight. The Hastings boss may be posthumous like the Bray heraldry in the nave, whilst the arms on the Fitzalan boss are those of the head of the house, perhaps William, the 9th earl of Arundel (K.G. 1471, died 1487), but more probably his son Thomas, the 10th earl (K.G. 1474, died 1524). They cannot be Thomas's arms ‘as Lord Maltravers' for so long as his father was alive he must have differenced those arms in some way, and in fact at least two contemporary manuscripts show that he added to his paternal arms a silver label, then as now a common difference for the eldest son.2 Hope also says that ‘the greater part of the vault of the south aisle of the quire was put up in the time of Henry VII and probably before 1502, since one of the keys has the arms of Arthur Prince of Wales who died in April of that year'. Here, too, Hope is mistaken. The arms may just as well be those of Henry VIII as prince of Wales; he was so created on 18th February 1503, and would have taken the plain white label of the eldest son on the death of his brother.

The Temple Church, London, has a rather unenviable notoriety among archaeologists due to its drastic restoration more than a century ago. Nothing could have been more thorough than the way in which every ancient surface was repaired away or renewed so that in the end the result was a complete modern simulacrum of this superb monument. Very little of this painful accomplishment has survived the serious fire occasioned by the air-raid of 1941, and it has devolved on me to reconstruct the church a second time. I can honestly say it is proving a more rewarding task than I at first thought possible, for behind the restorer's veneer there is sufficient of the old fabric remaining to make one feel there is still a life to be prolonged and much that is significant to be preserved.

Great Yarmouth has been fortunate in its historians and archaeologists. There, can, for instance, be few towns in England boasting so useful a record of its past as Henry Manship's History of Great Yarmouth, edited by Charles John Palmer, F.S.A., in 1854. Manship's father, another Henry, was elected into the Corporation in 1550, and appears to have taken an active part in affairs connected with the Haven in 1560. The younger Henry was educated at the Free Grammar School, and, whilst still a schoolboy, laboured with his own hands at the fortifications. He was Town Clerk from 1579 to 1585, and continued to be a member of the Corporation until 1604. Thereafter, although sometimes at loggerheads with some of his contemporaries, he busied himself upon his history of the town, compiled from records, most of which have since been lost. The history was finished in 1619, and the Corporation voted Manship a gratuity of £50. He died in poverty in 1625.