Since the purchase of the Morel Collection in 1901 the British Museum has been able to point to the Somme-Bionne chariot-burial as a notable example of the earliest definitely Celtic art of Europe; but a still finer group is now in process of acquisition, and is shown to the Society before passing into the hands of the Trustees. These four remarkable bronze vessels were found buried together on ioth February 1928, during excavations for a cellar on the site of an old abbey at Bouzonville, Lorraine, now in the Département of Moselle. They had been heaped together pell-mell, one of them inverted, without any protection from the soil. Nothing else was found on the spot in spite of careful search, and the bronzes must therefore be regarded as a hoard or treasure, not as the grave-furniture of a Celtic chieftain. It may be a hurried deposit of loot from various sources, but there is nothing to suggest that the four vessels are anything but contemporary. Wine-vessels may be expected in the interment of a chieftain (Fürstengrab), but a single wine-jar (stamnos) normally accompanies the flagon in such cases (as Weisskirchen, Dürkheim, and Klein-Aspergle). That they were intended to contain wine is inferred from the presence of white pitch or resin (used for flavouring) in the stamnoi of Weisskirchen and Klein-Aspergle. Attention has been called to this recently by our Fellow Mr. J. M. de Navarro (Antiquity, Dec. 1928, p. 435), who quotes Virgil and Pliny in corroboration of the practice, and points out that the Celtic demand for wine, notorious in the ancient world,2 was mainly satisfied by the Rhône-Saône traffic from the Greek port of Marseilles in the sixth and fifth centuries before our era.

There are certain details connected with the craft of the armourer, or rather with his productions, which hitherto have not received the attention which they undoubtedly deserve; for they bear very definitely on the whole subject of military equipment and as such require careful consideration if we are to use sculptured or pictorial contemporary records as illustrations of military operations. Writers on arms and armour have, with few if any exceptions, dealt solely with design and form, and have seldom noticed the reasons why certain types of equipment were introduced; nor have they drawn attention to the many obvious drawbacks or advantages of constructional details which force themselves upon one's notice if the subject is studied from the point of view of the man who wore the armour and had to fight in it.

The materials for a study of the iconography of St. Thomas Becket still exist in great abundance. On the canonization of the saint in 1173, his cult evidently spread all over Europe with lightning speed, and the consequences of this were very soon to be seen in all the arts. Much of the artistic production of different countries and centuries relating to the personality and life of St. Thomas has, of course, perished: and in England, after the de-canonization of ‘Bishop Becket’, decreed by Henry VIII, a veritable war was, in 1538, declared on the innumerable representations of the saint then existing in this country, the proclamation enacting expressly that ‘his images and pictures throughout the whole realm shall be put down and avoided out of all churches and chapels and other places’. Where the destruction was not complete, defacement of varying extent was resorted to, as is clear, for instance, from the many illuminations of manuscripts in which the rendering of St. Thomas Becket has been disfigured or partly obliterated. But even so, as already mentioned, there still exists plenty of documentation on which to base a study of the iconography of St. Thomas Becket; and I have now for some time been gathering material with that end in view. In doing so my endeavour has been to work as systematically as possible, though, as all students of iconography can aver, chance often gives valuable help in the pursuit of our quest. I had an experience of the working of chance only recently when a visit to Salamanca, entirely unconnected with my interest in St. Thomas Becket, suddenly brought me up against an extremely interesting Romanesque church of San Tomás Cantuariense, from which, however, all traces of the representation of the saint had vanished, except a very commonplace figure of a mitred bishop in carved and painted wood of quite recent date. Even though I have kept photographers busy over a wider area of Europe than I could anticipate when first embarking on this task, I dare not hope that I have as yet surveyed my material with anything approaching completeness; but the data I have brought together are, nevertheless, perhaps sufficient to allow certain deductions to be made and certain lines of evolution to be laid down.

The Object of the present communication is to bring together again three closely related items of antiquarian interest, which have got separated, and thus to recombine the parts of a long-forgotten scientific instrument of the Elizabethan Age, the invention of John Blagrave of Reading. Were any one of these three cluesto be lost, it would be impossible to reconstruct his Uranical Astrolabe.

The roof of the nave of Tewkesbury Abbey belongs to the first half of the fourteenth century; the bosses are carved in stone. Those down the central rib represent scenes from the life of Christ; those on the sides are angels, some with censers, some with musical instruments, and some, at the east end, with instrumentsof the Passion; there are also the four evangelistic symbols. For purposes of reference I have numbered the central line of bosses from the west end C 1, C 2, etc.; those at the side are numbered from the east end, on the north side N 1, N 2, etc., and similarly on the south side. I have numbered them thus as the central bosses obviously begin with the Nativity at the west end, while the side series have the most important figures at the east end.

Corfe Castle is situated in the centre of the Isle of Purbeck, about ten miles SW. of Bournemouth, and midway between Wareham and Swanage. The Isle of Purbeck is bounded on the north by Poole Harbour and the river Frome, on the west by the stream called Luckford Lake, and on the south and east by the English Channel. It is bisected by a range of chalk hills which stretch across the isle from east to west and attain a height at one point of over 600 ft. In the middle of the range is a great gap forming the natural pass from the northern portion of the island to the coasts of the southern portion and called by the Anglo-Saxons Corvensgeat or Corfe-Gate. Commanding this pass, and set in the midst of it, is a precipitous hill which rises to a height of about 200 ft. and is almost surrounded at its foot by streams forming a natural moat. Upon this hill the castle of Corfe is built (figs. 1, 2, 3).

The present article gives the account of the excavation of the Temple of Nabû in Kouyunjik, the larger mound of Nineveh, under British Museum auspices. A brief description has already been given in our A Century of Exploration at Nineveh (Luzac, 1929, referred to herein as CEN), and so we shall avoid repetition so far as is consistent with due description. Besides the excavation of this temple, our digging revealed the first chambers of a palace of Ashurnasirpal at 23 to 26 depth, and in digging out part of a house built by Sennacherib for his son Ashursumusabsi (?) (here abbreviated to SH) we found a practically perfect prism of Esarhaddon, and about fourscore more pieces of prisms of Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurbanipal (see CEN 83), as well as numerous pots and lamps.

It has generally been accepted as an axiom that the date of a seal can be determined within close limits by the style of the lettering of its legend. The late G. Demay, in his Inventaire des sceaux de la Normandie, published in 1881, was the first to give serious attention to the subject, and he naturally drew his material almost entirely from French sources. In 1887 the late Sir William Hope, in his paper on the Seals of English Bishops, offered some suggestions as to the date of the different styles of lettering, basing his conclusions on the fact that a bishop's first seal must be of the same date as his appointment to his see. His classification was as follows:

(1) 1072-1174. Roman capitals.

(2) 1174-1215. Rude Lombardic.

(3) 1206-1345. Good Lombardic.

(4) 1345-c. 1425. Bold black letter.

(5) c. 1425-1500. Fine close black letter.

(6) After 1500. Roman capitals.

Since the publication in Archaeologia of the paper read by me before the Society on 12th February 1925,1 have come across a considerable number, nearly one hundred in all, of Letters of Fraternity, in addition to the one hundred and seventy-eight which I was able to include in the Appendix to my paper. I owe the knowledge of most of these to the kindness of the same correspondents whose help I acknowledged at the end of my article, notably to our Fellows Dr. Rose Graham and Dr. H. H. H. Craster, Mr. R. C. Fowler, whose recent loss we have to deplore, and Dr. A. G. Little, F.B.A. My thanks are also due to the Duke of Rutland, F.S.A., for kindly allowing me to examine the Cluniac letter of fraternity from Lenton Priory, now at Belvoir Castle; to T. Bruce Dilks, Esq., of Bridgwater, for bringing to my notice the nine fraternity letters preserved among the Borough archives there, and for lending me his transcripts of them; and to the Dean and Chapter of Durham, for permitting the reproduction of the Brigettine letter from Syon to Durham which is illustrated in pi. LXVI.

The term ‘Maximilian’ as applied to armour of a fairly clearly defined style and date is one of those names, found in all branches of archaeology, which in spite of their admitted inaccuracy contrive to obtain a general currency as a terse and convenient label. It is at all events nearer the mark than the name ‘Gothic’, as used to describe the style immediately preceding it, for it marks a period which coincided with the latter half of the Emperor's reign and endured for some fifteen years after his death.