I do not believe that anyone gives up the illustrious office of President of the Society of Antiquaries without emotion; I was your first woman President, and I certainly do not. I want to thank you all—Officers, Councillors, Fellows, and staff—for the steady and unwavering kindness and indulgence that you have shown me during my tenure of office.

Early in 1963 much of the land occupied by the Roman building at Fishbourne was purchased by Mr. I. D. Margary, M.A., F.S.A., and was given to the Sussex Archaeological Trust. The Fishbourne Committee of the trust was set up to administer the future of the site. The third season's excavation, carried out at the desire of this committee, was again organized by the Chichester Civic Society.1 About fifty volunteers a day were employed from 24th July to 3rd September. Excavation concentrated upon three main areas; the orchard south of the east wing excavated in 1962, the west end of the north wing, and the west wing. In addition, trial trenches were dug at the north-east and north-west extremities of the building and in the area to the north of the north wing. The work of supervision was carried out by Miss F. Pierce, M.A., Mr. B. Morley, Mr. A. B. Norton, B.A., and Mr. J. P. Wild, B.A. Photography was organized by Mr. D. B. Baker and Mrs. F. A. Cunliffe took charge of the pottery and finds.

The excavations at Cirencester in the summer of 1963 were the most extensive that have so far taken place, with work continuing at the Amphitheatre and on five new sites inside the town. Also, as so often has happened in past years, yet another rescue dig had to be undertaken in October, after the main season had finished. Apart from the Amphitheatre, a site in the middle of the Forum was most generously made available by Mr. and Mrs. Constable; further information about the buildings in Parsonage Field, close to the earlier excavations of Miss K. M. Richardson, F.S.A., and Miss M. Rennie, was obtained, thanks to permission given by Gloucestershire County Council; extended knowledge of the defences on the south-west side of the town was obtained by the kind permission of the Watermoor Hospital Management Committee; problems relating to the street system were resolved in the front garden of the telephone exchange thanks to the General Post Office, and in the garden of Dyer Court thanks to Cirencester Urban District Council, who, with Lord Bathurst, also gave permission for the continuation of work at the Amphitheatre. Finally a small site in West Way produced information of Roman buildings in a hitherto unexplored area, for which permission was granted by Ardin and Brooks and Partners on behalf of their clients Messrs. Lipton's Ltd. The Excavation Committee's indebtedness to all who took part in the excavations, over ninety in number, and to all who contributed financially towards them, must be gratefully recorded.

In 1946 excavations were undertaken at Breedon-on-the-Hill by Dr. K. M. Kenyon, F.S.A., in advance of quarrying operations. Since then further areas of the hill-fort have been destroyed, the rate of quarrying increasing yearly. So in 1957 excavations were again planned by the Ancient Monuments Branch of the Ministry of Works, and lasted nearly three weeks. Another section was cut through the east defences, about 100 feet north of Dr. Kenyon's Cut A, this time to include the ditch, which up till then had not been examined. No time could be allowed for any excavation within the fort.

The amulet here described was found in April 1963 by Mr. A. G. Rook on a Romano-British site at Dicket Mead, Lockleys, Welwyn. He has kindly provided an interim description of the site and its associated finds and a discussion of the material from which the amulet was made. The object has now been placed on loan in the Verulamium Museum.

‘Villages’ of ‘up to a hundred little huts’ and even ‘pit dwellings' passed from history to mythology after Bersu's Little Woodbury excavations, and Professor Hawkes's consequent reinterpretation of the Cranborne Chase ‘village’ of Woodcuts as superimposed successive farmsteads. The ‘villages’ of the old Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain have no place in the scheme of things exemplified in the 1956 edition. But the new orthodoxy of the ‘single farm’ as the dominant, or indeed the exclusive, settlement form in the Roman and immediately pre-Roman countryside has itself been thrown open to doubt as scholars have, on the one hand, accumulated more evidence of the actual abundant variety of Iron Age to Roman settlement types and, on the other, questioned themselves and each other more closely on the origins of the pattern of English settlement, and the probability that it was not imprinted on a countryside devoid of all trace of previous land-use and organization.

The work of Petrecvs has been discussed by Déchelette and Oswald, both of whom ascribed it to the early Central Gaulish workshops at Lezoux.

A bowl at Guildhall Museum, stamped by this potter and seen by Stanfield (fig. 2), clearly the work of a South Gaulish artist, came to the notice of Oswald too late for publication. However, his manuscript notes, on the basis of Stanfield's rubbings, leave no doubt that he realized that the vase recorded by Déchelette from Lezoux was not made at that site. L'Abbé Cérès noted the stamp PETR from La Graufesenque.

The drawing of this astounding design is in the Library of the Society of Antiquaries of London. It is in pen and ink (black and brown) with sepia and watercolour washes, with some gold added; there are some setting-out lines and underdrawing in pencil and at the foot of the drawing is a drawn scale of approximately eight feet to one inch. The drawing is executed on a wove paper which is in five pieces, the whole now mounted on linen; there appears to be nothing on the back of the paper.

The evidence for geared mills in Roman Britain is sufficiently slight for the addition of a further item to be worthy of record.

Among the hoard of ironwork discovered in a well at Silchester in 1890 and described by Sir John Evans was an iron bar, 36.1 in. long, tentatively identified as an unfinished carriage axle. Though this explanation was clearly unsatisfactory, no better one was forthcoming and the use of the bar remained a mystery. Whilst it is clearly an axle or spindle of some kind its weight and asymmetry show it was not intended for a carriage and, contrary to Evans's statement, it is a finished object showing signs of wear in places. A recent re-examination has suggested that it was the pivot of a large geared mill (fig. 1a), transmitting the power from a toothed wheel, through the central hole in the stationary lower millstone, to the upper stone. The well-known example from Great Chesterford, Cambs., offers a fairly close parallel and that from the German limes fort at Zugmantel possibly an even better one. The absence of the terminal rind from the Silchester spindle is explained by the fact that it was keyed to the axle by means of the rectangular end on the bar and could thus be easily removed when the spindle was taken as scrap. The end of this keying has been battered over to give greater security in fixing.

The bowl of samian ware, which is discussed here (fig. 2), was found in 1906 at the Recreation Ground, Canterbury, and is preserved in the collections of the Royal Museum, Canterbury. Originally in fragmentary condition, it has been completely restored, except for one or two small pieces.

Of Form 37, it bears the retrograde signature BIILSAM in a small label (fig. 1). The glaze and relief are in fairly good condition, but some of the figure-types and borders are badly squashed, probably owing to the worn condition of the mould in which this vessel was made.

An inspection of the Old Deanery in 1948 failed, for some reason unknown, to disclose the early date of the building. Neither the medieval form of the plan nor the antiquity of the Hall roof were recognized. In default of any clear case for preservation on archaeological grounds, and though the case on scenic grounds was very strong, the decision was made to demolish the building to make way sooner or later for the development of a Ladies' Training College, despite pleas for preservation from the Local Planning Authority and from Mr. H. de S. Shortt, Curator of the Salisbury Museum.

The twenty-seven fragments of samian moulds discussed in this paper were originally found by Plicque at Lezoux, and formerly belonged to the Oswald–Plicque collection; they are now preserved in the Birley Collection, at the Department of Archaeology, University of Durham.

The study of deserted medieval settlements has led archaeologists to turn interested eyes on the site of the borough of Torksey. The description of it by William Leland, the Tudor antiquary, together with its known history, seemed to promise that here, as nowhere else in the east Midlands at any rate, it would be possible to study by excavation the character of an urban settlement in the early middle ages. Hence the decision of the Adult Education Department of Nottingham University to start in 1960 a programme of annual excavations as the focal activity of summer schools on medieval archaeology.

One result of the excavations in Winchester in 1961 was the formation in 1962 of the Winchester Excavations Committee. The city is at present passing through a period of intensive rebuilding and development which offers many opportunities for archaeological research. Moreover, the 1961 excavations had directed attention to the problems of Winchester's Saxon minsters and the Dean and Chapter were willing to allow excavation near the cathedral. With these opportunities in view, the committee was formed to undertake excavations, both in advance of building projects, and on sites not so threatened, aimed at studying the development of Winchester as a town from its earliest origins to the establishment of the modern city. The centre of interest is the city itself, not any one period of its past, nor any one part of its remains. But we can hope that this approach will in particular throw light upon the end of the Roman city and on the establishment and development of the Saxon town, problems as vital to our understanding of urban development in this country, as they are difficult to solve. Further, it is essential to this approach that the study and interpretation of the documentary evidence should go hand in hand with archaeological research, for the existence of documentary materials greatly enhances the possibilities of interpretation inherent in the archaeological results, and vice versa.

For a building of such importance and interest, the cathedral of Glasgow has attracted remarkably little attention from archaeologists during the last half century. Many students outside Scotland perhaps do not realize that Glasgow possesses the only cathedral of the Scottish mainland to survive virtually intact from the middle ages, nor that its history is (by Scottish standards) relatively well documented, because of the fortunate survival of a quantity of records ranging from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. We may hope that the time is not too far distant when a full archaeological and constitutional study of the cathedral may be undertaken. In the meantime there is room for some briefer studies of particular problems. The present article attempts to put together what can be discovered about the immediate predecessor of the present building: i.e. the church of Bishop Jocelin. Most of what has previously been written on this subject is scattered, and now rather inaccessible. It will be useful to present the evidence afresh; and if there is nothing entirely new to be said, students of twelfth-century architecture outside Scotland may still find that the facts are not without interest for them.

The drawing here discussed, hitherto unpublished, is in the Library of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Its description follows: plan, on three sheets, wove paper, no watermarks, joined together and folded into a volume containing a number of the earliest drawings and engravings in the possession of the Society; 6″× 64¼″, with a drawn scale (50 feet to 1 inch); inscribed (in a later hand), ‘A key to be left open from London Bridge to the Temple 40 foot broad’ and ‘Statut. 19 Car. 2d.’, together with dimensions and names of streets, alleys, waterways, wharfs, &c. (see Appendix). The page of the volume to which the drawing is in part affixed is also inscribed (in the same later hand), ‘An Actual Survey Plann or Draught of a Key to be left open from London Bridge to the Temple.’ (pl. LXVIII).