Of the many benefactions to the University of Oxford made by Charles Drury Edmond Fortnum (1820–99) one of the most important but least publicised was his great collection of finger rings. Signet rings of all periods were but one of his many interests, and he wrote several short studies about them. The present article presents a publication of the Etruscan and South Italian metal rings in the collection, since they can readily be considered on their own, while the Greek and Roman rings with intaglio devices and swivel rings with scarabs are best reserved for the proposed catalogue of Greek and Roman engraved gems. This study of the Oxford rings is also complementary to a more general one by the present writer devoted to Archaic Finger Rings, to be published in Antike Kunst. The Oxford rings listed here are illustrated in Plates I–III, the bezels enlarged twice (except nos. 16, 23–34), side views life size. Measurements are given in millimetres and the devices are described as they appear on the ring, not the impression. I have to thank Dr. H. W. Catling for giving me access to the rings and supplying photographs, and Mr. R. W. Hamilton, Keeper of the Ashmolean, for permission to publish them.

Rome under the Republic, from its beginnings as a small barbarian community, gradually took over the Greek world. It then transformed itself and its subjects into an Empire of remarkable stability and continuity of institutions. Similarly, the Roman Republican coinage, modelled originally on that of the Greek citystates of S. Italy, became under Augustus the coinage of the Empire. It would be interesting to know to what extent, if at all, the Republican mint anticipated or foreshadowed the ultimately very sophisticated organisation of the Imperial mint and its systematic use of control-marks forming part of the coin-type.

Certainly for the Republic the problems caused by the need to produce an enormous bulk of coinage already existed and a number of issues display series of marks which can be regarded as controls. For instance, the issue of L. Iulius Bursio displays such marks and alone used nearly as many obverse dies as the entire Athenian New Style silver coinage. It would be surprising if the process of striking was not in some way systematised and controlled by the marks, as it was in the case of the Athenian coinage.

In 1956 the British Museum acquired on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum a series of eighteen stucco reliefs of the kind used by the Romans in the interior decoration of walls and vaults: these were bought in 1078, together with a terracotta relief, and were all ascribed to a ‘Greek tomb of the second century B.C. lately discovered in South Italy.’ They appear as follows in the British Museum Register of Antiquities:

1. In relief foreparts of Griffin facing right, ending in short twisted tail. Background painted red. 35 × 39·5 cm.

2. In relief foreparts of panther facing left, ending in short twisted tail. Background painted red. 35 × 38·8 cm.

3. In relief ‘putto’ moving left holding a patera (?) in his right hand and tambourine in left hand. Overhead hanging swags. 47·7 × 35 cm.

4. ‘Putto’ flying to right holding a lyre in right hand. Overhead hanging swags. 49·6 × 35·6 cm.

5. In relief a winged Victory moving lightly to right. 48·3 × 34·4 cm.

6. In relief ‘putto’ running to right, over his left arm a small piece of drapery. Overhead hanging swags. 48·3 × 39·5 cm.

7. Concave and framed with leaf-tongue moulding. In relief ‘putto’ riding a sea-horse. 30·5 × 39·5 cm.

8. Concave and framed by leaf-tongue moulding. In relief ‘putto’ riding sea-monster. 31·2 × 43·9 cm.

9. In relief half-reclining semi-nude female figure, probably Venus. 30·5 × 37·6 cm.

10. Concave, framed by leaf-moulding. In relief ‘putto’ on back of panther prancing to left. 31·8 × 34·4 cm.

11. In relief, griffin prancing to left. 28 × 33·1 cm.

During the fourteenth century the Latins' hold on those fragments of the great empire of Romania which they had acquired after the overthrow of the Byzantine emperor in 1204 became increasingly precarious. In the Morea, as the Peloponnese was then known, the foremost Frankish houses, the Villehardouin, the Courtenay, the de la Roche and others, were extinguished. The French magnates faced hostility not only from the Greeks and Turks, but also from the Catalans and the Italianate elements to whom their lands passed through conquest, marriage or princely favour. A turning point in this process was the slaughter of many male members of the old Frankish aristocracy by the Catalan companies and their Turkish allies in a great battle near Thebes in 1311, at which Gautier de Brienne, who had succeeded his kinsman Guy de la Roche as Duke of Athens and Neopatras in 1309, was killed. Gautier's duchies were occupied by the Catalans, who were acting independently of the Aragonese King of Sicily, though they subsequently rendered a vague formal allegiance to a line of Siculo-Aragonese dukes. The Catalans did not take Corinth, which lay on the isthmus separating the Duchy of Athens from the Morea, and the Brienne family retained effective possession of its lands beyond Corinth, around Argos and Nauplia, which continued to form part of the Principality of Achaea.

The following group of inscriptions includes some unpublished texts found recently during the South Etruria survey and a few published ones in which additional or improved readings can be offered as a result of re-examination. Most of them are tombstones of essentially local significance, but nos. 1 and 4 from Tomba di Nerone, 5 from Casale Spizzichino and 20 from Filissano are of greater importance and interest.

I. Sites on or near the Via Cassia.

1. Travertine tombstone, damaged at the upper right corner (0·52 × 0·98 × 0·12), with schematic gable and acroteria above and a lightly and crudely incised wreath in the gable; inscribed on the exposed face, whose surface is damaged. Built into the wall of the drive leading to Via Cassia 901, which lies on the west side of the road a short distance beyond Tomba di Nerone. Recent building development revealed drainage cuniculi and other elements of a Roman building, and along the ancient road frontage there were several graves and remains of at least one mausoleum. It is very likely that some or all of the texts (nos. 1–4) were found locally.

The great landed wealth of the Roman Church both before and after the foundation of the papal state in the eighth century is well known. It is also well known that the Muslim invasions and the political breakdown which took place in Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries destroyed the ancient organisation of Roman Church lands, and that in the succeeding two centuries a new and partly feudal landowning organisation emerged in the Roman territory. But it is not at all clear what this decline of the Carolingian system meant in terms of the administration and extent of church property, and of the connected changes in the relations of the Roman Church with the local landowning nobility. The present short notes have been compiled in an attempt to shed a modest amount of light on this matter.

Our possession of the letters of Gregory the Great has given us some knowledge of the ancient organisation of the papal patrimonies. But even before the papal state came into being in the eighth century, there had already been two big changes since Gregory's time—the organisation of corn supply and charitable works in Rome through the Roman diaconates, and the re-organisation of many of the papal estates into larger aggregates known as domus cultae. Both these measures tended to centralise papal control over the economic life of Rome and the District, but it it with the second that I am mainly concerned here. My business, however, is with the decline and not with the growth of the new economic system, and to its earlier nature and development I refer only briefly.

Africano is one of the most distinctive, although one of the most variable, of the ornamental stones commonly used by the Romans. It is a breccia containing lumps of white, grey or, most typically, pink marble, in which the crystals vary from minute to very large, the largest usually occurring in well-defined veins or patches. These lumps of marble, which may be of any size up to several feet long, are embedded in a black, dark green or greyish matrix that is usually harder than the marble itself. It probably derives its modern Italian name simply from its generally dark colour, rather than from any early speculation as to its origin, and since Corsi's attribution of it to Chios was disproved by the discovery that Chian marble was the Portasanta of Italian stonemasons, it has usually been listed as of unknown origin.

Prefatory Note.—My interest in Pavia goes back at least to 1951 when I was elected Rome Scholar in Medieval Studies. I began seriously to collect material for the history of the city in the early Middle Ages in the winter and spring of 1953 when I enjoyed the warm hospitality of the Collegio Ghislieri, thanks to the efforts made on my behalf by the late Hugh Last, to whose memory this article is dedicated. The published proceedings of the Reichenau and Spoleto congresses on ‘The early medieval town’ in the 1950s clearly underlined the need for detailed studies of particular towns; but the lack of adequate archaeological evidence discouraged me from attempting such a study of early medieval Pavia. In 1964, however, Dr. A. Peroni, Director of the Museo Civico invited me to read a supplementary paper on this topic to the Convegno di Studio sul Centro Storico di Pavia held in the Università degli Studi at Pavia on July 4th and 5th of that year. The present article is an amplified and corrected version of that paper: I have made no substantial alterations to my account of the ‘urbanistica’ of early medieval Pavia—written for an audience of architects and art-historians as well as of historians—but have dealt more fully with the social history of the city in this period. Professor Richard Krautheimer read a draft of the revised version and made some pointed and helpful comments. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Peroni, not merely for the invitation to present the original paper but also for supplying illustrations and answering queries at a time when he and his staff were engaged in helping to repair the ravages of the Florence floods.

The trial excavations of which the pages that follow give a short, provisional account, were undertaken during July and August of 1966 on the invitation, and under the auspices of the Superintendent of Antiquities for Apulia, Professor Attilio Stazio. Their purpose was to establish the archaeological possibilities of the Italic site of Botromagno, near Gravina, with a view to the possible mounting of a fullscale archaeological exploration at some future date. The work in the field was under the joint direction of Mr. R. T. Brooks, who very kindly undertook the task at very short notice, and of Mr. Alastair Small, who is currently engaged in a study of the native Peucetian and Daunian cultures within the context of their relations with that of the cities of Magna Graecia. They were assisted by a number of friends and students of the British School, among them Lady Wheeler (who supervised the excavation of one site), Mrs. C. Millard, Misses Ann Stoves (draughtsman), Pamela Pratt, Jacqueline Joyes and Katherine Dunbabin and Messrs. G. Sansbury and R. J. Ling. The sites for excavation were selected on the basis of a surface survey made by Mr. Small and Mr. Campbell MacKnight of the Australian National University, Canberra, and of a trial magnetometer survey conducted by a team from Philadelphia University Museum, under the direction of Miss Elizabeth Ralph.