At the dissolution of the Benedictine house of Durham its last prior, Hugh Whitehead, became the first dean of the cathedral church, and its large estates passed almost undiminished to the new dean and chapter, who thus also succeeded to its title-deeds and muniments. These remained in their old home in the treasury of the monks, and afterwards in the cathedral library, until, by the exertions of our late Fellow the Rev. Dr. Greenwell, they were provided with a new resting-place in the rebuilt and refitted chapel of St. Helen, above the great gateway of the monastery. When arranging these documents in their new home Dr. Greenwell made a slip catalogue of the seals attached. This catalogue, collated, annotated, and illustrated by the present writer, has been printed by the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In it is a long series of the seals of the bishops of Durham from Ranulf Flambard (A.D. 1099-1128) to Cuthbert Tunstall (A.D. 1530-1559).

In dealing with Stone Age industries it is a sound principle to judge by the mass from a single site, as exceptional forms may be purely accidental and differ in date from similar pieces found elsewhere. But this method does not justify the neglect of rare specimens, which may unexpectedly amplify or correct the impression gained by even the most careful study of a large and commonplace series. To emphasize the occasional value of exceptional products, several specimens for which special importance is claimed have been selected during the last few years, and the Society is indebted to their respective owners for putting them on exhibition when this paper was read. Some have since been generously presented to the British Museum.

The work which I have the honour of laying before the Society to-night makes no pretence to originality of idea. That credit is due to Mr. Francis Baring, Dr. Round, and their predecessors. But I do venture to claim for it some small novelty in the application to the problem of more scientific methods than have as yet been applied to it, which should yield more certain conclusions. The starting-point of this study was the attempt of the late Mr. Baring to trace the route of the Conqueror's army in 1066 by the records of the devastation which are preserved in Domesday Book. For certain counties he took the values of the manors in King Edward's day (T. R. E. valet), a date which we may call 1065/6; and also the value when the manor was received by a Norman baron—in Domesday phrase the Quando Receptum or Q. R. valet—generally taken as 1067/8. From what may be called a naked-eye comparison of these two values, he inferred that a part at least of William's army had passed through those manors which showed a heavy depreciation in 1067/8 as compared with 1066, and he provisionally indicated the routes followed by the columns. The weakness of his case, however, lay in the facts, first, that he apparently considered only the manors, and not all the holdings in each village; secondly, that he merely considered the absolute figures as recorded by Domesday. To those who were not so familiar with the Great Survey as was Mr. Baring, the method was unconvincing, and, in consequence, many scholars have remained sceptical of his conclusions.

The churches of the Yorkshire Wolds afford much interesting material for the study of the architecture of the Yorkshire village church during the second half of the century following the Norman Conquest. As a rule they have undergone much less alteration and enlargement than the churches of districts which have seen more change, and an unusually large proportion of them retain, if not a considerable part of their original structure, at least enough to make it easy to reconstitute their original plan. With very few exceptions, their plans follow the common type of aisleless oblong nave and narrower square-ended chancel, with or without a western tower, though they vary greatly in size, from the large scale of the nave of Hunmanby to the little nave of Kirkby Underdale, the length of which is less than one-third that of Hunmanby.

A classification of the numerous bronze pins found in Ireland is to be desired. Wilde, who figured over thirty specimens of various kinds, made no separation between Bronze and Early Iron Age pins and those of the Christian period. Coffey devoted some pages to pins, reproducing a number of Wilde's illustrations; he did not, however, attempt any classification, merely stating that, with the exception of the ‘hand-type’ and other pins of that class showing decoration earlier than the interlaced style, the approximate date of the majority might be taken as the tenth to the eleventh century.

The interest in the unpublished document now submitted to the Society lies, mainly, in three large sepia drawings of a triumphal column, erected by the Emperor Arcadius in honour of his father the Emperor Theodosius the Great. My purpose is to draw attention to the historical importance attaching to these drawings, for, excepting some fragmentary sketches to be referred to presently, they are the only evidence we now possess to corroborate the narratives of contemporary historians who describe an important episode in later Roman history, when Theodosius the Great was engaged in a war on the Danube with a ‘new Scythian people who had not been seen before by any one’. We shall have no difficulty in identifying these new-comers, thus described by Zosimus, with the Tartar Huns, the forerunners of Attila and his host, who now, and for the first time, faced the Roman army in battle and were utterly defeated. The victory thus won for Theodosius and his imperial colleague, the second Valentinian, was considered, and not without reason, to be important enough to merit record in this triumphal column, for the westward invasion of the Huns, though not stopped, received a check from which it did not recover for another half-century.

Most religious houses in England were founded for a particular Order, and remained in connexion there with till the Dissolution. Several early foundations, however, went through various changes and ended as Benedictine abbeys.

Bronze bowls engraved in the interior with figure subjects during the Romanesque period are relatively numerous. But those with associated scenes or consecutive stories are few, and it is to this class that the two examples described in this paper belong, one having scenes derived from a Christian legend, the other subjects from classical mythology. The first, found in London, was formerly in the collection of Mr. W. Ransom of Hitchin; the second, brought up from the bed of the Severn very nearly a century ago, was presented by Sir James Agg Gardner, M.P., in 1920. We may begin with the example containing the Christian legend, the story of St. Thomas the Apostle.

In spite of the long history of silver in Spain, and the vast amount of that metal taken from her mines in ancient times, comparatively few objects made in the Peninsula before the Christian era are to be seen in museums or in private collections. The things not protected and concealed by earth, with possibly a few exceptions, long ago went the way of all articles of precious metal in a theatre of repeated warfare; and most of those discovered accidentally in the soil were until quite recently melted down for the metal they contained. The pieces with which the present paper deals have, in addition to their general interest, the special value due to their having been kept together ever since they were found, and to their being accompanied by a quantity of coins found with them which give us, with close approximation, the date at which they must have been buried.

Dover has been both fortunate and unfortunate. Its misfortunes it has shared with the other harbours on the south-east coast, and if its fortune has been to escape the fate which has overwhelmed them, this is due solely to its proximity to the opposite shore, and the consequent necessity of preserving it as a port of passage, an end which has only been achieved by a continuing expenditure of public money; nor is the tale, as some think, even yet all told.

In cutting drains for the Oxford sewage distribution on Mynchery Farm, Sandford, Oxon.. near the Thames, in 1879, four potters' kilns and other Roman remains were discovered, and systematic exploration of the site was then undertaken by the late George Rolleston, F.R.S., Linacre Professor of Physiology, assisted in the work by our Fellow Mr. Heneage Cocks, who studied anatomy under Professor Rolleston, and by the sewage engineers Messrs. Cobbold Brothers. Unfortunately the Professor died before fully working out the results of the exploration, and only a brief summary appears in the appendix to his Scientific Papers and Addresses (1884), ii, 937.

The bishop of Bath's Inn had a larger site than any of the episcopal palaces on the Strand. The frontage to the river was over 500 feet, that towards the street somewhat less, and the depth must have been upwards of 400 feet. Thus the Inn with its precincts covered an area of between four and five acres. The site of Durham Inn with a similar frontage was much less in depth. But Durham Inn itself in the middle ages far surpassed Bath Inn as a building, though the additions made to the latter after it ceased to be a bishop's inn made it eventually the more splendid. It is in its last days as the earl of Arundel's place that Bath Inn is of most interest both for its buildings and history.