The object of this paper is to endeavour to show that there was in the West of England an important school of craftsmen responsible for a number of buildings of the first magnitude as well as for others of a smaller size. This supposed school flourished at that period when the round arch was logically giving way to the pointed one; so that to understand the importance of its position in this development a few words on the reason of the adoption of the pointed arch are necessary.

It is almost exactly two years since I had the honour of addressing this Society on the results of my investigations concerning the Iconography of St. Thomas Becket. I was conscious at the time that I had not arrived at anything like a complete survey of the existing material; and in the intervening period the material at my disposal bearing on this subject has as a matter of fact considerably increased. To a notable proportion of this new material my attention was drawn as a result of the publication of my paper in Archaeologia; and I should like at the outset to express my warmest gratitude to my numerous correspondents, many of whom are Fellows of this Society.— The widespread interest, which from this large body of evidence I may conclude exists in the Iconography of St. Thomas Becket, has emboldened me to give an account of certain of the most interesting aspects of the Iconography of St. Thomas upon which I did not touch in my previous paper.

The investigation of the interior of the castle in 1925 resulted in the discovery of a series of furnaces in front of the well, the exploration of a circular house east of the well, and partial excavation of an area near the wall on the east side of the castle. The accumulation of debris from the wall, however, prevented continuation of this last piece of work right up to the wall itself. In 1927, therefore, with the kind permission of Mr. N. Matthews, who, since the first exploration in 1925, had acquired the property on which Chun Castle stands, it was decided to conduct further excavations in order to ascertain the nature of the site by the east wall and to investigate another portion of the interior of the castle.

In August 1930 the Victoria and Albert Museum was enabled to purchase a fragment of a tall cross of the well-known Northumbrian type, of which the best-known examples are perhaps the Bewcastle and Ruthwell crosses. This fragment, which had been for a long time in private possession at Easby in Yorkshire, has frequently been illustrated as one of the finer examples of the carving of the period. It shows on the one broad face Christ Enthroned in Majesty between two angels (pi. xxv, fig. 1); on the other, magnificently designed vine scrolls with a bird, probably an eagle or a falcon, and a beast (I would rather not specify the breed) in the convolutions (pi. xxv, fig. 3). On the two narrow sides are panels of interlaced ornament and vine scrolls, separated by bands of pearled ornament (pi. xxv, fig. 2). Mr. W. G. Collingwood, both in his contribution on Anglo-Saxon sculpture in the Victoria County History of Yorkshire and in his later work on the Northumbrian crosses,2 noted two other fragments built into the fabric of the parish church at Easby, which, though only one narrow face was visible, appeared to him to be of the same date, and to have come from the same or a similar cross. Another small piece 3 with a bust of Christ was also noted by him on the outside of the south wall of the chancel. Last autumn permission was obtained by the authorities of the Victoria and Albert Museum to cut out these stones and to replace them with plain masonry. The carved stones, which were brought to the Museum for cleaning, were found to be covered on three sides to a depth of two or three inches with hard mortar; on cleaning this off the stones were found to show on two of the broad faces busts of eleven of the twelve Apostles, ranged in groups of three or more under arches (pi. xxvi, fig. 1, xxvn, fig. 1), the halo of the twelfth head appearing at the bottom of the fragment already in the possession of the Museum. This shows quite clearly the order of arrangement of the stones–the Christ in Majesty at the top, with the Apostles below. Mr. Collingwood, only having one stone to go upon, had restored them the other way round with the Christ at the bottom. The other faces of these two fragments of the shaft show vine scrolls and interlacing panels similar to the first piece (pi. xxvi, figs. 2 and 3, xxvn, fig. 2). A reconstruction of the three pieces of the shaft is shown on plate XXVIII. The third fragment recorded by Mr. Collingwood as in the church was found to have on the walled-in side a second bust of Christ and to be, as already suggested by him, a part of the head of the cross (pi. XXVII, figs. 3 and 4). Although now in pieces the cross would seem to have been originally composed of a monolithic shaft with the head carved from a separate stone, as in the case of the Bewcastle and other crosses. The Easby cross must have been violently thrown down at some time, probably during the Danish invasions, and then repaired with lead, a piece of which still remains at the base of the middle stone (pi. xxvi, fig. 3). In this connexion it is interesting to note that Symeon of Durham records the fact that when the Viking raiders of Lindisfarne had broken off the head of a stone cross the two pieces were afterwards joined together by being run with lead. The material of the Easby cross, like the other great crosses of Bewcastle and Ruthwell, is a local stone.

In the Crucifixion scene on the remarkable bronze doors of Hildesheim Cathedral, cast for Bishop Bernward in 1015, appears a cross with a series of curious protuberances regularly disposed all round its edge. Dibelius, writing of this cross, has suggested that it represents a cross constructed of unhewn palm-trunks, conventionalized in form, and has cited, as early examples of similar crosses, the representations of crosses on some of the Monza ampullae, attributing these representations to a presumed tendency, on the part of a Palestinian craftsman, to show the Saviour's cross as if made of a wood common in Palestine. I am dealing elsewhere with the suggestion that the cross on the Hildesheim door represents palm-wood, concluding that logs of palm-trunk are not represented in that cross and that the latter is no more than one of a class fairly common, formed of conventionalized living vegetation; and I am there discussing, in considerable detail, Dibelius's further suggestion that the crosses, common in medieval times and during the early Renaissance, represented as if made of rough wood, have been derived from crosses intended to represent pieces of palm-trunk set crosswise. Although since preparing that study I have seen no reason to ascribe the origin of roughwood crosses to prototypes representing palm-trunks, either dead and as the material substance of which our Lord's cross was constructed or as living, and representing symbolically the Tree of Life, the iconographical questions–first, as to actual representations of palm-tree crosses; and, second, as to the symbolical meanings underlying such representations–suggested by Dibelius's conjectures have seemed to me to be worthy of the investigation of which I present the results below.

The excavations described below were carried out conjointly by the Museum of Antiquities at Stamboul and members of the mission excavating on behalf of the British Academy in Constantinople in 1927. The funds required were provided by both parties. The account here given is published by kind permission of Halil Bey, Director of the Museum, at whose request it was drawn up, and who in the first instance proposed to the British Mission that the work should be carried out in collaboration with Macridy Bey and the Museum.

The earliest painted glass preserved in the cathedral church of Wells— with the exception of the ten small tracery lights on the staircase leading to the chapter-house–belongs to the opening years of the fourteenth century. The reason for this is to be found in the history of the building. Begun under Bishop Reginald about the year 1186, it represents the period of transition between the Norman and the Early English styles. The thick walls with their straight buttresses are of the Norman type: the stout piers of the nave would betray the Norman heaviness, if each were not surrounded by four and twenty slender shafts. But, on the other hand, this is the first great church in England to banish wholly the round arch, which was still being used at Glastonbury for ornament where the structure did not require the new pointed form. In this transitional style Bishop Reginald's church was carried through to the end of the nave under Bishop Jocelin (1205-42), until the western wall was reached; and then, in the latter half of that great builder's time, we get quite suddenly the full perfection of the Early English in the elaborate splendour of the great west front.