The London Inn of the bishops of Exeter in the fourteenth century occupied the greater part of the space between the Temple and the bishop of Bath's Inn. The whole site was probably at one time the property of the Knights of the Temple, to whom Henry II in 1173 granted the church of St. Clement Danes. In the thirteenth century the advowson of St. Clement's together with certain messuages opposite to the church had passed into the possession of the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre at Warwick. When or how this took place I have not discovered. But these messuages, like the Temple, were held of the Honour of Leicester, and when in 1280 the Inn of the Canons opposite St. Clement's Church was granted to William de Breuse, bishop of Llandaff, for life, the grant was made with the assent of Edmund, earl of Lancaster, to whom that Honour belonged. In 1323 Walter de Stapledon, bishop of Exeter, was anxious to provide a London Inn for his see, and for that purpose desired to acquire the property of the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre in St. Clement Danes. With a view thereto he purchased from Walter de Cantelupe land at Snitterfield in Warwickshire with the advowson of the church there. In the following year he obtained the king's permission to exchange this property for five messuages and the advow-son of St. Clement Danes together with some land at Hornsey. The exchange was confirmed by two fines levied in Michaelmas Term 1325. From another source it appears that the Canons had held four messuages together with the reversion to a fifth which had been demised for life to William de Bereford. Bereford, who was Chief Justice of the Common Bench, died in 1326, and Stapledon then became fully possessed of the property. The messuages were stated in 1324 to be held of the king as of the Honour of Leicester, having come into the king's hands through the forfeiture of Thomas ot Lancaster in 1322; it was not known of whom the advowson was held.

Last year I had the honour of submitting to the Society a communication on a remarkable church on the Yorkshire Wolds, which lies in the middle of a wide district within the northern border of the East Riding which the evidence of Domesday proves to have been still derelict in 1086. Weaverthorpe church was built in the second decade of the twelfth century by Herbert the chamberlain (the father of St. William of York), and its examination showed that, in spite of the essentially Norman character of all its details, it retains certain pre-Conquest characteristics in the relative thinness of its ashlar-faced walls, the absence of the usual pilaster buttresses, and the tall proportion of its unbuttressed tower. Reference was then made to a still more remarkable example of this overlap in the somewhat earlier church of Wharram-le-Street, which I venture to think is of sufficient interest to justify more extended notice, for two reasons. Its tower belongs to a type which there is reason to believe was common in the England of Edward the Confessor's time. There has always been great difficulty in dating many of these towers, because, while some of them show no details which can be pronounced to be definitely Norman, the character of many others is much more doubtful. The importance of Wharram lies in the fact that, while it retains so much that undoubtedly belongs to the pre-Conquest English tradition, it also shows details which are just as certainly of Norman origin, and afford material for assigning an approximate date to its building. Its second claim to our attention is the conclusion which its examination seems to justify, that the influence of the school to which its master-mason belonged extended far away into Scotland.

The textile is not a wholly suitable material to receive lettering, at any rate in our Western angular alphabets; the stitches have to be very fine to preserve satisfactorily the characteristic forms of letters, and it seems difficult to work a word or sentence satisfactorily into the design. In the best ages of Western ecclesiastical embroidery, texts from Scripture and prayers were avoided; we may find the name of a saint, especially if his attribute is not very obvious, and, more often, the sacred monograms IHC and XP (). In later times examples of lettering in needlework, most familiar to us Englishmen in the ‘sampler’, usually seem to have something of the bizarre about them.

By kind permission of the owner, my friend Mr. Edward F. Elton of Burleigh Court near Stroud, I am able to call attention to an unpublished antique bronze head in his collection (pi. ix).

Nothing is known of its history before it came into his hands, but it has obviously been at one time buried in the ground, and particles of earth are ingrained in the patina over a portion of the surface. It has evidently been roughly broken off from the body, the edge in front being jagged, while behind it is flush with the bottom of the helmet. The scale is two-thirds of life size. The head is hollow-cast and shows considerable variations of thickness, some parts being so thin that they have worn through; in particular about half the surface at the top of the crest has perished. The head should probably be pitched more forward than the position in which it is now mounted.

In June 1921, during the cutting of a new road in the village of Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, various articles were brought to light indicating an Anglo-Saxon cemetery. The excavation took place on a site at the back of the High Street, on the north side, in a gravel plateau about 100 yds. from the present bank of the river Avon, 150 yds. from the Roman Rycknild Street, and 200 yds. from the old ford, which lies to the east of the church. The site is on the extreme western border of Warwickshire, within a mile of the Worcestershire boundary.

It has been more than once remarked that the study of medieval monastic architecture and arrangement can be better studied in this country than anywhere on the continent of Europe, and for this there are several sufficient reasons. In England the Reformation, and with it the suppression of the monasteries, coincided in date with the general abandonment of Gothic architecture and the dawn of the English Renaissance. Consequently, any surviving remains of a monastic house in this country (except where the buildings were converted into a mansion) are of the period when monachism was a living force, and before its vitality had been sapped by the commendatory system of government and its architecture translated into the foreign language ofthe Renaissance. Furthermore, compared with the continent, this country, after the Reformation, suffered comparatively little from the effects of civil strife; such strife as took place was less religious than political, and in it the monasteries had been too long untenanted to be a symbol of Romanism and called forth no animosity even in the Puritan soldiery. The matter was quite otherwise in both France and Germany, where the wars of religion inflicted grievous harm on the corpus of ecclesiastical building when the pendulum swung to the Protestant side. The wider tolerance of the later seventeenth and of the eighteenth century was even more destructive, in these countries, to monastic architecture of the middle ages, for with a more settled social state a new era of monastic building began which transformed the vast majority of French, Belgian, and South German convents into examples, often magnificent enough, of the contemporary Renaissance style in which all trace of the medieval arrangement is lost.

It is not too much to say that our knowledge of the dwellings of the Anglo-Saxons, at any rate of the earlier period, has hitherto been practically a blank. Practically so, because discoveries evidently similar to those to be described and found only a few miles away at Yelford and Standlake, Oxfordshire, were recorded by Stephen Stone as far back as 1857, while more recently and close by at Milton, Berks., sherds have been collected by Professor Stenton of Reading University, which must undoubtedly have been deposited under similar conditions.

The occurrence of orientation in prehistoric structures has long been noticed. It has not, however, received from investigators much more than a passing comment, such as ‘the barrow is directed to the eastward’, or ‘the entrance to the chamber faces the north-west’. If a definite bearing is given, it is rarely stated whether it is ‘Magnetic’ (such as is obtained from a prismatic compass), or a True Bearing, i. e. an azimuth.

Wiltshire had at the Suppression fifteen religious houses, of which six were of over £200 a year value and escaped the first attack by King Henry VIII. One had licence to continue. With the exception of five they were all in the northern half of the county, and six were in the Avon valley between Bath and Malmesbury.

It may be premised that no stone or wooden weapon can rightly rank as a sword, for such can at best be but a flattened club, and not until the advent of metal could such a weapon as the sword be made. Moreover, in early days metal was too scarce and the workers were insufficiently skilled to make so large a casting. It has been assumed that because arms took a higher rank than tools or domestic implements, therefore the first use to which metal was put was the manufacture of arms, but such a deduction is erroneous, at least as far as Great Britain is concerned.