The past year has witnessed a profound change in the fortunes and prospects of the national cause; growing hope has been exchanged for the certainty of victory and ‘how long?’ is the only question yet unanswered. To some of us who have passed an appreciable portion of our lives in the Victorian age, the shattering of the old security, the reversal of the old standards, and the casting of the old society into the melting-pot, may seem too catastrophic a series of changes to have been suitably experienced in one lifetime. Yet to those with a lively historic sense it must afford a certain bitter satisfaction, to have lived in and outlived the most momentous age in the history of mankind and to have been spectators of, or participators in, the grimmest drama of human history. It should furthermore be a stimulus to further effort that we may before long have an opportunity of assisting in the restoration of all that was best in the old life and in the creation of the new social order which will we hope, in time, soften or efface the memories of five purgatorial years.

At a sale at Sotheby's on 24th February 1943 of miscellaneous antiquities belonging to Dr. Hugh A. Fawcett, the Christy Trustees purchased on behalf of the British Museum two objects described under lot 117 as ‘an interesting Viking spearhead’ and ‘a long sword with straight quillons and flattened spherical pommel ornamented with bronze, the long blade with parallel grooves running up into the ricasso, 37 in., possibly Viking or later; both from the River Bann, Northern Ireland’.

The spearhead is certainly Viking, but the qualifying words ‘or later’ were a wise proviso in the case of the sword, because a second glance shows that it is very much later in date (pls. XIII and XX, b). In fact it is as near to our own day in point of time as it is to the Vikings. That it happens to belong to an extremely rare and interesting class that has hitherto received little recognition is my excuse for the length of this notice.

In the past, although many discoveries of early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries have been made in Northamptonshire, no detailed record exists of any series of burials larger than the thirty-seven graves explored by Sir Henry Dryden at Marston St. Lawrence at the southwestern end of the county. The following report of the cemetery at Nassington therefore constitutes a most important addition to our knowledge of the archaeology of the period.

The kilns were first discovered by the owner of the land, Mr. W. Nicholson, in the autumn of 1942 while ploughing the field for the first time in living memory. Potsherds and lumps of red clay were noticed in the wake of the plough, and Mr. F. T. Baker, of Lincoln Museum, was notified and excavation arranged and completed by December of the same year.