A previously unpublished Neolithic carved stone ball from Aberdeenshire, Scotland, is described. This intricately decorated object formed part of the collection of Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury) and is now housed at the Bromley Museum, Orpington, Greater London. The intrinsic importance of this ball is discussed and its interest is enhanced by the details of its collection history. The acquisition of other items from Scotland in the Avebury Collection at Bromley Museum is put in the context of Lubbock’s contacts and visits to Scotland.

The paper begins by considering the importance of springs as a focus for votive deposits in Bronze Age Britain. This is not a new idea, but nowhere has this association been examined through the excavation of one of these features. The point is illustrated by excavation at the findspot of a famous group of Late Bronze Age weapons, the Broadward hoard, discovered in 1867. Little was known about the site, where it was found or the character of the original deposit, but a study of contemporary accounts of the hoard, combined with geophysical and topographical surveys, led to small-scale excavation in 2010, which showed that the deposit had most probably been buried in a pit on the edge of a spring. Other finds associated with the spring included an Early Bronze Age macehead, a Roman pot and various Saxon and medieval animal bones. The latest deposit, with a post-medieval carbon date, included a wooden knife or dagger. An adjacent palaeochannel provided an important environmental sequence for this part of the English–Welsh borderland and suggests that the Late Bronze Age hoard had been deposited not far from a settlement. A nearby earthwork enclosure was associated with a clay weight, which may be of similar date. Despite the limited scale of the fieldwork, it illustrates the potential for treating springs associated with artefact finds on the same terms as other archaeological deposits.

Building 2, insula xxvii, at Verulamium is a large townhouse of three wings fronted by a corridor (porticus), facing the north side of the forum. Sheppard Frere, who excavated it between 1956 and 1960, concluded that it was constructed around ad 380, and was replaced during the fifth century by a large buttressed building, which in turn was cut by a water-pipe trench. This paper offers a reinterpretation of this site, suggesting a construction date in the late second rather than the fourth century.

In 2009, a metal-detector find of a rare garnet-inlaid composite disc brooch at West Hanney, Oxfordshire, led to the excavation of an apparently isolated female burial sited in a prominent position overlooking the Ock valley. The burial dates to the middle decades of the seventh century, a period of rapid socio-political development in the region, which formed the early heartland of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. The de luxe brooch links the wearer to two other burials furnished with very similar brooches at Milton, some 10km to the east and only c 1km from the Anglo-Saxon great hall complex at Sutton Courtenay / Drayton, just south of Abingdon. All three women must have been members of the region’s politically dominant group, known as the Gewisse. The burial’s grave goods and setting add a new dimension to our understanding of the richly furnished female burials that are such a prominent feature of the funerary record of seventh-century England.

The conservation and repair of the west front of Tintern Abbey church, undertaken by Cadw between 2005 and 2010, provided an unrivalled opportunity to survey, record and analyse the design, construction and alteration of a much-celebrated example of medieval architecture. This paper considers in detail the moulding profiles and ornament of the west front and offers a developmental history for this part of the abbey church. Comparisons are made with ecclesiastical architecture elsewhere in England and Wales, and with the contemporary programme of work being undertaken at nearby Chepstow Castle. Two appendices outline the history of its conservation since 1900 and assess some Victorian drawn records of the west front.

This paper describes a Syracusan silver dekadrachm (ten-drachma) coin of c 400 bc, now in the Hunt Museum, Limerick, that is set in a gold ring with a text in elaborate Lombardic letters of early fourteenth-century date identifying it as one of the thirty pieces of silver for which Christ was betrayed by Judas. It is an unusual and early example of this type of relic.

The court of Common Pleas was one of the most important courts in the English legal system for more than 600 years, until its abolition by Act of Parliament in 1873. The cases heard before this royal court were civil disputes between the king’s subjects, often relating to land, inheritance and debts. The purpose of this paper is to introduce readers to the ornament and imagery that appeared on the headings of the main records of the court of Common Pleas between 1422 and 1509 and to explore the origins and contemporary context of the images and representations employed by the clerk-artists who wrote and decorated these headings. The decoration they chose ranged from simple ornament to representations of plants, birds, animals and people. Great emphasis was placed on the role of the sovereign as the fount of justice, and this emphasis was reinforced by the incorporation of words and phrases, acclamations and verses from the Psalms chosen to underline the majesty and power of successive monarchs. The illustrations provide an important insight into the art, history and politics of late fifteenth-century England.

This paper takes as its start-point the entry for Thomas Bertie in John Harvey’s English Medieval Architects and uses it to explore the life and work of a master-mason who was trained in the Gothic tradition, but came to be one of the first to utilise Renaissance detail in his works in Winchester Cathedral and across Hampshire. Bertie’s work encompassed an astonishing range of projects, extending from the remodelling of the presbytery of Winchester Cathedral to the construction of chapels and tomb monuments, and from the conversion of monastic buildings into country houses to helping create a chain of artillery forts to defend the south coast. The distinctive Renaissance style that appears on so many of these works allows a connection to be made between them and Thomas Bertie.

The contract for the building of the north aisle at St James’s Church, Biddenham, Bedfordshire, in 1522 is an exceptional document that escaped the surveys of L F Salzman, John Harvey and most later scholars. Unlike other surviving medieval building contracts, it is the rough draft of an indenture, showing the alterations and changes that were made before it was copied into a neat final version and sealed. By surveying these changes it is possible to delineate, for the first time, the process of negotiation engaged in by its patron, Sir William Butler, and the mason, John Laverok. Unusual too are the details it provides of Butler’s collaboration with the parish in building the well-constructed aisle that would bear his arms. This went further than simply defraying the cost of the work, and is of significance for our wider understanding of the organisation and financing of parish church construction in the sixteenth century. Most importantly, it demonstrates the breadth and complexity of forms that co-operation could take between gentry and parish, and shows that projects with the arms of a single family could nevertheless be funded collaboratively.

This paper discusses a hitherto overlooked printed missal of Cistercian use at York Minster Library. Deletions to the calendar and text show that it must have been in England during the Reformation. Four manuscript leaves have been bound at the end of the missal; the last leaf has prayers for the pregnancy of Queen Mary i that are known from only one other source. The presence of these prayers raises questions about the continued use of the missal after the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Catholic hopes for Mary’s reign.

This paper explores the background to the publication in 1610 of the first English-language edition of William Camden’s Britannia, translated from the Latin by Philemon Holland. The translation itself is shown to be free, but largely reliable. Camden is found to have played little part in the detailed work of translation, but to have contributed most of the volume’s new content. The translation’s place within the formation of an English and a British national identity is considered.

Some time in the early years of the seventeenth century, the city fathers of Gloucester evidently commissioned twelve paintings of past benefactors to that city. The paintings survive in the Gloucester Folk Museum and were exhibited in the spring of 2014 to mark the approximate date of their four-hundredth anniversary. Given the absence of critically important sources that would have given precise information on their commissioning, their origin and history have remained somewhat obscure. This paper nevertheless strives to understand why, and by whom, they may have been painted, and why they remain significant today, both to the City of Gloucester and to the history of English portraiture. It argues that they were commissioned to bolster a sense of community identity and to encourage further benefaction at a time of local hardship and stress. It comments on them as examples of the regional English vernacular style in portraiture of the day, reflects on their current condition and very tentatively suggests who might have painted them.

In 1831 Dr James Raine excavated Bede’s tomb in Durham Cathedral, revealing a partial skeleton accompanied by a medieval ring. Three casts were made of the skull; the recent re-discovery of one of these casts provokes an examination of the authenticity of the remains and of antiquarian interests in craniology in the mid-nineteenth century.

This paper examines the context of two nineteenth-century images of the thirteenth-century statue of the Angel Gabriel in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey. One, by John Wykeham Archer, was previously unidentified; the other, by Elizabeth, Lady Palgrave, was misidentified.