It was recently my good fortune to discover in the Muniment Room of King's College, Cambridge, in a very unusual situation, the manuscript of a fourteenth-century love-song. Mr. Flower kindly drew my attention to a love-song of the early sixteenth century preserved in a rather similar manner at the Public Record Office. Both manuscripts included musical settings. That of the fourteenth-century song, Bryd one brere, has been edited and arranged by Mr. F. McD. C. Turner, of Magdalene College, Cambridge; that of the song from the sixteenth century by Professor E. J. Dent, of King's College; and they will be found in later sections of this paper. Meanwhile I shall endeavour to describe the manuscripts themselves, the literary texts of the two lyrics, and what can be inferred of their history.

In addressing the Society at an Annual Meeting from this chair for the first time, I must at once express my obligations to the Fellows for the honour they have done me, and confess my own diffidence as to their wisdom. The most gratifying honours are those to which one has no claim, and which one has no reason to expect; and therefore I can place the presidency of this Society among the most gratifying honours that have befallen me. It is not the only one that I have not deserved, but perhaps it is the most notable of them; and therefore it carries with it a special responsibility, since it must be justified, if it is to be justified at all, by its results. Of these it is too soon to speak yet. You have been very indulgent to an inexperienced President in his first year of office; you have sustained yourselves, no doubt, with the reflection that the real business of the Society was safe in the hands of very experienced officers, who would see that the republic took no harm, and that a President, after all, cannot do much mischief, provided he does not talk too much.

Even if the number of bronze bowls which constitute one of the brightest spots in the art of our Dark Age had remained at the respectable figure at which it stood a few years ago, British art could still boast of having furnished a most valuable contribution to the art of the period. But when we find added to this number two splendid examples in the space of three years we may well wonder what fresh revelation of the art may still be in store for future discovery, destined to illumine further the mystery that surrounds them and their origins. In 1931 the archaeological world was delighted by the Winchester bowl, as much on account of its perfect state of preservation as for the intricate workmanship of the scrolled designs on its escutcheons, even though these belonged to a type already familiar from numerous examples discovered in the past. Even so the variety of the patterns offers, as Mr. Kendrick has demonstrated, a most fascinating problem, one which he has gone far to solve, and yet, as he would be the first to admit, there are many points in their history that still remain obscure.

In 1929 the Duchy of Cornwall exercised its powers under the Ancient Monuments Acts, and placed Tintagel under the guardianship of the Commissioners of H.M. Works. During the clearance of the medieval castle it seemed desirable to investigate the earlier history of the site, in order to test the basis of the Arthurian traditions. In 1933 a fortunate discovery revealed dry-built walls on a terrace on the north-eastern cliffs. Subsequently an examination of the area surrounding the chapel disclosed indications of similar buildings, and trial excavations during 1933 and 1934 showed that these buildings belonged to a Celtic monastery.

Archbishop Chichele's statutes for the college of his foundation were dated at Lambeth on 2nd April 1443. ‘Dating’ means that on this day they were approved and issued to the warden, Roger Keys, who was present along with the primate's brother, Thomas Chichele, archdeacon of Canterbury, William Bykonyll, chancellor of the archbishop, John Brykhed or Birkhede, canon of Chichester, later rector of Harrow and one of Chichele's executors, and John Bolde, also canon of Chichester. Birkhede and Bolde are familiar figures in the early history of All Souls. They acted as feoffees of the lands accumulated to form the endowment, before the whole complex of estates was made over to the king, who re-granted it to the college. Bykonyll, like the armigers Robert Danvers and John Darell, had also been concerned in the foundation; while Thomas Chichele (as also Birkhede) was commemorated as a benefactor by the next generation. The nucleus of the little group that met to witness one of their master's last formal acts consisted of a few friends and colleagues from the archbishop's household, his helpers in the Oxford enterprise of the past six years.

During the summer of 1931 a set of air photographs was taken by Aerofilms, Ltd., under my instructions, covering the Roman walled town of Durobrivae and its surroundings, in the hope that marks in the crops might disclose the street system within the walls, as this had been very clearly visible from the air in the previous year. This expectation was not fully realized, although certain marks in the walled area appear to show some portions of the side streets which no doubt branched from Ermine Street in its straight course through the town, but very clear indications were given by the photographs of other Roman roads which connected with Ermine Street and with each other to the north and east of Durobrivae.

The great honour bestowed upon me to-night by your Council is one which I appreciate deeply but for which I find it difficult to thank you. The many years spent over work in the peaceful isolation of beloved deserts and mountains has ill prepared me for speaking at gatherings like the present. Also I cannot fail to-night to realize how distant are the special fields of my labours from the sphere of those great historical and archaeological interests which make so strong an appeal to the people of this country and which for many years past have found their chief guardian in the Society of Antiquaries.

The photographs and drawings here illustrated have been placed at my disposal by Mr. Kendrick of the British Museum, and enable me to publish with the Curator's permission a short note on these very attractive trinkets. They are three fragments of silver found in the City of London and preserved in the Guildhall Museum. Each is part of a small cylinder provided with holes for rivets, to be fastened as a decoration on some kind of staff. The original destination of the object is not clear: in any case the cylinders seem too slender for a crozier shaft, but belonged to something worthy of this costly and aristocratic decoration.

The excavations at Jarlshof, Sumburgh, have now been carried on for a couple of months each summer for the last four years, and a general review of the progress made, and of the results obtained, is now permissible.

The site is a remarkable one, a low promontory which projects into the Sumburgh Voe (as such inlets of the sea are termed in Shetland) on its western shore, on the side of the narrow isthmus which links the lofty headland of Sumburgh Ness, the most southerly point of Shetland, with Mainland, as the principal island is called. Facing towards ‘Fair Isle’, which lies midway between Orkney and Shetland, this would be the first land which any adventurous mariner would make in early times, and thus it comes about that a surprising collection of remains covers the area.

The occurrence of diminutive flint implements in certain industries of the Stone Age has been recognized for many years. Such specimens have been supposed to make their first appearance in the Upper Aurignac (Late Palaeolithic) period; to have extended sparingly through the Solutre and La Madeleine epochs; and to have become very numerous in the transitional industrial stages between the latest palaeolithic and earliest neolithic horizons. This, we think, is a fair statement of the opinion held by the majority of present-day archaeologists. There are, however, on record certain discoveries of diminutive flint implements in deposits older than those of the Upper Aurignac period. Search has been made for notices of previous discoveries, but material available is unfortunately small. In 1908 M. Eugene Pittard announced the discovery, in the valley of the Rebieres, Dordogne, of what he terms a microlithic industry in flint of Lower Le Moustier age. The site is in the open air, and the section exposed contained both Le Moustier and Aurignac levels of occupation. The microlithic industry was found at the base of the deposits, beneath Le Moustier horizons. M. Pittard figures some 40 specimens, and there seems no doubt that these represent very small but definite implements made to fulfil some special purpose. His excellent illustrations show that these resemble a series discovered in a dry valley to the north of Ipswich some years ago. These specimens will be described later, and possibly some of them are contemporary with M. Pittard's implements. The only other reference we can find to the discovery of very small implements before the Upper Aurignac period is in one of the many papers published on the remarkable finds at Chou Kou Tien, near Peking, China. In the limestone caves and fissures at this place have been found numerous fragments of skulls and jawbones of a primitive race of man to which the name of Sinanthropus has been given. Associated with these relics was a large number of stone implements, made of various rocks, of peculiar and somewhat unfamiliar types.

With the consent of the Duchy of Cornwall (the owners of the site) and H.M. Office of Works (its guardians), the Society of Antiquaries and the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society have undertaken a limited exploration of Maiden Castle, Dorset, over a period of three years. The first season's work was carried out in 1934 under the direction of Mrs. T. V. Wheeler and Lt.-Col. C. D. Drew, with the writer, and is here summarized.

1. Soil samples from a number of loci were submitted for examination for non-marine mollusca and I have tabulated the results. Molluscan remains were not common, but sixteen species were determined.

2. The following report is based upon a large collection of animal remains submitted some time ago by Mr. R. S. Newall. They were obtained during excavations at Stonehenge in 1920 to 1926, and come from two superimposed levels, viz. (a) Humus layers, and (b) Silt layer. The whole forms an interesting series to be dealt with under the two headings.

In the Antiquaries Journal for July 1934 (p. 292) the late Mr. P. A. S. Phillips remarked that some of the plate in the Chapel Royal, St. James's, is engraved ‘with the cipher L. D. under a royal coronet between palm leaves’. He assigned the cipher to James, duke of York, afterwards King James II, adding that all the plate engraved with it must have been given by James, not by Charles II, and that any pieces presented by him as sovereign ‘must have still borne the same cipher’. An editorial footnote comments that ‘there are reasons for supposing that this monogram stands for Lennox and Darnley, and was used by Charles, sixth duke of Lennox, 1639–72’.

The library of Eton College contains an illuminated German MS. of about 1540–5, originally in three volumes, now bound as four, of which the contents are largely heraldic. At the beginning of each of the original volumes are the arms of Henry VIII, handsomely, but not correctly, painted on a large scale; the supporters and the shape of the crown are wrong. The principal volume, entitled ‘Antiquitates’, when shown in 1932 in an exhibition of medieval works of art at Eton, caught my attention and suggested a study of its contents, which will be published, in German, in the Münchener Jahrbuch, 1935.

The beaker shown in plate XL was found in the early summer of 1934 in working the pits of the Kempsey Sand and Gravel Co., in the hamlet of Draycott in the parish of Kempsey, Worcestershire. The exact site is almost exactly one mile due south of the middle of Kempsey village, and 300 yards ENE. of the fifth milestone from Worcester on the main road to Tewkesbury, the diggings in question being 30–40 yards W. of the lane which here runs parallel to the main road (see fig. 1). The spot is rather over 700 yards from the nearest bend of the river Severn responsible for the drift of gravel that is being worked, and the surface stands here at about 60 ft. O.D. The beaker was found at a depth of 4 ft., embedded in what seemed to be undisturbed gravel; it was whole save for a small chip on the lip and the breakage of the handle at the moment of discovery, both since restored. Other finds in immediate proximity comprise fragments, including one of rim, of a twelfth-century cooking-pot, and a quantity of animal bones, including horse: these were not from the undisturbed gravel, and in any case no definite association can be claimed with the beaker. A habitation-site seems thus out of the question, and in view of the vessel's position in the gravel and its perfect state one would expect its context to be an inhumed burial. A close look-out for human remains in the area concerned has, however, been unrewarded. The beaker was submitted to the British Museum, together with the minor finds, by the Hon. F. D. H. Lea-Smith of Kempsey, in whose possession it remains; the facts concerning the discovery had been carefully ascertained by him, and all is here published by his permission.

An early volume of the Society's Proceedings contains Stephen Stone's record of his archaeological observations in the parish of Stanlake, Oxfordshire, and the immediate neighbourhood. The record as published is of a mixed nature, and at times it is quite difficult to disentangle the various periods to which the subject of his explorations belonged, though through no actual fault of his own, but rather because, at the date at which he wrote, archaeological knowledge had not advanced to a point at which an exact interpretation of the material was possible. Thus his account of a British village is almost inextricably mixed up with that of what we can now recognize to be circular trenches of a Bronze Age culture, and their close proximity to one another has perhaps added to the confusion. At the present day we can clearly realize that we have to do with two distinct cultures, even though actually they may not have been separated by any great distance of time; and that in spite of the fact that the pottery found in the British village is passed over with the barest notice, and only a few pieces have been preserved to give us a clue to its character. But that the village belonged to the Iron Age is established both by the description of the pits from which it came and also by the recovery from one of these pits of an iron knife complete with bone handle (pl. iv, 1), such as can be closely paralleled by a specimen from the Marne region. Two vases are preserved in the Ashmolean Museum (pl. iv, 2): one formerly in Mr. James Parker's collection is labelled Stanlake, and one given by Stone's executors came probably from this same site; though not very distinctive, both serve to corroborate the evidence of the knife. Vases obtained by Rolleston from a site in the parish of Wytham, Berkshire, fall into the same category (pl. iv, 3).

Illustrating this paper are photographs of a number of pre-Conquest stones, probably fragments of cross-shafts, carved with conventionalized zoomorphic designs of a kind found mainly, though not exclusively, within the confines of the ancient kingdom of Wessex. A few tentative suggestions as to the date and stylistic origins of these carvings are here put forward, and a list is appended of all such stones of whose existence I am aware. The fragments at Glastonbury, Tenbury, and Shaftesbury have not previously been published, and I am indebted to Mr. A. W. Clapham and Dr. R. E. M. Wheeler for bringing them to my notice. The photographs were taken by Mr. Brian C. Clayton, whose death was a serious loss to photographic recording in the service of archaeology.

From the southern end of the main mass of the Dorset chalk hills an extension runs eastward. This, tapering as it proceeds, forms the narrow ridge of the Purbeck Hills, and, after a break caused by the waters of Poole Bay, is continued by the downs of the Isle of Wight. To the north it is bounded by the valley of the River Frome and Poole Harbour. To the south the sea is nowhere more than a few miles away, and in places it has eaten deeply into the chalk ridge itself.

Peacock's Farm in the parish of Shippea Hill, Cambridgeshire, is situated in the SE. corner of the Fenland some 7 miles ENE. of Ely and about 20 miles almost due south of King's Lynn. The position of the site is shown in fig. 1, in which areas of alluvial deposit are reserved and more ancient deposits are obliquely shaded, marking the margin of the fen basin and in places islands, which break the monotony of the level fen. Crossing the map obliquely in the bottom right-hand corner is the Icknield Way, marked by a solid line where its course is certain and by a broken line where it is less well defined; and situated in immediate proximity to this ancient track on Therfield Heath, near Royston, is the only Long Barrow at present known in the region. A corner of the modern Wash is shown at the top of the map for convenience, though actually the sea was very far away in the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. The river system marked on the map is based entirely upon the work of Major Gordon Fowler, F.S.A., F.G.S., and indicates fairly certainly the system which functioned during the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, or rather that part of the river system of these periods still available for study above the sea. It will be observed that all the rivers shown on this map form tributaries of a single great river, flowing through the present site of Wisbech, through the estuary in the sixteenth-century coast line (shown by a broken line), and by way of what are now known as the Lynn Deeps and Silver Pit out across the present North Sea, to reach the contemporary coast-line.

In SE. Dorset a section of Roman road runs from Hamworthy on Poole Harbour to Badbury Rings, passing near the present village of Corfe Mullen just before it dips into the Stour valley. It has been known for several years, from discoveries in the Southern Railway's ballast pit, that a Romano-British settlement existed at this spot. The finds comprise pottery ranging from bead-rim to New Forest wares, as well as a storage-pit containing grain, on which Sir R. H. Biffen reported to the writer in 1929 as follows: ‘The bulk is wheat similar to that from the Iron Age sites at Fovant and Meare. But grains of oat are also present.’