Termoli is a small city of the Molise, on the Adriatic coast of Italy just above the junction of the ‘spur’ of Gargano with the main coastline. Like the whole of the lower Molise, it had in the middle ages a troubled history, always in dispute between the duchies of Benevento and Spoleto and the successive masters of Apulia, and on at least two occasions the victim of disastrous sack, at the hands of the Venetians in combat with Frederic II and in 1566 at the hands of the Turkish fleet under Ali Pasha. In 1943 it re-emerged characteristically into history as the scene of a successful flank-landing by the Eighth Army. Its most notable monuments are the remains of the castle built by Frederic II and the cathedral church of S. Basso, built under the same monarch and the most northerly outlier of the northern branch of the great Apulian school of Romanesque architecture. The façade, with its elaborate scheme of recessed arcading, derives directly from that of the Collegiata at Foggia, with which it shares the unusual characteristic of the use of a pronounced horseshoe arch. Within have recently been exposed the remains of the pre-Romanesque church and fragments of a mosaic pavement in the style of those at Otranto and Trani.

The loss which the Society has suffered by the death of Sir George Hill has been referred to at length, and in very appropriate terms, by the Secretary: but I wish at the outset of this address to pay a personal tribute to his memory, as one who has received many kindnesses from him, and benefited from the wealth and extent of specialized knowledge he was so generous in imparting. Sir George represented the finest flower of that exact scholarship in which the Victorian Age excelled: now, full of years and honours, he has passed on.

This street is close to the area of Folkestone which suffered severely from enemy action; indeed certain of the houses, which were once at its southern end, no longer exist. Examination of the remaining houses, several of them shaken by blast, was undertaken with a view to the removal of any fittings of value, should it be decided to demolish them.

This examination led at once to the realization that nearly all of the remaining houses, nos. 13 to 49 (on the western side) and 16 to 44 (on the eastern), are of seventeenth-century type with but one room on each floor, ground, first, and attic. Many hundreds of this type of seventeenth-century house have recently been studied at Great Yarmouth, where some dated examples belong to the first half of the century. At that town certain features occur in all houses of that half-century so far studied. They are (1) a front door and a back door opposite to one another with connecting passage, off which opened the ground-floor room; (2) a fire-place on the side of the room opposite to the passage, flanked on one side by a cupboard with a small window lighting it and on the other side by a winding stair, closed at the bottom by a door; and (3) the continuance of this stair to the attic floor with small windows lighting it between each floor. Stop-chamfered beams are, of course, very frequently found.

The excavations described in this report were aimed at establishing more about the character of the Cambridgeshire Car Dyke and at defining the period during which it was in active use. The dyke, which traverses with several changes of direction the low gravel and loam promontory between the fork of the Cam or Granta immediately south of Waterbeach and the alluvium of the Old West River (and present Ouse) north-north-east of Cottenham (fig. 1), varies in character considerably in its five-mile course. Most of it has been degraded to a field ditch, and over some stretches cultivation has overrun the banks on either side and encroached upon the bed, but the dyke survives reasonably intact at Waterbeach and on the site of the present excavations at Bullock's Haste and Setchel Fen.

Soon after King Henry III undertook the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey Church he founded a new Exchequer ostensibly for the one purpose of handling the funds assigned thereto. In this affair Edward the son of Odo, later known as Edward of Westminster, played the chief part, and some account of his career must preface the discussion of it.

In September 1943, in the course of repair work made necessary by the air raid of May 1942, certain fragments of wax images were found by one of the cathedral masons on the top of the stone screen which surrounds the quire. They were hidden behind the cresting in a wide open joint of the masonry, loosely packed with broken pieces of glass, slaked lime, oyster-shells, and splinters of stone, and over the tomb of Bishop Edmund Lacey (1420–55) (pl. XIX, a). All the fragments of wax are unpainted and all have been cast in a mould; they vary in colour from a dirty pale yellow to a deep terra-cotta; they are very brittle and dry to the touch, without the soft, silky feel of a wax doll.

The following notes relate to one of a number of ancient occupation and other sites examined by the writers between 1925 and 1939, in the district between St. Keverne and Coverack in the Lizard peninsula, and of which a record will appear in due course in the Journal of the Royal Institute of Cornwall. Meanwhile as the pottery found on the site in question may be of importance in helping to date Dark Ages ceramics discovered elsewhere, it has been thought advisable to publish the present account in the Antiquaries Journal.

The question ‘Where did the Archbishop of Canterbury sit in pre-Reformation times when officially present at divine service in his cathedral?’ is one which has had no very clear answer hitherto. There can be no dispute that his ‘throne’ par excellence—the sign and symbol of his episcopal and primatial dignity—was the so-called ‘St. Augustine's chair’ still in use at archiepiscopal enthronements—really a marble chair of early-thirteenth-century date (hereafter to be called the Marble Chair); or that a similar throne in the same position, viz. the old ‘basilican’ position of the bishop's throne behind the high altar, existed in the earlier choirs of Lanfranc and Conrad. But under the conditions which prevailed when the choir was rebuilt after the fire of 1174 this throne, however impressive symbolically, must have had such drawbacks from other points of view as to make it hard to believe that the occasions when the archbishop actually occupied it were more than very rare.

The importance of wills as a means of identifying unknown or lost brasses has long been recognized. Even for a brass of unquestioned identity, the study of the will often serves to elucidate heraldry, identify children, or, at its lowest, as a bonne bouche for the curious. One will, at least, is printed by Cotman, the first man to devote a book entirely to brasses; others are used by Waller; Haines endeavoured to collect from them indications of the costs of brasses; and later brass manuals have followed suit. The growth of record societies, however, and the consequent printing of wills, wholly or in part, has increased so greatly the information available, that it would seem the subject can endure the attentions of yet another antiquary.

The find of pottery and bronzes described in this paper was made in Catuvellaunian territory (fig. 1), on the north bank of the Ouse near Felmersham Bridge, in Shanbrook parish, Bedfordshire. At this place the river makes a gentle bend southwards towards the village of Felmersham. Following the Belgic predilection for riverine settlement, the site to which the find belongs was established on well-developed flood-plain gravels situated on the inner margin of this curve. Here in January 1942, from the gravel-digging exploited by Mr. A. E. C. Howard of Bedford, the excavating machine simultaneously disgorged the following objects:

A bronze bucket-handle and two bronze bucket-escutcheons in the shape of cow-heads (fig. 2).

A bronze spout in the shape of a fish-head (fig. 3).

A damaged bronze bowl (no. 1) with one of the two original attachments for holding swinging ring-handles (pl. VII, a, b).

Fragments of another bowl (no. 2), including parts of the rim and shoulder (pl. VII, c).

A flat plate of thin bronze, in shape the segment of a circle, with traces of solder on both sides (pl. VI, b).

Three pieces of curved bronze rim-mounting of U-section (pl. VI, a).

Three pieces of flat bronze ribbon and an irregular piece of bronze plate of the same thinness (pl. VI, a).

Some thirty potsherds, the lower jaw of a young pig, part of the tibia of another young animal, probably a horse, and some pieces of burnt clay (fig. 11 ).

The small fort of the promontory type with which this report deals lies in the parish of Lezayre, on the shore of Ramsey Bay on the brooghs which form the eastern edge of the undulating Andreas plateau towards the sea. Here, in the northern part of the bay, the cliffs are built up by warped stratified sands with reddish sandy and loamy bands. Where springs caused or initiated erosion the straight north–south line of the broogh is intersected by short valleys with steep slopes and marshy bottoms. Where, as occasionally happens, two of such valleys lie near to each other, the gullies create small peninsulas with level surfaces connected only by a narrow neck with the plateau. Ideal sites for habitation above the broad sandy beach are formed by natural agencies, sites which need only a small amount of adjustment to make them easily defensible. A certain disadvantage arises from the fact that both the platform of the promontory and the surface of the plateau lie in the same level, in the present case 60 ft. above the high-water mark.