Archæology, at the present day, is no longer the ill-appreciated amusement of the few. Its study is widely spread, while its importance is generally admitted, even by those whose inclination does not lead them to pursue it as a study.

No branch of archaeology appears to excite more general interest than sepulchral research in our own land, or in those foreign lands whose early inhabitants were, so to speak, kinsmen of our forefathers. This widely-diffused interest of our day happily differs altogether from the indiscriminate curiosity of a preceding age. And if science ventures to pass the sacred threshold of the tomb, it is solely because the early domestic history of our race is only to be found recorded in the tablets of the dead.

I was unfortunately not able to attend the Meeting of our Society on the evening when my friend Mr. Ashpitel read his learned and valuable paper on Chancels, but I have since been favoured with the perusal of it, and have been requested to make some additional observations on the subject. Far be it from me to attempt to answer Mr. Ashpitel; on the contrary, I would rather confirm what he has stated and illustrate it by some notice of the practice in France and England, Mr. Ashpitel having avowedly confined his attention chiefly to Italy. He has clearly demonstrated that in this instance, as in many others, considerable errors and confusion have arisen from a different sense being given to the same word, or from a gradual change in its meaning. We were all probably aware previously that the word chancel is derived from the Latin word cancellus, or the Italian cancelli, signifying a railing or screen; but it had not occurred to us that the original use of this railing or screen was to protect the chorus or choir from the pressure and interruption of the people while they were singing; hence the two words chancel and choir are synonymous in the sense of the place for singing, but that place is not by any means necessarily the eastern limb of the church. He has shown us that in Italy this singing-place, choir, or chancel, is continually changed even in the same church at different seasons of the year.

The facilities which you have afforded by the publication of your Kalendar for the public use of the valuable documents preserved in the State-Paper Office, relating to the first half of Queen Elizabeth's reign, and your kindness in permitting me to make extracts from your own book of MSS. on ancient armour, consisting of the scattered Exchequer documents, enable me to send to our Society some notices of the Tower of London and of the armouries there and at Greenwich, which are very interesting in themselves, and are chiefly of a date forty years earlier than the lists communicated by William Bray, Esq. F.S.A. to our Society, and reprinted by Meyrick from the Archæologia.

During the last winter a mason, named John Farmer, while engaged in digging for stone in the village of Filkins, unexpectedly brought to light some Anglo-Saxon remains. Hearing by chance of this discovery, I proceeded to Filkins, and from the account I then received, I at once determined to apply for permission to undertake a systematic investigation of the spot. This was kindly granted by Mr. Robert Watts, the owner of the land, and on the 30th of September I commenced operations.

I beg to lay before your Lordship and the Society of Antiquaries a Narrative of some interest as regards the exhibition of the Manners of a former period.

It may not be unknown to your Lordship that, in the olden time, foreign Princes, who had been received into the Order of the Garter in this country, were usually accustomed to acknowledge their high sense of the honour so conferred upon them by the annual celebration of St. George's day in their own countries; thus doing honour to the Order by keeping its feast.

The original record, from which the Extract that follows was taken, has been preserved in the Bermingham Tower, Dublin. It contains the Pleas of the Crown and Gaol Delivery at Waterford, before John Wogan, Justiciary of Ireland, on Thursday the morrow of St. Matthias the Apostle (February 25), in the fourth year of the reign of Edward II. (1311), and will be seen to be somewhat illustrative of the social condition of the inhabitants of that part of Ireland at the time of the invasion by Henry II. and also at the commencement of the fourteenth century. The Ostmen mentioned in it were the descendants of the Norwegians, commonly spoken of as Danes, who had many years before formed permanent settlements on the coasts; as to whose history Worsaae's volume on the Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland, and Ireland may be consulted with advantage. A few preliminary observations may serve to render the document more readily intelligible.

Warranted as well by the generall practice of Ambassadors of the late and present age as commanded by your Majesty's instructions of the 10th of January, in the 21 yeare of your Majesty's most happy raigne, at such time as you were graciously pleased to honor me with the caracter of your Extraordinary Ambassador to divers of the Princes of Italy, I most humbly prostrate at your Majesty's feet, and doe with all submission and reverence offer to your Majesty's consideration this following accompt of the Observations I made in the several places where I carryed that caracter.

Since I had the honour of reading these papers to the Society of Antiquaries, I have been tempted to conclude that they would hardly be deemed of sufficient importance to be received into their Archæologia, though, in the absence of more learned inquiries, I know of no good reason why the curious old diary of an elderly lady of an ancient house should be beneath the notice of an antiquary. Your official communication has however settled the question; and, as I find that the MS. has been selected for publication, I send it to you very little altered from the form in which it was read. Should it appear that the subject has been anywhere treated with less gravity than may become these pages, it may be pleaded that the feeling was in some measure forced upon me by the nature of the materials themselves, in moulding them into the form in which they now appear.

I have great pleasure in sending you for communication to the Society of Antiquaries copies of a series of letters written by the Queen of Bohemia, the daughter of James I., which are I believe unpublished, and which, like all the letters of that unfortunate princess, will be found of some interest. They are all addressed to Sir Edward Nicholas, who, as you are well aware, was Secretary of State to both the Charleses. The letters which passed between the Queen and Sir Edward, from August 1654 to January 1655, fifteen in number, have already been published in the Appendix to Evelyn's Diary, edited by the late Mr. Bray; and the twenty-five I now send you may be regarded as a continuation of the same correspondence, embracing as they do the period from April 1655 to January 1656.

In the series of letters I have hitherto had the honour of addressing to your Lordship, and of reading before this Society, I have confined myself to the topographical arrangement, merely following the order of my own actual tours in the English provinces of France, which were originally undertaken with a view of ascertaining whether there was any English character in the architecture of these provinces, or any marked connection between them and the architecture of England of the same period. I purposely omitted Normandy, as having been previously well described by Mr. Gally Knight and others, although that province is more familiar to me than any other part of France, and I have notes of many buildings there of which, to the best of my knowledge, no accounts have been published; but, as I fear that mere topographical descriptions of buildings are always rather dry and uninteresting, I propose on the present occasion to give some account of certain very early churches in different parts of France and Switzerland, which I have selected on account of their peculiarity, without reference to their topographical situation.

At the commencement of the present session I had the honour of communicating to the Society some remarks on land limits, appended to a charter of King Athelstan to the Abbey of Malmesbury, the result of a personal survey of Kemble and Ewen, in the northern extremity of the county of Wilts. The success of my investigations on that occasion encouraged me to pursue my researches still further, and to attempt, during the recess, an identification of the possessions of that early religious establishment prior to the Norman Conquest. I exhibit a map (PlateVI.) on which I have marked the ancient and modern names.