On 2nd February 1962, a group of crushed silver objects was found by Mr. W. F. Curtis at Blackdyke Farm, Hockwold-cum-Wilton, on the south-eastern edge of the Fens (TL 687883, see fig. 1). Though severely damaged and fragmented by deliberate breakage in antiquity and by the effects of burial, the objects were recognizable as Roman silver drinking-cups, some elaborately decorated. They were declared Treasure Trove on 20th February 1962, and were subsequently acquired by the British Museum.

One of the first questions likely to be asked by someone confronted for the first time by the great Oceanus plate (missorium) from Mildenhall (I, pl. VII a)** is, What was it used for? The answer is that neither it nor any of its fellow flat, decorated plates of silver, whether round or rectangular, to be surveyed in this paper, was ever used for practical, domestic purposes to serve as table-ware. It is hard to imagine the highly sophisticated and often elaborate relief- or incised-work that they carry being concealed beneath piles of fruit, vegetables, cakes, or portions of meat or fish greasy with gravy or sauce. These reliefs or engravings, whether covering the whole surface of a plate or confined to its central medallion or to its central medallion and flange, were essentially pictures for display in their owners' houses, or in temples or churches, probably mounted on brackets or shelves fixed to walls or to cupboards or chests (some are pierced by one or more holes as though for suspension on a wall), where they could be studied and admired for their beauty as works of art and/or their political, cultic or mythological implications.

‘It remains the most baffling and incomprehensible carving in the country’, wrote Sir Thomas Kendrick of the Reculver cross: of, that is, the five severely battered but finely sculpted fragments of the stone cross that once stood in the church at Reculver, on the coast of Kent. There is no monument comparable to that carving, in England or abroad. The Reculver cross has long seemed to hold out a tantalizing promise—that it might dispel some of the mystery still shrouding the gap between the waning of late classical art and the vigorous burgeoning of Anglo-Saxon sculpture.

Let into various walls inside the church of St. Mary and St. Hardulph at Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire, is a group of frieze sculpture and relief-carved panels. It is now generally accepted that these are of Anglo-Saxon origin, and have been reused in the present church, of which no part is earlier than the twelfth century.

How far do the pictures in early medieval manuscripts reflect contemporary life? Are the busy and attractive figures which populate many Carolingian or Late Saxon illuminations reflections of their painters and their patrons, or are they ghostly survivors of the Roman Empire, fossilized in a scribal convention? For some archaeologists, of course, the question of authenticity has never arisen, the contemporary relevance of pictures being cheerfully assumed; but it has to be stated at the outset that the odds are generally set against such optimism. That early painted books were usually copied from other painted books is clear from a continuity of image, picturecycle or design, all having roots in the Late Antique period. Thus drawing from life, or even abstract invention, where it occurred, will not be obvious and is probably only detectable at all by a process of elimination

The Cistercian abbey of St. Mary of Fountains has been the subject of extensive antiquarian and archaeological study for some two centuries, begining with John Martin's excavation of the chapter house in 1790–91. Three major studies in the nineteenth century, starting with the excavations of 1848–54 overseen by J. R. Walbran, who also began the analysis of the extensive documentary archive relating to the house, enhanced by a remarkably complete survey of the ruins begun in 1873 by J. A. Reeve, and culminating with an authoritative summary by Sir William St. John Hope, established the historical and archaeological development of the abbey and demonstrated the importance of the ruins. More recently, a detailed reappraisal by the first writer and limited excavation by Roger Mercer followed the placing of the ruins into the guardianship of what is now the Department of the Environment in 1966, and it was assumed that there was little more to be learned about the historical development of the house.

In 1865 the great antiquarian connoisseur of medieval painted glass, Charles Winston, said of the Herkenrode glass at Lichfield: ‘I do not know of any works in glass which are so powerful, without in the least degree violating the essential conditions of art’. This study, which illustrates all the glass of known Herkenrode provenance for the first time, demonstrates clearly the vision and skill of the glaziers in translating highly sophisticated designs into glass of startling luminosity and in achieving the visual power and transcendence of the limitations of the medium recognized by Winston.

While few surviving jewels can be identified with any certainty as English work of the sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries, much descriptive evidence exists in the form of inventories and lists of gifts of jewels and plate exchanged between the sovereign and the courtiers each year on New Year's Day. A further fruitful source of information lies in the many contemporary portraits, those of ladies usually showing them with a lavish display of jewellery. Such jewels cannot, however, be claimed as certainly of English make; jewellery was an article of international commerce and much was imported.

On 13th May 1856 Granville George Leveson Gower, 2nd Earl Granville (1819–91), Liberal diplomat and politician, wrote to Viscount Canning announcing his appointment as representaive of Queen Victoria at the coronation of Tsar Alexander II in Moscow that summer. He added that before accepting he had consulted his wife Marie, who had ‘pronounced some sage aphorisms, but danced a hornpipe and lamented that it would be necessary to buy twenty gowns and have her diamonds reset’. Marie Granville's sense of the importance of jewellery on such an occasion was shared by her husband's uncle, William, 6th Duke of Devonshire (1790–1858), who, on behalf of George IV, had attended the coronation of Tsar Nicholas I in 1825. Having himself experienced Russian hospitality at its most magnificent he knew what was expected of the representatives of foreign royalty, and he not only gave the Granvilles money and lent them also his silver, but he commissioned a set of jewels incorporating hundreds of diamonds and eighty-eight cameos and intaglios from his ancestral collection.