On 1st July 1858 Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace laid before the Linnean Society their independent but closely approximate theories of biological evolution. Next year the centenary of that event—I suppose the greatest intellectual event of the nineteenth century—will be celebrated in a variety of ways and places. The steadfast gaze of the Prince Consort, from beneath his gilded tabernacle in Kensington Gardens, will encompass an international throng of celebrants at the doors of his great rotunda across the road; and we may imagine his puzzled but inquiring spirit hovering a trifle uneasily over the commemoration of an event which marked, if not darkened, his declining years. I trust that we ourselves shall, at the proper time, respectfully recall a moment which was to mean only less to the humanistic than to the biological sciences.

The purpose of this paper is to present five large prehistoric bronze vessels, from Wales, Ireland, and the north and south of England, found at various dates from the early nineteenth century to 1932, but published as yet imperfectly or not at all, and to consider, with reference to their affinities abroad, their significance for these islands’ Late Bronze and earliest Iron Ages. The starting-point for any such study must in general be the article in Archaeologia, vol. lxxx, by the late E. T. Leeds. In the twenty-seven years since he wrote, new finds and new work have indeed supplemented and somewhat varied his conclusions, but they leave us still deeply in his debt.

This mail shirt, which is now in the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh and was in the Meyrick and Noel Paton collections, dates from the fourteenth century. A little is known about its more recent history. Apparently it was bought by a Jewish dealer from an ancient family at Sinigaglia, near Bologna, ‘in whose possession it had been beyond any of their records’. It has been published before but because it is in such a good state of preservation, because mail shirts of the fourteenth century are rare, and because something is known about its history, it is important that it should be republished.

The Roman defences of Cirencester are described by Buckman and Newmarch in Remains of Roman Art in Corinium (1850), 9 ff. and map, by Church in A Guide to Corinium Museum (1905), 9 ff., and by Haverfield in Archaeologia, lxix (1920), 161 ff., who quote earlier authorities.