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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

During the clearance of the moats and wards of these castles in Glamorgan and Monmouthshire, which has been undertaken by H.M. Office of Works in conjunction with the work of consolidating the masonry, a number of finds has been made. Some of these are of more than passing interest, and it has seemed advisable to place on record a complete list of all which in any way illustrate the history of the castles concerned.

The eleven diligent volumes of Don Antonio López Ferreiro's Historia de la Santa Apostolica Metropolitana Iglesia de Santiago de Compostela contain a mass of documents related to the history of the cathedral of Santiago, but, in spite of this wealth of material, the date when the building was begun has never been clearly established. The Historia Compostelana (i, 78) states: ‘Est autem B. Jacobi specialis et praeclara nova Ecclesia incoepta Era I.C.XVI. V Idus Jul.’ (an. 1078), thus giving the date as A.D. 1078. However, in the Codex Calixtinus, a twelfth-century piece of pilgrimage propaganda, containing among other things a description of the cathedral, no less than four different dates are given for the event: ‘Ecclesia autem fuit incepta in Era MCXVI. Ab anno vero quo incepta fuit usque ad letum Adefonsi fortissimi et famosi regis Aragonensis habentur anni LIX, et ad necem Henrici regis Anglorum LXII, et ad mortem Ludovici pinguissimi regis Francorum LXIII, et ab anno quo primus lapis in fundamento eius ponitur usque ad illum quo ultimus mittitur XLIIII anni habentur.’