There is no need for me here to stress the extraordinary scarcity of surviving panel pictures of undoubted English origin dating from the fourteenth century, in spite of the fact that at the time they must have been produced in enormous quantities. All the greater is, in consequence, the importance which attaches to the notable examples which I have the honour of exhibiting and commenting upon to-night; and that I am able to do so is due, in the first instance, to the privilege extended to me by the owner of the panels, the Earl of Leicester, G.C.V.O., C.M.G., and H.M. Office of Works; while I owe a further and special debt of gratitude to Mr. F. J. E. Raby, C.B., F.S.A., through whose initiative my attention was first drawn to these panels.

The pictures in question (pl. xxix) have come down to us in very fragmentary condition, and are painted on thick boards, three in number, two of which join up satisfactorily enough for us to deduce that they originally formed part of one and the same composition, while the remaining panel, though evidently a unit belonging to the identical scheme, does not link up with the others. All three boards come from Castle Acre Priory, and were discovered there in recent years, though not all at the same time: the panel on the left of the two belonging together on 19th November 1930, and the two other boards on 25th August 1932. The room in which they were found was the outer parlour, underneath the prior's chapel, in the western range of the buildings: they were used as part of the panelling of the wall when this portion of the buildings was occupied as a dwelling-house. The painted side, in each case, was uppermost, clearly indicating that they had been discarded as decorative panels and re-used for structural purposes. The panel found in 1930 was built into the twelfth-century door in the west wall, and the two other boards into the window-head in the north wall.

The re-excavation of this well-known barrow was undertaken at the suggestion and cost of Sir Edmund Davis (upon whose estate it is situated) after the recent publication of Dr. R. Austin Freeman's novel, The Penrose Mystery, in which it largely figures. With the ready consent of the Commissioners of His Majesty's Office of Works, the work was carried out in July 1936, and the writer had the assistance either for the whole or part of the time of Miss M. E. Greenwood, Dr. S. Graham Brade-Birks, and Sir Edward Harrison; and our thanks are due to Mr. H. Read Gillett, Sir Edmund Davis's agent, for much valuable help.

Villas are so uniform in character that they arouse comparatively little interest compared with the military problems of Roman Britain. But a villa surrounded by ditches, whether for defensive purposes or not, can be immediately classed as a rarity. A list of such examples of domestic fortification in the Roman period includes the houses at Castle Dykes, near Ripon, at Cwmbrwyn in Carmarthenshire, at Bartlow in Cambridgeshire, at Langton in Yorkshire, and at Ely near Cardiff. Of these only the two last have been scientifically excavated, and only the house at Ely has fortifications which conform to the building. In these circumstances the discovery of a villa surrounded by five ditches and occupied, through five periods of construction and reconstruction, from the latter half of the first to the middle of the fourth century is of particular interest.

The villa in question is situated some 200 yards east of the Fosseway, at a point 9 miles south of Lincoln and a mile and a half north of Brough (Crococolana). The site is marked on the Ordnance Survey and known locally as Potter Hill. It comprises a long ridge of land some hundred feet higher than the plain in which Crococolana is placed. Stukeley in his Itinerary says, ‘and journeying to the space of about 12 Roman miles, I found Collingham on my right hand: there is a high barrow or tumulus called Potters Hill, where they say was a Roman pottery: it stands upon an eminence commanding a prospect both ways upon the road. Half a mile further is Brough.’

Nevertheless the presence of a Roman building was not suspected until the discovery in 1933 by the farmer, Mr. E. Taylor, of a mosaic pavement.

During a recent visit to the famous gravel-pits at Warren Hill, Suffolk, one of the workmen handed me the bone which is described in this note. He evidently attached little importance to the specimen, which had been kept merely because it was a bone—as such are rare in the Warren Hill Gravel. The finder informed me that the specimen came from the concreted gravel—a very compact and chalky layer in the Warren Hill deposit. This claim is borne out, first, by the white, chalky appearance of the bone, which corresponds with the condition of others from the same horizon; and, secondly, by the fact that the medullary cavity of the specimen still retains some of the gravel in which it was embedded. The bone is clearly fossil, but, like others from Warren Hill, this condition is not accompanied by an addition to the weight of the specimen. The bone, in fact, probably now weighs less than it did in its pristine state—a condition of affairs, however, by no means uncommon in ancient specimens. It has assumed a consistency similar to that of chalk, and its surfaces can easily, though roughly, be scraped, or cut, by a knife.

The miscellaneous notes herewith presented have been gathered, at various times and from various sources, since publication of my last series of notes of the kind, in the Archaeol. Journ. for 1931 (lxxxviii, 228–46). The one single factor they all have in common is some connexion or other with the medieval English alabaster industry, on which much scattered material has already appeared in several well-known books and in a very considerable number of papers on the subject in periodical publications.