During 1961 the Cirencester Excavation Committee was faced with three major rescue excavations. Two development sites, for convenience called Leaholme Gardens, lay south of The Avenue, which crosses the heart of the Roman town, while the third lay north of Ashcroft Road, in an area well known for discoveries of mosaic pavements. Excavations were carried out for three weeks at Easter and for nine weeks during the summer. The Committee records its grateful thanks to each of those bodies which gave in all a very large sum of money, about £2,200; to all who in a variety of capacities assisted the excavations, often, as at Easter, in very bad weather; and to the Cirencester Urban District Council and Messrs. Mycalex Ltd. for permission to dig in Leaholme Gardens and on the Ashcroft Road site respectively. At Easter an L-shaped site, east of Leaholme House, was examined, covering the west end of the basilica, first discovered by our Fellow, Mr. Wilfrid Cripps, in 1898, and the corners of Insulae V and VI divided by Ermin Street and lying to the south of the basilica. In the summer the second site in Leaholme Gardens, west of that already described, was examined and proved to include the corner of Insula II, while beneath both sites conclusive structural evidence of an early military occupation was found.

I must first thank you, very sincerely, for re-electing me as your President; I am just past mid-career of the normal tenure of the office. Still more warmly I thank you for re-electing the officers who make my work possible.

I had thought that this might be a quiet year, in which we might sit back and think. It has been anything but that. You will all remember the sudden and unexpected death of Philip Corder, our Assistant Secretary, only a few weeks after our last Anniversary Meeting. He had been our Assistant Secretary since 1943; and, as aide to Mr. Kingsford, then in failing health, had in fact had charge of much of our business for some years before that. He was a distinguished Romano-British archaeologist in his own right—his tenure of the Presidency of the Royal Archaeological Institute is testimony enough—and his long experience as Editor of our publications had given him a wide knowledge in many fields. His geniality and friendliness had made him widely beloved among our Fellows; his training courses had made him revered by the younger generation. We all mourn him. He will not soon be forgotten under this roof.

For many years ever-increasing reports of Roman buildings and other finds from the neighbourhood of the village of New Fishbourne, one mile west of Chichester, have indicated the existence of an extensive early Roman settlement in the area (fig. 1). Early in 1960, during the construction of a water main across fields to the north of the main Chichester-Portsmouth road, a trench was cut through a Roman building which was found to incorporate massive masonry blocks and a mosaic floor. The pottery from the trench was predominantly first century. Accordingly, the Chichester Civic Society arranged a three-week trial excavation at Easter 1961, on the results of which further excavations were undertaken during the period 22nd July to 31st August. The work was made possible by generous grants from the Chichester Corporation, the Ministry of Works, the Society of Antiquaries, the Haverfield Trustees, the Marc Fitch Fund, the Sussex Archaeological Society, and by the public's response to the appeal. Nine students, mainly from Cambridge and Oxford, were employed throughout the excavations.

Two small-scale excavations were carried out at Verulamium during 1961. In January it became necessary to explore the site about to be occupied by the museum extension, and several trenches were cut on the north-east and south-east sides of the existing museum building. It was not possible in the time and with the resources available to excavate down to natural soil, but only to examine those layers due for removal by the builders. Considerable depths of deposit are known to exist here, possibly filling an early ditch. The site lies in the west corner of Insula XVIII: the earliest structure reached was a timber-framed building, burnt down possibly c. A.D. 155. This was succeeded by an Antonine masonry building with channel hypocausts. Possibly c. A.D. 300 this building was enlarged by encroachment on the street frontages. It clearly extends some way outside the area excavated both towards east and south. The character of the structure is domestic.

In 1872 there came into the possession of the British Museum a small bronze fitting. In length 71 mm. and cast in a single piece, one end is in the shape of a bovine head, the other being a ring set at right-angles to the head, the shank having the appearance when viewed from the side of being bent back on itself to complete the circle; the maximum outer diameter of this ring is 27 mm. The animal's brow is defined by a double ridge which forms the lip of a question-mark-shaped socket whose body is represented by the top of the fitting. The shank has a diamond cross-section swelling gently from the moulded lips of the ring up into the head. The ridge on the rear surface sweeps out towards the top giving the end a triangular section. The casting is technically not wholly successful; the base of the ring has a stress fracture, there is a weak point at the top of the ring, and the sockets in the head (recently filled in with candle-wax) and on the return foot of the ring seem to be due in part to faulty pouring into the mould; certainly in the latter case there seems never to have been any intention to form an inlay setting although there is another possible use (see p. 28 below). Otherwise it must be said that the surface of the bronze has a fine finish with little or no sign of subsequent tooling.

In 1958 a rescue excavation was carried out by Miss Mary Rennie, on behalf of the Ministry of Works, in the southern half of Parsonage Field, off the Watermoor Road, on ground now covered by the County Health Centre. Here the remains of a Roman building of some size were partly examined and an interesting mosaic pavement of geometric design and late date was uncovered. In that same year the Cirencester Roman Excavation Committee was set up.

The following fragments of samian moulds, together with another one already published, belonged formerly to the Oswald Collection and were presumably found by Plicque at Lezoux; all, except nos. 10–12, are now kept in the teaching collections of the Institute of Archaeology, University of London.

The Cistercian abbey of Vale Royal was, as the name implies, a royal foundation and as such will be included among the buildings described in the forthcoming Ministry of Works publication, A History of The King's Works. In April 1958 Mr. H. M. Colvin approached the writer with a view to arranging the excavation of the east end of the abbey church and so completing the plan, much of which had been obtained by excavation in 1911–12. The project received the enthusiastic support of I.C.I. Salt Division, which had its offices in the present mansion of Vale Royal, and indeed it is true to say that without their very generous provision of labour, equipment, and other facilities no excavation would have taken place. It was hoped that a comparatively short campaign would suffice but in the event the excavation continued from June to December 1958; the complexity of the plan and the wholesale robbing of walls to foundation level or lower meant that an area excavation proved necessary instead of the selective trenching which had been intended.

The appearance of a joint paper more than ten years after the death of one of its authors demands a few words of explanation. Our late Fellow, Herbert Chitty, read before this Society on 21st May 1925 a paper on ‘Fromond's Chantry at Winchester College', printed in the 75th volume of Archaeologia. It was his intention to offer to the Society a companion paper upon the other chantry in the college, that of Warden Robert Thurbern, and from 1926 onwards he devoted time to research into its history, and to the collection of a series of lantern slides, made for him by the late Sydney Pitcher. Other occupations forced Chitty to lay aside this project, and it remained unfinished at his death on 28th December 1949. The basic materials survived him, however, as well as the collection of slides. Meanwhile, the years 1950–60 have seen momentous changes in the appearance of Thurbern's Chantry, adding a new chapter to its history. These functional, architectural, and decorative changes are now complete, and this seems a suitable time to present the results of Chitty's researches, followed by some account of recent happenings.

During the builders' excavation for Bucklersbury House, Walbrook, in the City of London, carried out in 1955, an immense clearance was made to a great depth in the natural soils underlying the man-made levels of London. Before this took place, scientific excavation in a limited area by Professor W. F. Grimes, on behalf of the Roman and Mediaeval London Excavation Council, had attracted a great deal of attention to the site, both from archaeologists and from the general public. His most spectacular discovery was the Temple of Mithras, which lay on the eastern edge of the site, adjoining the modern street of Walbrook. Almost of equal interest, however, to the student of Roman London, was his location of the Roman streambed of the Walbrook, which flowed in a southerly direction immediately to the west of the Temple of Mithras, about 30 yds. west of the street of Walbrook. The stream was subject to silting and its bed steadily rose, forming a thick deposit of black mud, which had an extraordinarily preservative effect on objects of metal which had been dropped in it from the banks. Iron was completely unrusted, while copper and bronze remained shining and bright.

Dr. Joan Evans wrote in 1953 in her book The History of Jewellery: ‘While it may exceptionally be possible to name the patron who ordered a Renaissance jewel, it is nearly always impossible to determine its nationality, except on purely stylistic grounds.’ It is precisely into these difficult waters I wish to venture, in order to clarify, in the light of the evidence of several newly discovered jewels, what kind of historiated jewellery the English goldsmith was creating for his rich patrons in the second and third quarters of the sixteenth century. The field in this paper is restricted to gold work executed in relief and covered with enamels, translucent and opaque—a technique commonly called ‘encrusted enamelling’. This restriction is due partly to the accident of survival and partly to the fact that the sculptural affinities, together with the iconographic and stylistic aspects of this group, offer a firmer basis for the determining of a national style. England in the first two decades of the sixteenth century was just beginning to see and feel the effects of the Italian Renaissance style in the Arts, and this is reflected in the minor applied art of the English goldsmith in the following years.

A small gilt-bronze disc brooch was found at Little Houghton, Northants., in 1957, a surface find on a Roman site, and was acquired by Northampton Museum (pl. xv b, fig. 1). It is a thin disc, diameter 2·5 cm., tapering at the border, with remains of pin holder and catch at the back and shallow pattern in relief on the front. The gilding has rubbed off the higher parts of the pattern, and has disappeared entirely in places where the brooch has been damaged and bent, possibly by fire. The ornament consists of two Style II animals, identical except for the shape of the jaw. They are S-shaped, turning round to bite their own backs; the body continues directly into the angle of a back leg which crosses the body and ends at the border in the rudiments of a foot; a front limb shoots forward to interlock with the hind curve of the other animal; the head is an eye framed by a right-angle; in one case the upper jaw passes below the body and the lower jaw is short and curves only slightly outwards; in the other the upper jaw again runs below the body, and the lower jaw swings round and seems to meet the upper jaw behind in a complete loop. There is damage at this point, however, and on analogous evidence it is quite likely that the lower jaw did not join the upper, but swept on independently.

During the excavations at Colchester in 1950, in Insula 22 of the Colonia, the Norman Bank was sectioned. An account has been given of the underlying Roman structures, but not of the later phases of this earthwork. They consisted of the Norman Bank itself and a later make-up.

The pottery is divided into four groups according to the stratigraphical evidence, which is given in detail in the descriptions of the pottery on pp. 66–67. With one exception (group 1, no. 1), which is a stray of earlier date, all the pottery may be regarded as contemporary, since even the latest, group 4 from pit C1, was sealed by the old turf-line over the Norman Bank. There is no historical evidence for the construction of this Bank, but since it is not in alignment with the Castle Keep, built c. 1076–86, it is believed to be slightly later in date. It may be said at once that no appreciable difference in date can be detected between the pottery of groups 2, 3, and 4. Comparison with dated material found elsewhere in England suggests that the pottery is not later than the early part of the twelfth century, but closer dating is provided by comparison with material from Colchester Castle itself. This consists of four sherds, including the angle of a sagging base, obtained from the foundation trench of the Castle Keep in 1931–2, which Mr. Hull kindly sent to me for examination. Although so few in number, the ware of these sherds is consistent and agrees precisely with that of groups 2, 3, and 4 as described below. The date of these groups, and therefore of the Norman Bank, is thus as close to the date of the Keep as the sequence of construction will allow. On balance, the available evidence points to a date within the period c. 1080–1100 for the Norman Bank.

The identification of medieval altars in cathedrals is a difficult and complicated business and information from original sources is both scanty and contradictory, whilst much of the printed matter, frequently based on the researches of seventeenth and eighteenth-century antiquaries, is far from accurate.

The conventional story of the fate of James II's Great Seal, that he cast it into the Thames in the course of his flight from Whitehall in the early hours of 11th December 1688, was challenged by the late Sir Hilary Jenkinson in an enthralling article in the Antiquaries Journal in 1943. He perceived that in design and size the counterseal used by William and Mary for their Great Seal (1689) is wellnigh identical with that used by James II, except that a figure of Mary mounted on horseback has been crudely intruded into it; the inscription is new. With this in mind he examined the statements of a number of contemporary writers and later historians about what happened to James's Great Seal and, finding a number of discrepancies among them, argued that the conventional story is extremely doubtful, if not false, and that William and Mary made use of James's counterseal—the actual matrix—with comparatively slight alterations. In a final section he noted the resemblance between impressions of both seal and counterseal of James II and those of William III's seal and counterseal (1695), and suggested, with only a slight reservation (‘I am afraid we cannot say with absolute certainty that the actual matrices engraved by John Roettier in 1685 were still in existence in 1702’), that William was now using both of James's matrices. The suggestion appears as a statement of fact, with no reservation, in Sir Hilary's Guide to the Seals in the Public Record Office, 1954.