The progress of archaeology in Anatolia during the last few years has enabled us to distinguish certain cultural areas of which the chief are (i) the western and south-western, and (ii) the central and eastern (fig. l). Troy belongs to the first group, though its position, its importance, and its foreign elements prevent us from considering it a type-site; Alişar and Bogazköy represent the second group. The differences between east and west, manifested in architecture, ceramics and the smaller utensils, though most conspicuous in the second millennium, exist to a certain extent in the third. Less characteristically Anatolian is the country south-east of the Taurus, whither alien influences from Syria and the east could penetrate easily; while the developments in the extreme north-east are still too obscure to make discussion profitable.

During the past summer a number of parts of ancient English astronomical instruments were found in the University Observatory at Oxford, during the refitting of certain rooms for the new programme of work of Professor Plaskett, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy. Professor Plaskett was kind enough to draw my attention to the find, and, on my expressing the opinion that it was of historic value, was gracious enough to present the instruments to the Oxford Museum of the History of Science in the Old Ashmolean.

At only one period in English history was it thought that the country had no further use for crowns, and that brief seventeenth-century heresy led to an act which has since been deplored for nearly three hundred years—the destruction of the Regalia. The significance of this destruction is worth emphasizing at the outset, as it meant a real break in the history of the development of the crowns themselves. A general popular belief is that, up to this time, all the sovereigns from William the Conqueror onwards had been crowned with the crown of St. Edward the Confessor, and all those after the Rebellion used the new St. Edward's Crown made at the Restoration. But the matter is hardly as simple as that. Not only do we find references to, and pictures of, various other crowns, but the coronation crown in some descriptions sounds very unlike a Saxon diadem, and we find, besides, that the present St. Edward's Crown has by no means been used at every coronation since it was made.

The ancient box-wood casket of western origin which forms the subject of this paper measures 6 in. in length, 2¾ in. in width, and has a total height of 3½ in. It consists of two parts—the remarkably well-preserved box and its somewhat damaged lid; both are ‘dug out’, from the solid, not ‘built up’, as was the method employed in making contemporary ivory or bone caskets. The lower portion is brick-shaped, whilst the lid is ridged, somewhat like the roof of a house, the gable-ends however being set back, as is the case with the earlier bone casket, of Anglo-Saxon workmanship, preserved in the Brunswick Museum.

Ten years ago, through the kindness of a member of the Wollaston family, I came into possession of a large circular plate apparently of bronze. It was much oxidized and begrimed, and had been preserved with the scientific instruments and other relics belonging to their illustrious ancestor Dr. William Hyde Wollaston, President of the Royal Society in 1816, who died in 1828.

Very little is known about St. Manchan. He died of the plague in 664, composed a poem of which two lines survive, and may have been the author of a commentary, parts of which are quoted in an early twelfth-century manuscript (British Museum, Harley 1802). But though various attempts were made to establish his genealogy, there were other saints of the same name, so that the references to him are sadly confused, and all that is certain is that he lived in the first half of the seventh century, and gave his name to the place now called after him Lemanaghan, i.e., Manchan's grey land (Manchan's church). This was a small monastery in co. Offaly that has little recorded history and can never have been a house of much importance. In 1531 it was under the charge of the prior of the neighbouring monastery of Gallen, and by the beginning of the seventeenth century it was almost unknown, being described at that time as situated in the middle of an impassable bog. Its chief treasure, the shrine, attracted no notice from the outside world; but it was still preserved there, and there is a record of its existence in the church at Lemanaghan about 1630.

The Long Barrow lies one mile north-west of the village close to the northern boundary and near the north-west corner of the parish of Notgrove, Gloucestershire. It is situated in a field called ‘Poors' lot’, or ‘Poors' allotment’, by the road from Cheltenham to Bourton-on-the-Water, and is about a quarter of a mile east from Notgrove G.W.R. Station. It is one of the Cotswold long barrows of which there are two others about two miles away, while the Swell group is only four and a half miles distant. It is marked as the remains of a long barrow on the 6-in. Ordnance Survey, Gloucestershire XXVIII. 10, latitude 51° 53′ 20″, longitude 1° 51′ 40″.

Conway occupies a position of great natural strength and, from a medieval standpoint, of great military importance. It is defended on the one side by the River Conway, here a wide estuary, on the other by the mountains of Snowdonia; and in the middle ages it commanded the road from England into the Welsh strongholds of Gwynedd. It might be thought that the strategic value of such a site would be recognized at an early period, but there is no evidence of its military or communal occupation before the arrival of the Cistercians, whose houses were normally placed on secluded spots, in the twelfth century. The Cistercian abbey of Aberconway was founded about 1186.

The halberd is of sufficiently frequent occurrence and of a sufficiently distinctive character to be a most useful ‘type fossil’ by which may be traced connexions and the trend of cultural developments in prehistoric Europe. That another paper on the subject is not a superfluity in archaeological literature is evident from the lack of any paper dealing at once with the Irish and Continental material. That this paper should be written in Ireland is fitting because the amount of the Irish material is so large. When Coffey wrote his valuable paper on ‘Irish Copper Halberds’ (frequently referred to in the following pages), he had before him the material in the National Museum of Ireland, which comprised at that time 49 halberds. This number has in the meantime increased to 71, while the total number of Irish halberds of which I have been able to get particulars is 143, 67 having known localities. This body of material, which is considerably greater than that from any other country, makes it clear that the part played by Ireland in the story of the European halberd must have been an important one. When we come to study the typology, evolution, and distribution of the weapon, we shall get further proof of this importance.