Mr. Thomas Layton died on 4th September 1911 at the advanced age of ninety-two years, having been a Fellow of this Society since 1868. He had contributed to the Bronze Age Exhibition at Somerset House in 1872, and in 1883 gave a remarkable Roman sword and sheath (fig. 25) to the British Museum; but otherwise his energies were devoted to collecting, unhappily with little method or discretion, and the task of carrying out the terms of his will was anything but a formality. Most of his antiquities came to light during dredging operations in the Thames at Kew, where he resided, and these were left to the Brentford Public Library as the nucleus of a Layton museum. The Librarian, Mr. F. A. Turner, has cleaned, sorted, and exhibited the specimens with infinite pains and considerable success; and it is to him and the Brentford Library Committee that we are indebted for the present exhibition and for permission to examine and describe the principal items of the collection.

At first sight it would seem somewhat profitless to select as the subject of a paper a building not one stone of which can ordinarily be seen, but the great Benedictine church of St. Peter, Westminster, stands so high in the affection of the English-speaking races that even the smallest contribution to its story may be assured beforehand of a welcome. Moreover, there is a certain appropriateness in the fact that by an undesigned coincidence that contribution should be offered on March 21st, the feast of St. Benedict himself.

The study of Topography from the point of view of types and positions of settlements has hitherto received little attention in this country, although it often throws light upon difficult historical problems. Professor Maitland has summed up our knowledge of this subject in his characteristically brilliant and suggestive manner. He has pointed out that we are learning from the ordnance map, ‘that marvellous palimpsest’, that ‘in all probability we must keep at least two types before our minds. On the one hand there is what we might call the true village or the nucleated village. In the purest form of this type there is one and only one cluster of houses. It is a fairly large cluster; it stands in the midst of its fields, of its territory. On the other hand we may easily find a country in which there are few villages of this character. The houses which lie within the boundary of the parish are scattered about in small clusters; here two or three, there three or four.’

The roll of arms which is to be dealt with in this paper was presented to, the Society by our Fellow Mr. John Bilson, under date 12 January 1905. Proceedings, xx, 173, notes that ‘John Bilson, Esq., F.S.A., exhibited and presented an illuminated Roll of Arms (defective at the beginning) of a date circa 1530 with 439 shields arranged in rows of five each’. As the meeting was one for the election of fellows, no discussion upon the roll took place, nor has any notice been taken of it since. The description given in Proceedings as above is somewhat misleading, as will be seen hereafter. The roll was exhibited by the Society in 1916 at the exhibition of objects of British Heraldic Art at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, being no. 12 in case A, described on page 7 of the Catalogue, though not quite accurately. It excited much interest and induced us to think that a complete publication of its contents might be of value.

About eighty-four years ago the late Daniel Gurney, F.S.A., published in Archaeologia (xxv, 411–569) some extracts from the Household Accounts of the le Stranges of Hunstanton during the reigns of Henry VIII and his children. The Muniment Room at Hunstanton Hall, from which they were taken, contains a series of Rolls of similar accounts of the reign of Edward III. In the belief that the publication of some of these will be useful for purposes of comparison of prices, and as throwing some light on the manner of life of a knightly family in the middle of the fourteenth century, I have selected one of them for description in the present paper.

Silver in comparison with gold is of rare occurrence in nature in the metallic state. It is not found in the sands and gravels of rivers, but has to be sought for in mountain regions, where it is embedded in mineral veins. In these veins, too, it rarely occurs at the surface, like copper in the Lake Superior district of America, or in the outcrops of veins, as there, where it may once have been present as metal, it has usually been converted into chloride, by the traces of chlorine as sodium chloride invariably present in rain. Its occurrence is hence limited to the deeper deposits, where the ores are but little altered, and even there it is almost always in the form of delicate filaments or thin leaves, and very rarely massive, so that, without being first melted, it could not be fashioned into the simplest objects. An exception to its occurrence in these forms is found in the Kongsberg mines in Norway, where large masses, ranging in weight from 68 lb. to 1,537 lb. avoir., have been taken from the underground workings. For the above reasons silver has played no part in the culture of early man, and indeed it has never been found, as we shall see later, in association with his remains until subsequent to the time when he had first become acquainted with copper or bronze.

At the present moment, nothing, perhaps, would so much extend our knowledge of the Roman Empire as a close study of the character and history of its town-sites. It is only by working out the details of inhabited sites—and especially of towns—one by one, that we can get the premises needed for certain general conclusions as to the history of the Empire and, above all, of its provinces. If, for example, we can prove (as I believe we can) that many provincial towns were founded or first developed, or began especially to flourish, in the Flavian age (A. D. 70–96), we shall gain light on the spirit of that age, and on the policy of its government, which we cannot obtain otherwise. These things are not told us by ancient writers, not even by Tacitus; archaeology alone reveals them.