In my last letter I carried the account of my architectural Tour in the English provinces of France as far as Bordeaux; the following year I made this my starting point, and traversed the length of the ancient province of Guienne, which it is hardly necessary to ohserve is a long and rather narrow strip across the south of France, extending from Bordeaux in the west, nearly to Lyons in the east, leaving Gascony and Languedoc in the south, and other smaller provinces to the north. I have paid no attention to the modern division of the country into departments, it not being material to my purpose; and my rapid passage from one department to another would have caused great confusion in describing my route.

The parish of Wing, from the accounts of which I purpose to make some extracts, is situated on an elevated ridge overlooking the Vale of Aylesbury; distant some three miles from Leighton Buzzard, nine from Aylesbury, and about the same distance from Tring.

Among some additional MSS., belonging to the Trevelyan family, recently placed in my hands, I find many of especial interest and value in an historical point of view; and, as I know nobody more capable of estimating them than yourself, I have addressed to you the following account of one of the most important. The particulars will be given in greater detail in a volume on the preparation of which I am at present engaged, but it seemed to me that a statement of a few of the most prominent features would be highly acceptable to our Society; and Sir Walter Calverley Trevelyan, who enrolled himself among our Fellows during the last season, has promptly and liberally allowed me so far to anticipate what will appear more at large hereafter.

The year 1325 is memorable in the history both of England and Prance as a time when very difficult negotiations were going on, and when the Queen-Consort of England undertook the office of mediator between her husband, the King of England, and the King of France, her brother.

Du 20 Avril au 16 Mai 1855, j'ai exploré une partie du cimetière abandonné de l'ancienne paroisse de Bouteilles, supprimée en 1791, et dont l'église a été démolie en 1806. Le motif de cette recherche était le désir de recueillir et d'étudier des cercueils de pierre et des croix de plomb avec formule d'absolution, genre d'antiquites que l'on avait rencontrées en 1842, lors de la confection du chemin de grande communication No. 1, de Dieppe à Neufchatel. J'ai été assez heureux pour y trouver les objets que je cherchais.

I am induced to address your Lordship, not so much on account of the general interest you have always taken in antiquarian researches, as presuming that, from your descent from a Chief Justice of the reign of Henry VII., and your possession of his Sergeant's Ring, with the first known instance of a posy inscribed, you will have a special regard to those inquiries which relate to legal history. Your connection also with a Chief Baron of the Exchequer of the last century warrants me more particularly in calling your Lordship's attention to the following observations with reference to the title of an officer of the latter court, which I trust may be worthy of the consideration of our Society.

By the kindness of James More Molyneux, Esquire, of Loseley, I am enabled to lay before the Society of Antiquaries a transcript of another of the Loseley MSS. some of which have already appeared in the eighteenth volume of the Archæologia, and a collection from which was published in 1835 by Mr. A. J. Kempe, a Fellow of this Society. It is an account of the presents received and the expenses incurred at the wedding of the daughter of Mr. (afterwards Sir William) More, of Loseley, in 1567, and will, I think, be found of considerable interest as throwing light on the wedding customs among the landed gentry of that period, the more especially as I am not aware of any similar account having hitherto been published.

I have the pleasure of laying before the Society an Original Deed which makes a trifling addition to the little which is known of Sir Thomas Swinford, the son of Catherine Swinford, whose connection with John of Gaunt, and subsequent marriage to him, make her and her son historical personages of the fifteenth century. It has been found amongst the Evidences of Mr. Wentworth, of Wolley, in Yorkshire.

Among the many interesting remains of heathendom, which, to the great benefit of comparative Archaeology, you have recorded in your work on Saxon Pagandom, none have struck me more than certain vessels and utensils found at Eye in Suffolk, and described by you in Part xi. plate xxii. compared with Part ii. plate iv. As works of art they have not indeed much to recommend them; nor are they valuable for the sake of the material of which they are formed. And yet they are more than commonly remarkable. They are so, not only on account of their comparative rarity in this country, which renders them attractive merely as curiosities; but of their intimate connection with objects identical in form, which have been discovered in various parts of North Germany. You are, no doubt, aware that thousands of urns have been exhumed in that part of the continent within the last two hundred years; but, of them all, none approach more nearly in form to the English than those excavated last year at Stade-on-the-Elbe. A comparison of them with those which you have engraved, and those which we find in the “Saxon Obsequies,” and other English works of archaeological interest, will, I trust, not be without value for you. It will serve to shew how complete, even in this matter of detail, was the resemblance between the Saxons in England, and those who remained behind in their old seats upon the Elbe.

The Vase, of which a tracing is laid before the Society, has been described in the Catalogue of the Greek Vases in the Museum, although its subject could not at the time be made out, and the present memoir must be considered as an attempt to interpret its meaning, a task rendered the more difficult as there is not any distinct mention of the subject by the classical writers, and it is one transmitted only by the artists of Greece. It occurs on one of the hundred select vases presented by the late Prince of Canino to Cardinal Fesch, and subsequently ceded by the possessors to the British Museum. The Vase is of the shape called hydria or calpis, ornamented with red figures upon a black background, and its style is that usually known as the commencement of the decadence of the fictile art. It has no inscription, unfortunately, to aid in its decipherment. It was found in the sepulchres of the ancient Vulci.

By the kind permission of Mr. Edward C. Brodie, of Salisbury, I submit to the inspection of the Society a very numerous collection of objects discovered in that city during the progress of excavations for the new sewers. They consist of—1. Knives, of various descriptions; 2. Shears; 3. Spoons; 4. Padlocks; 5. Keys; 6. Weapons; 7. Buckles; 8. Pilgrims' signs; 9. Rings; and some other relics, the uses of which are not easily ascertained.

I have again the pleasure of sending you a transcript of some of the numerous documents of antiquarian interest preserved in the Muniment Room of Loseley House, near Guildford. for access to which, as on a previous occasion, I am indebted to the kindness of their proprietor, James More Molyneux, Esq. of Loseley, a Fellow of this Society.

In my last letter I gave some account of the celebrated Cloister of Moissac; after which I visited Toulouse, which I consider to have been the head quarters of a very remarkable school of sculpture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; but which did not form part of the English province of Aquitaine, and therefore is not included in this series of letters. The next place that I visited was the town of Cahors, which is finely situated amongst the hills, and was strongly fortified, as it was a border town between the dominions of the Kings of England as Lords of Guienne, and the Counts of Toulouse.

As long ago as 1797 the Abbé Mann of Brussells, then residing in exile at Prague in Bohemia, communicated to our Society, of which he was a foreign Member, “A short Chronological Account of the Religious Establishments made by English Catholics on the Continent of Europe.” His lists were collected with care and exactness, and in many instances preserved a record of religious Communities in which numerous members of the most eminent Catholic families of England became professed.

The antiquities which I wish to submit to the consideration of the Society have been brought under their notice on a former occasion; still, as a hundred and twenty years have since elapsed, it will scarcely be necessary for me to apologise for reverting to them again.

In my communication “On some of the Weapons of the Celtic and Teutonic Races” read to the Society some time since, I alluded to the fact of the weapon termed “angon” by Agathias never having been found in any of the numerous graves of the Frank and Anglo-Saxon period explored in France and in this country. The subject was thought not undeserving the attention of an active and observant Fellow of the Society, and accordingly Mr. Wylie on the 20th January, 1853, communicated some remarks on this weapon, which he illustrated by a sketch of a javelin, presumed by him to represent the angon so minutely described by Agathias. This example is preserved in the Museum of Artillery in Paris, and it is represented in Mr. Wylie's remarks in the 35th volume of the Archæologia, p. 51. At the same time Dr. Collingwood Bruce noticed incidentally in his account of the Roman Wall a weapon nearly identical in shape and character with that described and represented by Mr. Wylie.

Much has already been said on the Angon, and after the so full and interesting communication, illustrated by the able pencil of Herr Lindenschmit, with which you favoured us last season on this historic subject, any further comments may appear needless. At the risk of such an imputation, however, I shall beg permission to submit some additional gleanings, made during the past summer, of the attentive consideration of the Society.

Among the Sloane Manuscripts in the British Museum there is one, entitled “The Story of the Ship's Boat which gave Peter the Great the first Thought of building the Russian Fleet.”

I am not aware that it has been in print; nor have I found it known to persons whose literary means, and whose knowledge of all which has been published in this or any other country relating to Russia, has enabled them to call such a Tract to recollection. It must have been written more than a century ago, since it is found in Sir Hans Sloane's Collection of Manuscripts, which was transferred to the Trustees of the British Museum in, or soon after, 1753.

In the year 1847 you published in the Archæologia an interesting letter addressed by a Mr. Churchman to Sir Joseph Banks, respecting the tradition of a city named Vineta, which was supposed to have been submerged on the shores of Pomerania. The circumstance that a city of such size, wealth, and commercial importance, as to have been described as “Maxima civitatum Europæ,” should have been not only obliterated from the face of the earth, but almost from the memory of man, gave me an interest in investigating the statements of early authors respecting its history and situation. My researches, however, brought under my notice so much that was either doubtful or contradictory, that I could come to no definite conclusion upon either point, and became content to lay the subject aside till more decisive evidence might chance to fall under my notice.

A manuscript volume in my possession, which formerly belonged to Sir Christopher Hatton, as testified by his own handwriting upon it, supplies some additional information respecting Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper and father of Lord Chancellor Bacon, a notice of which seems not unsuited to the purposes of this Society. Sir Nicholas was a very unpretending man, as regards authorship: he published little or nothing in his lifetime; and perhaps the difficulties in which he was involved by, at least, assisting Hales, in his treatise on the title of the Scottish Queen, served as a warning to him how he again gave adversaries an advantage over him by printing a book. That book was the means of excluding him from the Privy Council, after he had been several years in possession of the Great Seal; and, owing to the animosity of the Earl of Leicester, he did not for some time re-establish himself in the favour of the Queen.