In the autumn of 1972 there appeared on the London market a remarkable collection of many hundreds of pieces of richly carved bone, all reputedly found together many years ago and thought to have adorned ornate toilet boxes and similar containers from a single tomb. Closer examination, however, soon revealed that, except for the parts of four small pyxides, the whole of this material came from the decoration of a single ancient couch of hitherto unprecedented elaboration. In 1973 the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge succeeded in buying the whole collection with resources made available by the Cunliffe Fund and the Victoria and Albert Museum Grant-in-Aid Fund. Detailed study and identification of the components followed and less than a year and a half later a complete restoration of one end of the couch had been carried out by the Museum's technical staff and placed on show in the Roman Room there.3 This has had the happy result of putting the best preserved elements on public display and making their function and the design of the whole couch immediately meaningful, while still leaving much of the material relatively unassembled and so available for any future investigation into the ancient techniques involved. Further study of this remarkable piece of furniture has followed and has since been reported on by the author in papers read to the Friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum and at the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge.

Among the remnants of interior decoration in the Roman Imperial palace at Baia are the stuccoed vaults of three rooms, the so-called ‘Stanze di Venere’, which attracted the attention of innumerable travellers and antiquaries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first and second rooms, respectively pavilion-vaulted and barrel-vaulted, retain enough of their stucco-work to justify a close study of design and subject-matter; while even in the third room, where only a few fragments survive, some figures and ornaments can be discerned. Further information about the decorations is supplied by unpublished drawings carried out in the early eighteenth century. Dating is difficult, but stylistic evidence suggests that the stucco-work of room 1, which belongs to the original phase of the complex, dates to Augustan times. The other two decorations are later, but no later than the Flavio-Trajanic period, for then or soon afterwards new structures were built at a higher level and the three rooms were turned into cisterns. The decorative programme in both 1 and 2 is primarily Dionysiac but also embodies references to the sports of the palaestra and to bathing, themes which lend weight to the idea that the chambers formed part of a bath-suite.

The Ravenna Cosmography is apparently a valuable work, since it contains a large number of place-names of which many are not known in other sources. Unfortunately its bare enumerations, generally lacking in any significant detail, are often disfigured by serious errors; an over-all view of the work makes these show up more clearly than does any partial study. When the names peculiar to the work really existed, it is possible to find their sense by etymology, and by toponymic study one can locate them on the ground, but then one faces the problem of their provenance, perhaps in some source as yet unexplored or lost, since the Cosmographer was nothing more than a compiler.

Our answer depends on two preliminary definitions, that concerning the date of the Cosmography in relation to that of its possible sources, and the role of the unknown authors cited in Books II–IV. Since Book V, despite its relationship to the previous Books, makes no mention of these, a discussion of this highly controversial matter would be out of place here. It should be noted merely that the coincidence between the information given from unknown sources and the unknown authors has not yet been proved.

The great age and unusual character of the south door of St. Helen's Church, Stillingfleet, now in North Yorkshire but formerly in the East Riding, has engaged the attention of antiquaries since the early days of archaeological study. The door and the fine twelfth-century doorway in which it is set have been recorded repeatedly in drawings, photographs, manuscript notes, and published accounts. The systematic account of the church published by Charles Hodgson Fowler in 1877, on the occasion of his restoration of St. Helen's, together with the plans and elevations preserved with the faculty papers, is the basic point of reference (Fowler, 1877; Borthwick Inst. PR 21 STIL). Nevertheless since Hodgson Fowler's day few scholars concerned either with the historic buildings of the locality, or with the general trends of vernacular art in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, or with church ironwork, or church carpentry, have resisted the temptation to comment on the door. Most agree within relatively narrow limits about the date of the doorway, but opinion has been diverse about the date of the door itself. It is a complex structure evidently comprising much original woodwork with additions and alterations from a number of restorations, and there is various structural and decorative ironwork. Hodgson Fowler seems to have been responsible for a sensitive though far-reaching restoration and he was thus probably in possession of more facts about its construction and character than was any later worker until recently. He seems to have been in no doubt, taking the evidence as a whole, that both doorway and door belong to the twelfth century. Most later commentators have been more impressed by the supposed Scandinavian character of the decorative metalwork, and W. G. Collingwood followed by Talbot Rice, Pevsner, and more recently Baggs have questioned the contemporaneity of door and doorway, suggesting that the door might perhaps belong to the eleventh century, and it is included in Wilson's catalogue of Anglo-Saxon metalwork.

The invasion of Ireland by the Anglo-Norman armies in 1169–70 is not normally regarded as an event of any importance in the history of English art. Such an attitude is understandable, for Irish works in the Middle Ages rarely made any substantial contribution to artistic developments elsewhere. But the military activities of 1169–70 did have important results from an English point of view, since they greatly extended the ‘geography’ of English art and architecture. Following the Anglo-Norman conquest, Irish churches increasingly looked to England for ideas, and native styles were gradually supplanted by imported techniques. Very few of the standard histories of English architecture or sculpture devote much attention to this process, and a page or two describing the occasional Irish cathedral is normally deemed sufficient. Yet this does little justice to the Anglo-Norman achievement in Ireland, where, in just over a century, an immense amount of building was carried out. Most of this was English in style and ought to be considered within the context of English developments. Indeed, in some cases Irish evidence can considerably extend an understanding of specifically English problems: no study of West Country architecture, for example, would be complete without a parallel study of contemporary Irish work.

Amongst the records of the house of Savoy preserved in the Archivio di Stato at Turin, in the repository known as the Sezioni Riunite, there are to be found what are probably some of the earliest quasi-royal household accounts now surviving outside this country. Dating from 1269 onwards, they include nine rolls of the years of Count Philip of Savoy (1268–85) and some twenty-five of his nephew Amadeus the Great (Count Amadeus V, 1285–1325). Five of the earlier group were printed by Mario Chiaudano before the Second World War, but so far as is known none of Amadeus's accounts are available for study except in the original. They are, however, of great interest, and by reason of the closeness of the Anglo-Savoyard relationship in the time of Edward I especially deserve the attention of English scholars. They record journeyings of the counts that add up to an itinerary second only to that of that much-travelled king himself, and the details of guests and messengers constantly underline the links between the two courts. Sometimes they help to fill in the background of diplomacy, as for instance when they tell us that amongst those dining with Count Amadeus at Cambrai on 27th December 1296 were the bishop of Chester, Sir Otto de Grandison, Master John of Berwick, and Sir Hugh le Despenser; sometimes they leave us guessing at lesser matters, for example, as to what construction should be placed on the payment, a few weeks later, of 13s. 10d. to a little Englishman (parvo Anglico) who carried the ‘moulds for the bells’ (aportanti modulos campanarum)—if that is indeed the meaning—from St. Quentin to Cambrai, and thence on from Cambrai to Chambéry. One of the longest and, from the point of view of its English content, most important of these accounts is that covering a period of more than a year in 1302–3, during which Amadeus crossed twice into England, spending liberally, on each occasion, on London-made purchases to send or take home to Savoy. Amongst them we find such choice acquisitions as nineteen gold rings bought for 76s. sterling by the count at Odiham on New Year's day (‘… in xix. anulis auri emptis per dominum apud Odiham die Martis anni novi’ (1st January 1303)) perhaps for immediate dispatch as seasonable gifts to friends at home, the very next entry being a sum of 50s. sterling paid to send a courier, Raymond de Festerna, from Farnham to Savoy and Geneva; or a gold private seal and chain (‘… in sigillo domini Comitis secreto aureo et cathena ipsius aurea et factura ipsius sigilli et cathene preter partem auri quod tradidit dominus… 31s. 3d. sterl' ’); or two paintings of the Trois Vifs et Trois Marts (‘… in duabus tabulis depictis trium mortuorum et vivorum emptis per dominum, 40s. 6d.’).

Royal assent to the foundation in the parish church of Tattershall (Lincs.) of a college dedicated to the Holy Trinity, the Virgin, and SS. Peter, John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist was granted on 14th July 1439. The establishment was to consist of a Master or Warden, six priests, six clerks, and six choristers, and with an almshouse for thirteen paupers attached to the college, under the charge of the Master or Warden. The main purpose of the college was to pray for the souls of King Henry VI, Ralph, Lord Cromwell (the founder), and his parents, friends, and benefactors, and especially for the soul of his grandmother Maud Cromwell.

Some of the most famous armours in the Tower of London Armouries are those which belonged to Henry VIII, who came to the throne in 1509. Although there had been an Armourers’ Company in London since the fourteenth century all Englishmen who could afford it bought their armour from the great continental centres of production such as Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Milan. At the commencement of his reign Henry had to obtain his fine armour from the Continent, notably from the Emperor Maximilian (emp. 1493, d. 1519) who, in 1514, presented him with three armours made in Innsbruck by Conrad Seusenhofer whom Maximilian had induced to migrate from Augsburg in 1504. The helmet with ram's-horns and grotesque mask (IV. 22) is, it has been suggested, a survival of one of these Seusenhofer armours.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries small, brightly coloured pictures seldom more than three inches high were often painted in autograph albums (Alba Amicorum). It is here intended to describe those which illustrate the dress of all ranks of society in England, Italy, and France. In England, social historians have occasionally reproduced some of them, French costume historians have made use of them, while the Italian writers on costume prefer the larger and more accurate woodcuts in the contemporary costume books of Cesare Vecellio and others. On the whole they have not attracted the attention they deserve.