In South-eastern England, north of the River Thames, is a small but important group of rich La Tène III cremation burials (fig. 1). One of the characteristics of the group is the absence of a mound, or any other surface indication, and it follows from this that the discoveries are invariably by chance, as a result of some agricultural or commercial excavation. At best the archaeologist has had to make a hasty excavation under conditions far from ideal, and at worst he has been presented with a garbled account of the discovery and an incomplete collection of grave-goods.

In August 1951 skeletons were found during the building operations of the Buckland Estate, Dover, Kent, and were brought to the notice of the late W. P. D. Stebbing, who visited the site and supervised the excavation of one grave. The contents of this grave were sent to the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments, and the writer supervised the remainder of the excavation under the auspices of the Inspectorate.

In the year 1964 fifty three new peerages were created, about four times the annual average of recent years, so that some concerned in the machinery of peers' creation and introduction into the Upper House of Parliament were forcibly reminded of a tract written in 1653 by Sir Edward Walker, Garter King of Arms, entitled ‘Observations upon the Inconveniences that have attended the frequent promotions to Titles of Honour and Dignity since King James came to the Crown of England’. The ceremony of introduction takes between ten and fifteen minutes for each peer and late in 1964 some of their lordships became so agitated by its repetition and consumption of parliamentary time as to ask whether it could be shortened. This led to the research into the history of that ceremony on which the present paper is based.

The group of medieval and seventeenth-century buildings which forms the subject of this paper lies in the centre of academic Oxford, between the site of the city wall on the north, Exeter College and its garden on the west and south, and the old Schools Quadrangle on the east. It constitutes indeed the heart of the medieval university. In writing to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, on 14th July 1444 the authorities described the site as eminently suitable for a library because it was somewhat remote from secular noises. In spite of a marked increase in secular noises over the past 500 years in traffic-ridden Oxford, this description remains substantially true today. The buildings, erected then and later, remain in external appearance almost exactly as they are depicted in David Loggan's Oxonia Illustrate. of 1675 (pl. xxvii). They comprise the Divinity School, for which the university was already collecting money and laying the foundations in 1423 ; Duke Humphrey's Library, built over it in the forty-five years following the letter to Duke Humphrey of 1444; Arts End and the Proscholium added at right angles to the east by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1610–12; and Selden End with the Convocation House below, attached similarly to the west in 1637–40. The three upper rooms, Duke Humphrey, Selden End, Arts End, form the core of the ancient buildings of the Bodleian Library: they have been continuously in use for library purposes for between 320 and 360 years.

The origins of this inquiry lie in my work after the war as a Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Officer in Germany when, during a joint inspection of a large eighteenth-century palace under our care, a German colleague, struck perhaps by the realization of the ugly, indeed the insolent, contrast between its battered splendours and the surrounding desolation, said to me almost apologetically: ‘After all, it was built in imitation of Versailles!’