To one whose working life has been in large measure focused upon our Society, and whose thoughts have been often enough drawn to it from remote parts of the world and sometimes in strange circumstance, the presentation of his first Anniversary Address is an emotional moment. I say that in all deliberation. For the most part I do not much believe in emotion; I prefer hard outlines to my thinking and regard sentiment as a rare and perilous indulgence. If I indulge now for an instant, you will I hope infer a gratitude, deeper than I care to say, to you who have entrusted me with your presidency and have so crowned a career of long and (I trust) reasonably faithful service to the discipline for which we stand.

In 1843 Daniel Gurney, Esq., F.S.A., discovered the site of a medieval kiln at Bawsey, near King's Lynn in Norfolk. It is known that local tradition had preserved the memory of such a kiln, because the Rev. J. H. Bloom, writing a history of Castle Acre, which was published in 1843 before he knew of the discovery of the site, remarked that tradition said that the priory of Castle Acre possessed a kiln at Bawsey near Lynn. John Gough Nichols, writing two years later in 1845, describes the discovery as follows: ‘Near Lynn in Norfolk was a manufactory of tiles which occur at various places in that neighbourhood. They are of the ordinary form but small, about 4½ inches square, and generally embossed in relief, no second material being inserted to restore a smooth surface.… A considerable quantity of these tiles, together with the kiln in which they were made, has been found at Bawsey near Lynn, and many of them have been placed over the fireplace of the inhabited room at Rising Castle, to which they were presented by Daniel Gurney, Esq., F.S.A. of North Runcton.’ The tiles at Castle Rising are still there, others recovered at the same time are in King's Lynn Museum, and still others found their way to the British Museum in 1855 as the gift of Sir Henry Ellis.

There are, or at least are known formerly to have been, in Italy a somewhat surprising number of alabaster carvings produced in medieval England, some of them in their original gaily-painted frameworks, in churches or in museums; others, detached from their initial wooden supports and now more or less isolated, preserved in public museums or in private collections. How and when these carvings came to be in Italy would seem to have remained as yet almost uninvestigated, although examination of contemporary archives concerned with Italian churches in which English alabasters exist, or from which it is known that they have been removed, might well bring to light information of signal importance to historians of the once vigorous English alabaster industry. Despite the abundance of surviving English alabaster carvings—they may well number some thousands—it is to only a minute percentage of them that we are able to assign with reasonable certainty a date more than broadly approximate; or, at least for those carved after about 1400, with more than moderate assurance the locality responsible for their production. Although records there are, some foreign but for the most part English, of matters connected with the English alabaster industry, co-ordination between individual carvings and the documentary evidence is almost completely lacking. While there is strong probability that some of the English alabasters in Italy reached there as refugees expelled from England, or smuggled out, because of the religious disturbances resulting from the English Reformation, it would appear correspondingly probable that many of them passed to Italy in the ordinary course of trade, as seems indeed to have been the case with the St. Peter and St. Paul, and their two accompanying alabaster carvings, cited infra. Most of the English alabasters still in Italy or recorded as having come from there are presumably attributable to the fifteenth century. I think it by no means unlikely that examination of Italian ecclesiastical records could in at least some cases inform us where those alabasters had been purchased, when and whence they were shipped, by or through whom they were presented, and perhaps of other matters of interest in connexion with the English alabaster industry.

Halangy Down (fig. 1) is the lower precipitous slope of the decline from Telegraph Hill (Ordnance Survey B.M. 166. 3 ft.) to the sea at Halangy Porth and Point. Halangy Down and the earlier chambered tomb upon the crest are often referred to locally as ‘Bants Carn’. The true ‘Bants Carn’ is a considerable rock outcrop dominating Halangy Point. This escarpment faces Crow Sound, which separates the north-west part of St. Mary's from the neighbouring island of Tresco. The hill-side is sheltered by the mass of Telegraph Hill from inclement weather from the north-east and east, but is fully exposed to the south-west and west.

The existence of an ancient village site here has long been known in the islands. At the close of the last century, the late Alexander Gibson cleared away the underbrush from one of the more prominent huts and made a photographic record of its construction. Shortly after, the late G. Bonsor, of Mairena del Alcor, near Seville, in addition to excavating the chambered tomb, noted a considerable midden together with traces, of prehistoric occupation exposed in the cliffs of Halangy Porth just below the village site. Dr. H. O'Neill Hencken noted Bonsor's description of the midden, and, as nothing was known at the time of the material culture of the ‘village’, he associated the two.

The widespread use of coal in Roman Britain has long been recognized. It has been found on many sites in burnt and unburnt state, occasionally in direct association with industrial and domestic use. The fullest account of the subject has been given by the late R. G. Collingwood, and it is the purpose of this note to supplement this with additional information and comment.