At Our Anniversary Meeting, or birthday party, this venerable Society celebrates St George's Day on the nearest convenient date for the 239th time since its royal charter was granted by Letters Patent in November 1751. We meet, after the formal but not unimportant business has been disposed of, to do three things: to witness and applaud the presentation of medals in recognition of valuable services to archaeology; to pass in quick review some of the outstanding features of the Society's year just past; and to allow the President to make observations on some more general matter that he thinks deserves the attention of the Fellowship. First, then, to our medallists.

The occasion that brings us together this morning might have been observed no less fittingly in Oxford or at Winchester. But Nowell Myres was above all—all through his long life—an antiquary: and St James's is the parish church ofthe Antiquaries, of the ‘Old Lady of Burlington House’, whom so many of us revere and serve, as Nowell did with such conspicuous distinction through a Fellowship that lasted all but sixty years. So it is good for us to be here.

In August 1984 Mr James Rickett, using a metal detector adjacent to a public footpath in a wood near Dinnington, South Yorkshire, found a bronze torc. Recognizing it as an important find he promptly took it into Sheffield City Museum, Weston Park. Subsequently the landowners, Mr and Mrs J. H. Morrell, generously donated the torc to the Museum (Accession no. SHEFM:1984.515). Later a careful survey was made of the wood by staff of Sheffield City Museums and the South Yorkshire Archaeology Unit.

Many of the ash chests collected by Henry Blundell for Ince Blundell Hall (Lancashire) came from the Mattei collection. By comparing the engravings in Monumenta Mattheiana (1778) with those published in 1803 by Blundell we can see what restorations and other changes were carried out between these dates. However, in one respect these changes are not as radical as it might seem, since apparent changes to the inscriptions are in fact merely the result of mistakes made in the production of the Monumenta Mattheiana engravings.

A reliquary casket known from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century records as that of St Winifrid had been lost by the mid-nineteenth century from the church at Gwytherin in Clwyd. A drawing attributed to Edward Lluyd, published here for the first time, suggests that it was most probably of eighth- or early ninth-century date and was influenced by Anglo-Saxon (JG-C) or Irish (LB) models, if not an actual import into North Wales.

After a short, general review of medieval shrine types, a particular category is defined and examined: ‘tomb-shrines’: which were a form of shrine-base with round, window-like openings, constructed over the pre-existing grave of a saint. The archaeological and documentary evidence (including evidence from drawings and painted glass) for tomb-shrines is examined, and the few extant structures are described and discussed. In the light of these findings an important fragment of thirteenth-century Purbeck work from Winchester Cathedral is reassessed: it is argued that it derived from the tomb-of St Swithun. This stood on the site of the saint's original grave until the Reformation, and was a focus of veneration that was as important as the main reliquary behind the high altar within the cathedral itself.

The undocumented memorial (pl. XIIa) to Richard Paget (d. 1636) and his two children in St Mary's, Skirpenbeck, some 12 miles east-north-east of York, has hitherto received little or no attention from scholars, other than a brief mention by Nikolaus Pevsner and a flawed description and conjectural attribution by K. A. Esdaile. Yet its form and its remarkable inscriptions, combined with a puzzling incongruity ofexecution, present the art historian with a number of intriguing problems. Among these are questions relating to its design and construction, the date of its erection, and the style and possible authorship of its ingenious commemorative verses. Detailed consideration is given to such matters in another paper by the writer, however, a brief résumé of them may be helpful before discussion of the wider questions raised here: the iconography of the monument and its relationships both with others of the period and with contemporary opinions.

As the intensive study of the medieval rolls of arms continues it is becoming ever more clear that, even in the thirteenth century, the general rolls were drawing material from existing collections—often in blocks of entries. One of the features of many of the general rolls, both in England and on the continent, is a section devoted to the arms of emperors and kings; sometimes with a selection of oriental and African potentates (Appendix I). Such series were also used in decoration; as in the windows formerly in the great hall of the Bishop's Palace at Lincoln, in wood carvings at St Mary's, Barton on Humber, and the early fifteenth-century painted ceiling in St Alban's Abbey. These appear, in most of the rolls, as self-contained units, and vary in number and content. There was, therefore, no single source from which the compilers drew their material. In the present study the author proposes to examine some of the problems and to introduce two newly discovered English medieval rolls of arms relevant to the subject.

Ashmole MS 1121 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains details of six Stall Plates which it would appear were removed from St George's Chapel following Degradation from the Order of the Garter. Of these, three are those of Companions whose names do not appear in the generally accepted lists of those who were formally degraded.

Silver has generally been valued second only to gold from at least as early as 2000BC. A material which is highly prized becomes a status symbol and cheaper imitations find a ready market. Craftsmen very early developed methods of applying thin layers of silver onto base metal as an economical use of precious metal, whether for its decorative effect or, particularly in the case of plated coins, to deceive the customer. Unfortunately, silver plating is less commonly preserved than gold plating, and corrosion at the interface between the silver and base metal may destroy the evidence of how the plating was applied. The situation is complicated because many of the white metal surfaces on pieces labelled as ‘silvered’ are in fact produced by tin, or more rarely, by arsenic. Nevertheless, there are still sufficient surviving examples to indicate that silver plating has a long history during which techniques were developed to give better results and to allow more economical use of the precious metal.

Ms Royal 2. B.V. in the British Library, London, is a tenth-century Psalter from Winchester, possibly from Nunnaminster. On the last folios of this MS (189-190) were added in the late tenth century, miscellaneous computistical entries, which include the years ofChrist, the ages of the world, the ages and generations, the numbering and reckoning of years and the number of years from the Creation to the foundation of Rome. Two texts, the ‘De longitudine mundi’ (fol. 189) and ‘Longitudo, latitudo et altitudo templi et tabernaculum (sic)’ (fols. 189r and v) precede, and another, ‘De area Noe’ (fol. 189v) follows a short text entitled ‘De aedificatio (sic) ecclesie sancti Petri apostoli’ at folio 189v.With the exception of this last, all these texts are also found in a ninth-century MS, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B.VI (fols. 106-70). To the best of my knowledge, the ‘De aedificatio[ne]’ does not exist in any other manuscript, and there is no known source for it. The present note aims solely at bringing this text to light and providing an edition of it; an examination of its implications for English history and architecture will be provided elsewhere.

The historical circumstances of Lord Castlemaine's embassy are well known. James II, as the Roman Catholic monarch of Britain, wished to pay his respects to the Pope, Innocent XI, and to secure a papal ambassadorial representative to his kingdom. There must have been further urgent requests of a political nature. He sent Lord Castlemaine as ambassador, the husband of Barbara Villiers. The Pope was made anxious by the close ties of James with Louis XIV and was not eager to receive him; a private audience at the Vatican was granted on 19 April 1686 not long after his arrival. The public entry, postponed owing to the indisposition of the Pope, did not take place until 8 January 1687.