Among the MSS. which once belonged to Samuel Jeake, the well-known editor of the Charters of the Cinque Ports, now in the possession of Morton Frewen, Esq. are 190 letters written in the years 1664 to 1674 to Mr. Philip Fryth, a solicitor at Rye, and a few to Mr. Samuel Jeake, by Mr. John Allin, sealed with the device of a pelican and its young, or the death's head and cross bones, or the arms, a chevron between three talbot's or leopard's heads, and the crest a talbot's or leopard's head. Many of these letters relate to the last grievous visitation of London by the Plague (the history of which De Foe compiled). They are very interesting, and I am enabled, by the kindness of T. W. W. Smart, Esq., M.D., to lay extracts before our Society in continuation of the paper of Mr. Samuel Pegge, in the sixth volume of the Archæologia.

Now that the public attention is so much directed upon the Tower at Westminster which is to receive the great clock and bell which are to proclaim the hour to the whole population of London, it appears not unseasonable to draw into notice the ancient and long-lost Bell-Tower which formed part of the buildings of the ancient Palace of Westminster, and stood very near to the site of the more splendid and imposing Tower recently erected.

Our zealous Stuttgart correspondent, Captain von Dürrich, to whom we owe the discovery of the Oberflacht remains, perhaps the most important of their class, has favoured me with a brief communication respecting some ancient and obscure Suabian tumuli. This I have endeavoured to embody in the following notice, which I would venture to hope may interest our Society. Captain von Dürrich's letter is accompanied by illustrative drawings, now exhibited.

Dans le courant du mois de Mars, 1856, j'ai commencé une seconde fouille archéologique dans le cimetière abandonné de l'ancienne église de Bouteilles près Dieppe. Le but de ma tentative nouvelle était encore la recherche de cercueils de pierre et de croix en plomb avec formule d'absolution. Cette fois j'ai trouvé deux croix et six tombeaux.

Nicholas, the son of Robert Breakspear, was born early in the twelfth century at Langley Abbot's, in Hertfordshire.

His father appears to have been a younger son of a family deriving its name from a place situated in the adjoining parish of St. Michael; but was so indigent as to have had recourse to mendicant habits, in which his child probably participated. Upon the death of his wife, Robert Breakspear became first a lay-brother, and then a monk, of the adjacent Abbey of St. Alban's, leaving his young son to provide for himself. Nicholas, thus deserted, very naturally hung about the monastery of which his father was an inmate, waiting among the crowd assembled at its gate for the daily distribution of its broken victuals, and occasionally being employed in fulfilling some of the menial offices of the establishment.

Prior to the fifteenth century, Spain being constituted by a number of small independent states, their interests clashed with each other, and serious feuds became the natural consequence. When reduced, however, to one common rule, belonging to one nation, discovery and conquest followed, and its domestic institutions, together with the character of its literature, improved. It is to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella that this beneficial consolidation and completion is to be ascribed. The states into which Spain in the beginning of the fifteenth century was arranged, consisted of Castille, Aragon, Navarre, and Granada. These at length were included within one monarchy, and Castille became the capital of the kingdom.

It is the especial province of the antiquary to collect and arrange, under one view, the scattered notices to be found in old writers, and to illustrate those notices by comparing them with the monuments which time has spared, and the usages which yet linger among us. By such means, passages in history, which are, in themselves, purely incidental and subordinate, are made to bear their share in the illustration of past ages, and thus to afford occasional glimpses of the manners and customs of the generations that have preceded us.

On September 8th, 1856, I commenced my seventh, and last, archæological research in the remarkable cemetery of Envermeu, which, since its first discovery in 1850, has been the means of revealing to me nearly the whole of Merovingian archæology. On the 10th I visited the ground to examine the trenches which the workmen had prepared, and, on the same day, I examined seven interments, the first of which proved to be the most interesting of all my discoveries of this season.

In the month of July last, while engaged in some antiquarian inquiries on the borders of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, I accidentally heard of the discovery of sepulchral remains in the village of Kemble. Convinced from the account I then received, that these relics were of the Anglo-Saxon period, I lost no time in proceeding to Kemble, where I obtained abundant proof of the discovery, and a sufficient description of the objects discovered, to satisfy me that my conjectures were well founded.

There is scarcely anything more perplexing to the architect in building churches in the revived medieval style than the treatment of the chancel. If he knows anything of, or has any feeling for, Gothic art, he must know how bad, in every point of view, a small or short chancel is. Very few ancient examples are less than one-third of the total length of the building, while in very many the chancel is quite as long as the nave. If the architect follows these proportions, and complies with a notion which has been lately promulgated, and which we shall presently have to examine, that the laity should not be allowed to enter the chancel, then he is told that he has built a church one-third of which is useless; that a large portion of the service is read at such a distance that people cannot hear, and that he has wasted money simply to get a good external effect.

I was unfortunately not able to attend the Meeting of our Society on the evening when my friend Mr. Ashpitel read his learned and valuable paper on Chancels, but I have since been favoured with the perusal of it, and have been requested to make some additional observations on the subject. Far be it from me to attempt to answer Mr. Ashpitel; on the contrary, I would rather confirm what he has stated and illustrate it by some notice of the practice in France and England, Mr. Ashpitel having avowedly confined his attention chiefly to Italy. He has clearly demonstrated that in this instance, as in many others, considerable errors and confusion have arisen from a different sense being given to the same word, or from a gradual change in its meaning. We were all probably aware previously that the word chancel is derived from the Latin word cancellus, or the Italian cancelli, signifying a railing or screen; but it had not occurred to us that the original use of this railing or screen was to protect the chorus or choir from the pressure and interruption of the people while they were singing; hence the two words chancel and choir are synonymous in the sense of the place for singing, but that place is not by any means necessarily the eastern limb of the church. He has shown us that in Italy this singing-place, choir, or chancel, is continually changed even in the same church at different seasons of the year.

During the last winter a mason, named John Farmer, while engaged in digging for stone in the village of Filkins, unexpectedly brought to light some Anglo-Saxon remains. Hearing by chance of this discovery, I proceeded to Filkins, and from the account I then received, I at once determined to apply for permission to undertake a systematic investigation of the spot. This was kindly granted by Mr. Robert Watts, the owner of the land, and on the 30th of September I commenced operations.

I beg to lay before your Lordship and the Society of Antiquaries a Narrative of some interest as regards the exhibition of the Manners of a former period.

It may not be unknown to your Lordship that, in the olden time, foreign Princes, who had been received into the Order of the Garter in this country, were usually accustomed to acknowledge their high sense of the honour so conferred upon them by the annual celebration of St. George's day in their own countries; thus doing honour to the Order by keeping its feast.

Warranted as well by the generall practice of Ambassadors of the late and present age as commanded by your Majesty's instructions of the 10th of January, in the 21 yeare of your Majesty's most happy raigne, at such time as you were graciously pleased to honor me with the caracter of your Extraordinary Ambassador to divers of the Princes of Italy, I most humbly prostrate at your Majesty's feet, and doe with all submission and reverence offer to your Majesty's consideration this following accompt of the Observations I made in the several places where I carryed that caracter.

Since I had the honour of reading these papers to the Society of Antiquaries, I have been tempted to conclude that they would hardly be deemed of sufficient importance to be received into their Archæologia, though, in the absence of more learned inquiries, I know of no good reason why the curious old diary of an elderly lady of an ancient house should be beneath the notice of an antiquary. Your official communication has however settled the question; and, as I find that the MS. has been selected for publication, I send it to you very little altered from the form in which it was read. Should it appear that the subject has been anywhere treated with less gravity than may become these pages, it may be pleaded that the feeling was in some measure forced upon me by the nature of the materials themselves, in moulding them into the form in which they now appear.

I have great pleasure in sending you for communication to the Society of Antiquaries copies of a series of letters written by the Queen of Bohemia, the daughter of James I., which are I believe unpublished, and which, like all the letters of that unfortunate princess, will be found of some interest. They are all addressed to Sir Edward Nicholas, who, as you are well aware, was Secretary of State to both the Charleses. The letters which passed between the Queen and Sir Edward, from August 1654 to January 1655, fifteen in number, have already been published in the Appendix to Evelyn's Diary, edited by the late Mr. Bray; and the twenty-five I now send you may be regarded as a continuation of the same correspondence, embracing as they do the period from April 1655 to January 1656.

In the series of letters I have hitherto had the honour of addressing to your Lordship, and of reading before this Society, I have confined myself to the topographical arrangement, merely following the order of my own actual tours in the English provinces of France, which were originally undertaken with a view of ascertaining whether there was any English character in the architecture of these provinces, or any marked connection between them and the architecture of England of the same period. I purposely omitted Normandy, as having been previously well described by Mr. Gally Knight and others, although that province is more familiar to me than any other part of France, and I have notes of many buildings there of which, to the best of my knowledge, no accounts have been published; but, as I fear that mere topographical descriptions of buildings are always rather dry and uninteresting, I propose on the present occasion to give some account of certain very early churches in different parts of France and Switzerland, which I have selected on account of their peculiarity, without reference to their topographical situation.

At the commencement of the present session I had the honour of communicating to the Society some remarks on land limits, appended to a charter of King Athelstan to the Abbey of Malmesbury, the result of a personal survey of Kemble and Ewen, in the northern extremity of the county of Wilts. The success of my investigations on that occasion encouraged me to pursue my researches still further, and to attempt, during the recess, an identification of the possessions of that early religious establishment prior to the Norman Conquest. I exhibit a map (PlateVI.) on which I have marked the ancient and modern names.