The task of transcribing and completing Mr. Wickenden's and Mr. Bradshaw's Inventory of the contents of the Chapter Muniment Room at Lincoln has recently brought under my notice certain original inventories of plate and jewels which formerly belonged to that church.

Three of these with two or three subsidiary documents have already appeared in the Monasticon, but not satisfactorily edited.

When Queen Mary was dying, according to Mistress Rice as quoted by Holinshed, she declared, “When I am dead and opened you shall find Calais lying in my heart.”

In her letter of January 7, 1558, to the gentlemen of every shire, urging them to raise men for the succour of that town, which though she was not then aware of it had already fallen; the Queen spoke of Calais as the chief jewel of the realm. That it was so in the opinion of many there is no doubt, and the delineations of the English possessions in France of those days always present the district as viewed from this country, that is with the actual south at the top of the map.

Through the activity and skill of native and European excavators in Egypt during the last few years, our knowledge of Egyptian archaeology has been much increased; and nearly every collection of Egyptian antiquities in Europe has been substantially enlarged. Curiously enough, however, the contents of certain sections of these collections have remained without many additions; and among such sections must be placed the weapons of war of the ancient Egyptians, who lived before the eighteenth dynasty. There are in the various Egyptian collections a comparatively large number of bronze daggers and knives, and other weapons which are supposed to have been made during the rule of the eighteenth or nineteenth dynasty over Egypt; but, in many cases, the proofs that would make the belief a certainty are wanting. When, however, by means of inscriptions, or the knowledge of the circumstances which attended the discovery of certain bronzes, we can fix their date beyond all doubt, it is most important to put such facts on record. The object of the following notes is to describe some of the most interesting of Egyptian bronze weapons now known to us.

In the following pages will be found the result of a somewhat careful examination of all the existing ancient sites in the district of Furness, in North Lancashire. The remains themselves are very varied in character, ranging from the rude enclosure of dry-built masonry to the burh of the Anglo-Saxon lord. The accompanying illustrations represent all the most important examples of these; and, as far as I am aware, every site (excepting some groups of cairns, which on parts of the fells are innumerable) will be found described with some detail in the text.

The discovery of additional subjects since I last had the honour to exhibit tracings of the Friskney wall-paintings has shown me that there was a general purpose of doctrinal teaching in the whole series, the recognition of which purpose gives a clue to the interpretation of each picture. The intention was, as I believe, to represent by a succession of subjects, progressively from west to east, the presence of Christ. First, in the flesh, “His earthly ministry”; second, in the “host”; the former in the series on the north, the latter on the south clerestory. The tracings before us are from the latter. They are a continuation (going from west to east) of the two subjects recorded in Vol. XLVIII. of Archaeologia, viz., The Gathering of the Manna, and The Last Supper. I have numbered them in the order in which they stand in the church, occupying the three spandrels east of that which contains the picture of The Last Supper, i.e. on the clerestory wall above the three easternmost bays of the south arcade.

Having a very strong personal objection to the system of seat-reservation and appropriation in church, I naturally looked forward with considerable satisfaction to reading the pamphlets and works on the subject which I was told would convince me of the antiquity of the “free and open” system, and that “appropriation” and “reservation” were innovations of a comparatively-speaking recent date.

That the Egypt of the Pharaohs was famous from the earliest times for the manufacture of linen is evident not only from the splendid specimens of linen bandages and sheets in which mummies are wrapped, but also from the testimony of ancient writers. Egyptian linen was, for the most part, made of flax, and a good idea of what an important matter the success of the flax crop was in Egypt may be gathered from the fact that the smiting of the flax when in. bloom by the hail (mentioned in Exodus ix. 31), was considered to be as great a calamity as the smiting of the barley when in the ear. The finest and best linen was worn by the priests of Egypt in the form of shirts, the κιθῶνας λινέους of Herodotus, ii. 37, 81, a commoner and coarser sort was used for the final bandages and “sheet” of mummies, perhaps also for sleeping upon, compare the of Prov. vii. 16, and the coarsest sort of all for sails, awnings, etc. Nearly all the flax woven in Egypt was grown in the Delta, and the best quality appears to have come from Pelusium; according to Strabo, Panopolis was famous in olden times for the manufacture of linen, and working in stones, and it is easy to show that the art of weaving linen and of ornamenting garments with woven or worked designs did not pass away from that town until ten or eleven centuries after the birth of Christ.

There can be little doubt that the spoon which now performs such an indispensable part in our domestic economy may lay claim to descent from a very high antiquity. Certainly as soon as the habit of eating pottage, in a manner such as we should consider decent, had been acquired there must have been spoons of some kind in use.

The crossbow which forms the subject of this paper may be, I venture to think, of interest to the Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries, as it is a weapon of somewhat uncommon construction, of good artistic decoration, and more especially because the date which is inscribed on it and the escutcheons of arms which it bears, enable me to assign its ownership very definitely to a historical personage.

Since the last communication on the subject of my excavations at Lanuvium, which the Society of Antiquaries did me the honour to publish in 1886, those excavations have been carried on continuously, but very slowly, in consequence of the difficulties arising from the necessity of devising some means for disposing of the earth extracted in the course of excavation.

In the spring of 1889 a large series of documents formerly in the possession of Edmund Gibson, the learned prelate who for a quarter of a century presided over the see of London, were offered to me for purchase. I at once recognised their interest and importance, and, as it seemed to me that such documents should not remain in private hands, I secured them, not for my own collection but for the library of St. Paul's cathedral church. The papers comprised about ninety volumes in folio or quarto, together with a considerable mass of loose sheets of manuscript matter.

There are few points in ancient history more interesting than an inquiry into the age and object of the great “dykes”; such as those of north Wiltshire, between central and southern England; those north of Cambridge, which bar the only access into East Anglia from the south; those which run from the estuary of the Dee to that of the Severn, cutting off the whole of Wales; or the great earthwork nearly parallel to the Roman wall which crossed the island from the Solway to the Tyne.

I have the honour to lay before the Society an archaeological survey in which will be found the principal and most of the minor archaeological discoveries which have been made in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire North-of-the-Sands, in other words in the diocese of Carlisle and the parish of Alston, which though in the county of Cumberland is not in the diocese of Carlisle. The Survey is based upon the model of the able Survey of Kent by our Fellow Mr. George Payne, printed in Archaeologia, with one or two deviations which I venture to think improvements. For instance, arranging the Topographical Index in three columns instead of four, so obtaining more space in the three left, while the duty done by the abolished column (Mr. Payne's second column) is discharged by appropriate cross-headings. In the first column, that headed “Locality,” I have given, after the name of a place, the reference to the quarter (N.E., N.W., S.W., or S.E.,) of the 6-inch Ordnance Map in which the place is or should be marked. The labour of doing this is no light work, and the mere turning over and over of some hundred and fifty of these sheets entails considerable fatigue. But once done, its convenience to all using the index is obvious. Thus two places of the same name allocate themselves at once without the necessity of a long description, e.g. in Cumberland, Kirkland, 15 N.W. and Kirkland, 51 S.E. at once define and differentiate themselves.

The way into the cloister of Westminster Abbey from the west is through what in the old days was the parlour, a place where the monks coming from their cloister on the east met those from outside with whom they might have business, who came from the court called The Elms on the west. Now, with its windows blocked up, its walls bare and weather-stained, and its carved and moulded work all decayed and broken, it seems a rather gloomy passage. But it was a light and beautiful room after the general rebuilding of the domestic part of the abbey, which Abbot Litlington completed with the legacy of his predecessor Cardinal Langham. It is in a line with the south walk of the cloister, and lies between the deanery—once the abbot's house—on the north, and the western part of the frater on the south. This end of the frater was walled off from the rest below and formed the pantry and buttery, above which was a gallery.

We have the honour to bring before the meeting to-night the record of the third year's excavations on the site of the Roman city at Silchester.

Complaints have been not infrequent of late years that the history of the Italian Renaissance is a subject that is worn rather threadbare. So far as popular and picturesque writing is concerned there may be some truth in this complaint, but it can hardly apply to serious studies, and it certainly does not apply to one branch of the subject, the history of the revival of the national style of architecture in Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century. Due homage has, indeed, been paid to the genius which raised aloft the splendid dome of S. Maria del Fiore, and the history of that achievement has, I believe, been thoroughly investigated. But Brunellesco was something more than an engineer, and the history of his purely architectural works, so remarkable for their severe and noble style, seems not unworthy of being studied in the same spirit and with the same scientific method as the Gothic architecture of the north. Nor are the buildings of Alberti, Antonio di San Grallo, Bramante, and other early architects less worthy of antiquarian research, and much of their history remains very obscure.

If any Fellows of our Society have lately perused the copious literature on those Memorials of St. Thomas which were long the glories of Christ Church, the cathedral church of Canterbury, and vanished in 1538, I would ask them to compare their experience of the result with mine. I rose from the perusal with a hazy vision of those objects and of the transactions concerning them, such haziness arising from the confused manner in which the notices of them were treated, the neglect to seek for definite meanings of terms, the clinging to sham tradition as if it were real history. In such cases the proper remedy is that which is now being applied to the general history of our country, namely, to rebuild the story out of affirmative evidence arranged in order of date and construed in harmony with known events and practices. I propose to apply that remedy here.

By the kind permission of the Warden of New College, Oxford, I have the honour to exhibit copies of four pen and ink drawings attributed to the year 1463.

They are from a MS. at New College, Oxford, entitled Brevis Chronica de ortu vita et gestis nobilibus reverendi viri Willelmi de Wykeham, which is generally attributed to Thomas Chandler. I do not find him in the Dictionary of National Biography, but he was a man of some note in his day, having been warden, first of Winchester and then of New College; chancellor of the university of Oxford, and of the churches of Wells and York; master of St. Cross hospital, near Winchester; dean of Hereford and the chapel royal; and secretary of state under Henry VI. and Edward IV. He died in 1490.