The paintings which were fully uncovered during 1946 in the Great Chamber of the house known as Longthorpe Tower near Peterborough, are the most important domestic mural paintings of the medieval period in England. Here is preserved a unique example of the appearance of the private apartment of a man of means and taste in the early fourteenth century, and some indication also of the learning and moral ideas of his period. By means of painstaking research scholars have recovered much information about the paintings in Westminster and the other royal palaces. (See in particular T. Borenius, ‘The Cycle of Images in the Palaces and Castles of Henry III’, in Journ. of the Warburg and Courtauld Insts. vi (1943), 40–50.) There are also a few mentions of paintings of a secular character in other buildings, but almost nothing now survives. The uncovering of the magnificent series of paintings at Longthorpe Tower, which is not a particularly large or important dwelling, suggests that mural painting of a hitherto unimagined richness and elaboration must have been usual in the castles and great houses of the English nobility during the medieval period.

In the year 1850, Cardinal Wiseman writing to Dr. Russell of Maynooth mentions an ancient crosier which had come into his possession. This is the first record of the shrine known variously as the Kells crosier or the crosier of Cúduilig and Maelfinnén, which now forms one of the most beautiful and most treasured exhibits in the British Museum collection of Irish Early Christian antiquities. In his letter the cardinal describes how he had acquired this ‘most valuable relic’ at the auction of the belongings of a solicitor in London, the crosier evidently having been left in the chambers by a previous occupant, and asks for help in deciphering the inscription. Nothing whatever is known of the earlier history of the crosier or of when it was removed from Ireland. At the request of Dr. Russell, Petrie exhibited the crosier at a meeting of the Royal Irish Academy on 14th February 1851, and read a paper on it. The shrine was at the time deposited on loan in the Academy museum. The next step in the modern history of the Kells crosier was its acquisition by the British Museum in 1859.

In the group of images in the round with which this study is primarily concerned, the Virgin Mary is represented enthroned and holding the Child Christ on her left knee. He usually is seated, but sometimes stands. Two distinct methods of construction appear in these images: in one, a carved wooden core is overlaid with thin, but stiffish, sheets of copper shaped to conform closely to the surface of the carving; in the other, the image is constituted of stout sheets of copper beaten into shape and is hollow. It may be presumed that the craftsmen who made these images were heirs respectively of two separate traditions—one, that of sheathing a wooden core with metal; the other, that of applying metal figures in relief upon a champlevé enamelled surface. The images of both types are enriched with champlevé enamels. Perhaps some of the wooden-cored ones were sheathed to keep them from disintegration through decay or the ravages of worms, because of the special veneration in which they were currently held, but there are a number whose cores look to have been carved with an immediate view to employment as foundations for their present metallic casings. Most of the images, whether cored or coreless, would seem to have been made in the same region, and conceivably by one lot of workshops fairly closely associated with each other.

The various objects listed below were found in the course of commercial digging for sand and gravel in the large pit about half-way between Rainham and Up-minister in Essex (see figs, 1 and 2), on the opposite side of the road to Gerpins Farm. In 1937 Mr. George Carter, a local Public Health official, heard that archaeological finds were being made, and purchased a number of objects from the workmen. He brought these to the attention of Mr. (now Sir Thomas) Kendrick at the British Museum, who identified the objects and arranged for an exhibition of the collection at the Museum. At this time, too, Sir Thomas took photographs, some of which are published here. It is solely to this prompt and accurate recording that we owe our knowledge of the Bronze Age beaker and the gold coin pendant, for these are now missing. Mr. Carter presented the collection to the Borough of Dagenham, to be kept in the museum of local history being assembled at Valence House. There is no record of the gold pendant ever being housed there, however, and the present Librarian, Mr. J. O';Leary, has no knowledge of it. The Bronze Age beaker was stolen. The collection is otherwise intact, with the exception of a certain amount of deterioration in the condition of some of the iron objects.

The object of Early Iron Age metal-work hitherto known as the Torrs Chamfrein was found at some date before 1829 in a ‘morass’ (presumably a peat-bog and probably a drained loch) on the farm of Torrs in the parish of Kelton, about one mile east of Castle Douglas, Kirkcudbrightshire. The identity of the finder and the date of discovery are unknown. The earliest record of the object is a full-size pencil drawing (pl. lxxi), lettered by parts, preserved among the Walter Scott papers in the National Library of Scotland. The drawing is the work of Joseph Train, a Galloway exciseman who had received preferment in his employment through the influence of Sir Walter Scott, and acted for him as an agent for the collection of antiquities and antiquarian information. How the chamfrein came into Train's possession is not recorded. The drawing was evidently made soon afterwards, and is of importance as a record of the fact that the chamfrein was already then in its present form, at least externally. The drawing was sent by Train to Sir Walter Scott, and was followed later by the gift of the chamfrein itself, after the latter had been mounted on a wooden stand with an inscribed brass plate, the better to display it.