The Neolithic long barrow whose excavation is described in this report is one of a pair known as Giants' Hills, situated in the parish of Skendleby, Lincolnshire (NGR: TF(53)429709; Lat. 53° 12′ 40″ N., Long. 0° 8′ 30″ E.). The general geographical location is an outlier of the chalk at the southern extremity of the Lincolnshire Wolds (fig. 1). The site lay at between 56 and 58m O.D. along the gentle south-facing slope of a small river valley (fig. 2). The maximum slope is 7 degrees. Orientation was approximately south-east/north-west with what can be considered the more important end of the barrow (the front) towards the south-east. The dimensions of the preserved mound were 65 × 13m (maximum) (originally 77 × 19m), and of the entire site from the original outer edges of the ditch, 89 × 29m (maximum).

The other barrow of the pair, Giants' Hills 1, was excavated by C. W. Phillips (1936). To the south-east beyond a low chalk ridge and in a topographical position similar to that of the Giants' Hills barrows lies another pair of long barrows, the Deadmen's Graves (fig. 2). On a broader geographical scale, both pairs belong to a group of about fifteen long barrows situated on the Lincolnshire Wolds (fig. 1).

Excavation took place under the direction of the authors at the instigation of the Department of the Environment (now the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England) because of damage sustained by ploughing. As well as being a rescue operation, the work can be seen as an integral part of research into prehistoric chalkland environments and Neolithic burial practices. Thus, financial support was provided not only by the DoE, but also by University College Cardiff and the University of Leicester. There were three field seasons. In the first two, from 4–28 September 1975 and 27 March to 10 April 1976, the western end of the site (west of line AL, fig. 4) was excavated totally. The main excavation took place between 14 August and 25 September 1976.

The fittings from the military belt—heavy semicircular buckles with inturned scrolls and rectangular mounts with relief or niello decoration—are common finds at Colchester, Hod Hill, Richborough and other early Roman sites in Britain. Identical pieces have been recovered in even greater numbers from the contemporary forts and fortresses along the Rhine and Danube frontiers. Although well known (Ritterling 1913, 148–55; Webster 1969, 122–3), they have yet to be studied and published as a group, a process which would yield valuable information about their spatial distribution, the relative popularity of different decorative schemes and, possibly, about the centres of manufacture. The following is a synthesis and discussion of the British finds only (fig. 1); it is based on a thorough search both of the published literature and of museum collections, particularly those in the south of England and the Midlands.

According to John Flete, the fifteenth-century historian of Westminster Abbey, Abbot Richard de Berkyng (d. 1246) bequeathed to the Abbey two curtains or dorsalia which he had procured for the choir, depicting the story of the Saviour and St Edward. Nothing is known about the appearance of these textiles; but they were presumably of fine quality, befitting the patronage of a Treasurer of England, and were evidently intended to hang in the choir stalls. There they remained until after the Dissolution. According to a sixteenth-century commentary with transcriptions of the original texts in the hangings by Robert Hare, discovered by M. R. James (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, MS 391 [611], they were of ‘faire arras worke’, and so were tapestries rather than embroideries; they were also described as ‘wrought in the cloth of Arras’ by Weever in 1631. They hung in the church until 1644, whence they were removed to the chamber of the House of Commons in the Palace; according to Brayley ‘a large remnant’ of the scene of the Circumcision was still preserved in the Jerusalem Chamber at the Abbey in the early nineteenth century. The tapestries were one of the most extensive recorded instances of English thirteenth-century textile production. They provide evidence too for a genre of monastic choir decoration analogous to the lost Old Testament narratives in the choir at Bury St Edmund's and the typological pictures formerly adorning the choir-stalls of Peterborough Abbey. Moreover, they anticipate the mixture of purely narrative material in the surviving fourteenth-century paintings above the dossals of the choir stalls of Cologne Cathedral, and especially the tapestries depicting the lives of St Piat and St Eleutherius from the choir of Tournai Cathedral, Arras work dated 1402.

The Westminster Retable is the most important thirteenth-century panel painting to survive from northern Europe and, quite arguably, from all of western Europe (pl. XXVIa). An oak panel measuring approximately 0.95m high by 3.33m wide, it is divided vertically into five compartments. In the centre is the figure of Christ, standing, blessing and holding in his left hand an orb or globe upon which is painted a delicate miniature landscape (pl. XXVIb). He is flanked by the Virgin Mary and St John the Evangelist who both hold palm fronds. Iconographically this grouping is unique in medieval art. Each figure stands in an architectural niche of high Gothic design. To either side of the central group are four medallions arranged in the Islamic star-and-cross pattern. Each of these eight-pointed star medallions contained a narrative scene, of which three on the left survive: the Raising of the Daughter of Jairus, the Healing of the Blind Man and the Feeding of the Five Thousand (pl. XXVIc). Such miracle scenes from the adult life of Christ were but rarely depicted in the Middle Ages. At either end of the panel are niches for standing figures of saints; only St Peter on the left survives, although ghostly vestiges of his counterpart, presumably St Paul, on the right remain visible.

Thus the monstrous Gerioneo, intent on bringing matters to a swift conclusion, sets about Prince Arthur in the Faerie Queene (V. xi. v). However, despite enjoying the advantage of having three bodies—and, therefore, three pairs of arms which enable him to shift his axe from side to side with bewildering rapidity— Gerioneo is outfought. One by one his arms are pruned away, ‘like fruitlesse braunches’ until, at last, his bodies are hacked quite through so that they fall ‘all three one senselesse lumpe’. Yet, although Prince Arthur's technique is clearly superior to the brute force of his adversary, Spenser's account is hopelessly vague, and we can form no idea as to how the hero achieves success.

The roof of the so called ‘Pilgrims’ Hall’, Winchester, now dated to c. 1308, has long been recognized as one of the earliest surviving examples of hammerbeam construction. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that the complete medieval structure, of which the Pilgrims’ Hall forms rather less than half, has not previously been investigated in detail. In its original form it was a six bay building covered by a single roof, which, though of one constructional phase, employed a variety of principal truss types (fig. 1). The three bays at the north end of the complex have masonry walls: they comprise the actual Pilgrims’ Hall, whose most impressive feature is its pair of hammerbeam trusses (pl. XLa). The other three bays had timber framed walls, and were subdivided into a second, two bay hall with a central base cruck truss, and a single bay at the south end of the building. In this paper the term ‘Pilgrims’ Hall’ is used to denote only the three bay hammerbeam hall, while the entire original structure is referred to as the ‘Pilgrims’ range’.

The roof and timber framing of the complex must surely rank with those few structures that, in the words of the late R. T. Mason, ‘stand out for their contribution to overall knowledge’. The outstanding significance of the Pilgrims' range in the study of early medieval carpentry is that it included four major ‘aisle-derivative’ roof truss types in a single building: a true aisled truss, a base cruck truss, two hammerbeam trusses, and at least one raised aisle truss. The existence of continuous longitudinal members (arcade plates, cornice plates and a central purlin) and the uniform upper roof structure throughout the length of the range show that the entire roof was erected in a single campaign.

John XXII, elected as the second of the Avignon popes on 7 August 1316 at the age of seventy-two, built extensively in the territories around that city as well as initiating works in Avignon itself. In 1318 he began the construction of a palace on the edge of the small town of Sorgues, situated some nine kilometres north of Avignon at a point on the line of the old Roman road to Orange where there was a bridge across the river Ouvèze, a major tributary of the Rhône. This paper considers the evidence for the palace, including the surviving remains of the structure which are published here for the first time, and for certain contemporary buildings in Sorgues, in particular the house at 27 Rue de la Tour in which a series of late fourteenth-century frescoes was uncovered in 1936. These researches began with an architectural study of this ‘Maison des Fresques’, but it soon became clear that such investigations raised wider questions involving the interpretation of documentary and archaeological evidence relevant both to the palace and to the medieval topography of the town.

The inventory of the jewels of Anne of Denmark, wife of James I of England, belongs to a group of catalogues of personal jewellery of Tudor and Stuart royalty of which one of the most important is that made after the death of Henry VIII in 1550. It is now in the National Library of Scotland (Adv. MS 31.1.10) and was compiled in 1606, the last entry being dated January 1607. It records over four hundred items giving the weight of gold or silver, and the number and nature of the gems in each. The text was written in a neat secretary hand on the recto of each folio, the verso being left blank for later notes. Most of these, together with the marginalia and corrections to the main text, are in the same hand; but two other writers can be distinguished. The presence of these corrections and annotations show it to have been the working copy kept in the Jewel House.

The detailed descriptions make it possible to trace some of the jewels in the earlier inventories of Henry VIII, Mary Tudor and Queen Elizabeth, and, in the case of the latter, to donors such as her favourite, the Earl of Warwick. On his accession James I declared certain jewels to be ‘individually and inseparably for ever annexed to the kingdome of this realme,’ but this did not prevent either their use at Court of subsequent dispersal.