The main object of this paper is to exhibit to the Fellows a collection of the Notarial Marks used by the notarial members of the Scriveners' Company of London.

These marks are preserved in a book called the “Common Paper” of the Scriveners' Company, which is in fact the register of members of the Company from the year 1390 to the year 1628.

The history of the church of Wells under its bishops from 1174 to 1247, from manuscript documents in possession of the Dean and Chapter, has formed the subject of papers in former volumes of Archaeologia. I propose to draw from the same sources some notes on the history of the “chapter,” and of the rise of the buildings of the church, in the latter part of the thirteenth and early years of the fourteenth century. The history of the church of Wells has been marked hitherto by the names of individual bishops. In this next period the growth of the chapter as the governing body in the church is the distinguishing feature.

The interior of the beautiful church of Mildenhall in Suffolk is remarkable for its spacious and noble proportions. Its roof of oak must take a chief place amongst the many fine examples in the eastern counties. The chancel is of Early English architecture, but the nave and aisles belong to the fifteenth century. It is to the roof of the latter to which I shall direct your attention. It has never been painted, as was so commonly the practice in the county, and therefore has that grey colour which ensues when no extraneous matter has been applied. The roof of the nave is divided by seven principal beams, supported by spandrels with tracery, with additions sustaining the rafters.

Until quite recently it was customary for the Lord Mayor to go on Sundays in state to one or other of the City churches.

On these occasions the Lord Mayor was accompanied by the sheriffs and officials of the Corporation, and escorted by the mace-bearer and sword-bearer, the latter wearing the cap of maintenance, and carrying the state sword. It was usual for the alderman of the ward to be present with any other aldermen that pleased to come, and as many aldermen as came brought with them their ward beadles, carrying the ward maces.

We may accept as a fact that the Komans did advance in force, at any rate as far as the Graupian or Grampian Hills, and we may feel sure that they constructed camps, and strong camps too, along their line of march.

The fact that the Society of Antiquaries possesses one of the most important and the earliest dated of the portraits ascribed to the hand of Lucas D'Heere, the poet-painter of Ghent, may cause the Fellows of the Society to take some interest in the life and works of this artist.

Lucas D'Heere is not one of those painters whose life has fallen into oblivion through want of biographers. Carel van Mander, who in 1604 published his precious collection of biographies of Flemish, Dutch, and German painters, was actually a pupil of D'Heere, and included a full notice of his master's life in his series, which, from the intimate connection between the two painters, may fairly be accepted as authoritative. Further his biographies are avowedly based on a similar collection made by Lucas D'Heere himself.

It is with unfeigned hesitation that I venture to bring forward a new restoration of the Halicarnassian Mausoleum. For more than a century the form of this celebrated monument has been the enigma of architectural antiquaries, and down to the present time no solution has received so unanimous an assent as to be deemed conclusive. It is not indeed surprising that the earlier theories, those of Caylus, Choiseul-Groufner, Canina, Texier, and others, should have been discordant, and to most minds unsatisfactory; for they were founded solely on the notices of the building found in ancient authors, and these notices are brief, desultory, sometimes veiled in figurative language, and sometimes to all appearance contradictory to each other, if not to themselves. Even the ingenious and tasteful designs of the late Professor Cockerell and Mr. Edward Falkener were prepared in ignorance of any material remains beyond the few slabs of sculptured frieze procured in 1846 by Sir Stratford Canning from the citadel of Budrum. But when at length it was resolved to supplement theory by fact, and to procure monumental in addition to literary evidence, when the resoures of the British Government were liberally placed at the disposal of an eminent archaeologist, to excavate the whole site of the Mausoleum, and bring to England all the remains of its architecture or sculpture which could illustrate its construction, it might have been expected that the mists of uncertainty would have disappeared in a flood of light. But very different has been the event.

The cathedral church of Wells contains, both within and without, a number of ecclesiastical figures of unusual interest. Besides a series of seven effigies of early bishops, all carved at the same time about the end of the twelfth century, there are, in addition to the well-known incised slab of bishop William de Bitton II. 1267-1274, five effigies of pre-reformation bishops, viz.: William de Marchia, 1293-1302; John de Drokensford, 1309-1329; Ralph de Salopia, 1329-1363; John Harewell 1369-1386; Thomas de Bekinton, 1443-1465. The last-named has also a cadaver below. There are, besides, effigies of two seventeenth century bishops, John Still, 1593-1608, and Robert Creighton, 1670-1672.

The purpose of the present memoir is to place on record an account of what, in many respects, is one of the most valuable discoveries ever made in Britain of weapons, implements, ornaments, and other things belonging to the Bronze Age. Discoveries of objects of that period have usually consisted of a single article or more accidentally lost, of hoards of founders or vendors, secreted for one reason or another, and of the various sepulchral remains which have been found in barrows, cairns, or other places of burial. These all are of greater or less importance as illustrating the condition and habits of life of the people of that time, and the stage of cultivation and civilization to which they had attained. But the discovery with which this account is concerned possesses a very much higher value than that of any hoard of however great a number of articles, or of any series of objects which relate to a section only of daily life and occupation. It gives us, though perhaps in a lesser degree, much the same information that the lake dwellings of Switzerland and other countries have so abundantly supplied. “We possess, in fact, in the discovery about to be described a record in the very things themselves of the entire equipment of a family as it was possessed by them when they perished in their home, as I believe, by a sudden and unforseen catastrophe.

The finest collection of ancient portraits from Egypt that has found its way to England is undoubtedly that brought over by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1889, and exhibited by him in that year at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly. It had been found during the previous winter months in the cemetery of Hawara, in the Fayyum. This fine series of portraits, for such they evidently were, had been painted in wax upon wooden panels, and, according to the opinion of Professor Petrie, had been done after death. They are mostly to be seen in the British Museum and National Gallery, but some are in private hands.

The magnificent stalls in the quire of St. George's Chapel at Windsor differ from those in any other church in this country, on account of their having been built, not for an ordinary collegiate or monastic foundation, but for the knights and canons of the Order of the Garter.

In the autumn of 1892, Mr. Edwin Henty, in planting trees on his property on High Down Hill, in the parish of Ferring, in Sussex, came upon a number of graves, which, from the character of the relics found in them, were readily determined to be of Saxon origin. Mr. Henty has carefully preserved all that he could secure, but from the unfortunate accident that the men employed in the work were strangers, and not his own workmen, there is reason to believe that a number of the articles found were disposed of to visitors and others.

The village of Wenhaston is situated in the north-eastern part of the county of Suffolk, between the towns of Halesworth and Southwold. The church, dedicated in honour of St. Peter, stands on high ground, commanding the valley of the Blyth, and about two miles from the grand old priory church of Blythburgh, to which it formerly belonged. Though not to be compared with many of the fine churches in the neighbourhood, yet Wenhaston church possesses various points of interest which may be briefly enumerated, as they may assist us in assigning a date to the panel painting of the Doom, which, by the kindness of the vicar, the Rev. J. B. Clare, is this evening exhibited.

It is comparatively seldom that relics of antiquity from the American continent are laid before the Society. There is one good reason for this, in the impossibility, in most cases, of assigning any date to American antiquities. We may be able, from internal evidence, to show that an object was made after the discovery of the continent, and in that case it belongs to the beginning of modern times. If, on the other hand, there is reason for placing it before the time of Columbus, there is little to say beyond the bare statement of that fact. In the absence of intelligible history, it is difficult to see how we are to pass beyond this stage. Among the more civilised peoples, such as the Mexicans and Peruvians, it is easy enough to distinguish and classify the artistic productions of the several great tribes, but to discriminate between the buildings or sculptures of, for instance, the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries is another matter, and one as to which there would probably be as many opinions as men.

The MS. Psalter, which is exhibited by our Fellow the Rev. Canon Cooke, by the kind permission of the Governors of the Grammar School of Bury St. Edmund's, is a fine example of an English monastic service-book, and is of interest because it can be shown by internal evidence to have belonged to the great abbey of St. Edmund.

The village of North Stoneham, not far from the Eastleigh railway junction, eight miles from Winchester and four from Southampton, stands, as the name denotes, “Ad Lapidem,” at one of the milestones on the Roman road from Winchester to the waterside at Clausentum. The parish church has somewhat higher architectural pretensions than is usual with the simple Hampshire village churches; it has a nave and two aisles running the whole length of the building, but no structural chancel; it is almost a square, with a low fifteenth-century tower at the west end.

By the courtesy of our Fellow Thomas Brooke, Esq. a MS. Pontifical is exhibited, with pictured subjects of great beauty and in a splendid state of preservation. It has been briefly described in the Catalogue of the Brooke Library under thetitle Pontificate Romanum and is there set down as the work ofan English scribe, and assigned to the thirteenth century, but it will be presently seen that this description needs revision.

In the account of excavations at Silchester, given to this Society by Messrs. G. E. Fox and W. H. St. John Hope, in December, 1890, and published in the Archaeologia, attention is called to a very remarkable collection of antiquities which were found in a pit in the part of the town known as Insula I.

The remains which are the subject of these notes are, unfortunately, but scanty, and belong to the undercroft of the chapter-house, rather than to the chapter-house itself. Still, slight as they are, they enable us to determine with sufficient accuracy the plan of what must have been a beautiful addition to this most beautiful church.

We have few writings on the subject of English gardening before the sixteenth century, when Turner, Tusser, Hill, Fitzherbert, and Gerard gave their well-known works to the world, and were quickly followed by numerous other writers on the same subject.