The Tenth Iter in the British section of the Antonine road-book has been for many years–indeed for centuries–a standing puzzle in Romano-British history. Of its nine stations the seventh, Mancunium, has always been recognized as Manchester; but the others are not so easily identifiable. The first, third, and fifth reappear in the Notitia Dignitatum towards the end of the section headed item per lineam valli; but it has long been admitted by everyone that they are not therefore necessarily to be sought on Hadrian's Wall itself. Camden, on the strength of an inscription found by Reginald Bainbrigg at Whitley Castle near Alston, identified that fort with Alone, the third station of the Iter; and Horsley, accepting this identification, made the Iter begin at Lanchester and traverse a series of stations lying behind Hadrian's Wall and acting as supports to it, before turning south by way of the Eden and Lune valleys to Manchester. That was a good solution, and indeed the best possible solution, granted the correctness of the equation Alone = Whitley Castle; but it necessitated the complete rejection of the mileages as given in the Iter, since the hundred statute miles from Whitley to Manchester are represented by 83 Roman miles or about 76 statute miles between Alone and Mancunium. Moreover, Camden's identification was unsound. The Notitia places the Third Cohort of Nervii at Alone (spelt in that document Alione) and Bainbrigg's inscription mentioned the Second Cohort. Camden arbitrarily altered the numeral in order to effect the identification.

I have no intention to enter upon any general discussion of the character of London houses in the Tudor period. My only purpose is to lay before the Society such information as I have been able to collect with regard to four particular houses, which will serve to illustrate the furnishing, the arrangement of the rooms, the external surroundings, and in one instance the actual plan. Of the first of these houses I have no exact history of earlier date, but I am able to supply a precise Inventory of its contents room by room in 1509. The second and third–the Coldharbour and the Erber–were in their origin fourteenth-century houses of which the early history is well known, though of neither, so far as I am aware, do we possess such precise information with regard to the buildings as that which I have obtained for their condition in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. The fourth is a much less important building erected (or rebuilt) about 1555, but is of interest from the fact that we are able to restore its plan with some degree of certainty.

The discoveries recorded in the following pages cover, in more than one sense, a considerable period of time. Some of them were made as early as the spring of 1915, immediately after the present author had read a paper on a similar subject, which was later published in Archaeologia, lxvi. The bulk, however, are the fruits of the resumption of building operations in 1919 and 1920, after the great blank interval of the War. It is not proposed, in the description of the finds, to distinguish exactly between these periods, for the sites investigated fall by a happy chance into two groups–one in King William Street, the other about London Wall and Finsbury Circus–each of which can be treated as a whole. It will be sufficient for the present purpose to note that one site from each group–the Comptoir National from the first, and 12 to 26 Finsbury Circus from the second–was excavated in 1915, and the rest between the autumn of 1919 and the summer of 1921.

More than anywhere else in Europe the Neolithic Period has been studied in Scandinavia, where finds are exceptionally rich, and circumstances have made a sequence possible. Isolated attempts have been made to formulate an evolution series in France (Déchelette, Manuel, i, 514-16; L'Homme préhistorique, 1907, p. 71) and Germany (Prähistorische Zeitschrift, vi (1914), p. 29), but the material is not so abundant, and association of types in hoards or burials not frequent enough to complete the undertaking. Our Fellow Mr. E. C. R. Armstrong has described some associated finds of Irish neolithic celts in Proc. Royal Irish Academy, xxxiv, c, no. 6, but attention in England has been rather distracted by the abundance of Drift implements, and there has been a tendency to class all surface finds as neolithic, internal evidence alone being deemed insufficient to justify a chronological arrangement. Groups of contemporary specimens buried as hoards or deposited with the dead in any kind of grave have been provokingly rare; and an offer made by Mr. Algernon A. Hankey to exhibit a hoard of celts to the Society and subsequently to present them to the British Museum was therefore accepted with enthusiasm. Opportunity was taken to borrow from Mr. Russell J. Colman, who readily acceded to the request, another hoard of five celts found near Norwich; and since the paper was read, the Earl of Leicester kindly lent the President a group of four, also from Norfolk, for examination and inclusion in the present series, to which the Curator of Norwich Castle Museum has also contributed, through Miss G. V. Barnard, outlines of two other hoards from the same county. There are probably other datable groups in public or private collections, but it would be futile to delay publication of those above mentioned till a thorough search of all the literature and museums in the kingdom had been undertaken. These will at least form the basis of a chronological scheme for neolithic celts, the value of which can be estimated by the ease or difficulty of incorporating other groups that may come to light.

Some five years ago I read before the Society some portion of a paper concerning the shields of arms which are to be found in the vault of the cloisters at Canterbury cathedral. The whole of this paper was afterwards published in Archaeologia, vol. lxvi, pp. 447 seqq. At that time I was urged to proceed farther and deal with the shields in the vault of the south porch. I was quite ready to do this; but my photographers who, fortunately for themselves, were of military age, found themselves, as heralds would say, in their proper colours, namely khaki, and had business more important in hand. They are now all safely back intheir various employments, and this year (1920) I have been able to carry forward my plan to completion. I made due acknowledgement before of what I owed them for their excellent photographs; and the photographs from which the present illustrations are prepared do not, I think, show any falling off, though the materials they can now get may not be of pre-war quality.

Mr. John Ward, F.S.A., lately Keeper of the Department of Archaeology in the National Museum of Wales, has been prevented by illness from publishing this hoard, which was until recently under his care. The following summary embodies information kindly supplied by him regarding the circumstances of the find.

The subject of this Report is one of several Romano-British sites in the Hambleden valley, about a mile south of the village of that name, not far from the south-west corner of the county of Buckingham. The finds lead to the inference that the homestead was built before the middle of the first century A. D., and occupied until the end of the fourth, the latest coins being dated 392-5. The southernmost extremity of the enclosure is barely 300 yards from the Thames at Hambleden Lock. The Oxford-London road, at a point a mile nearer Henley than Great Marlow, runs east and west, close to the Bucks, bank of the river, and a branch road turns off almost opposite the lock, and runs north to Hambleden Skirmett, Turville, Watlington, etc. The homestead is in the western angle formed by these two roads, and is on the Greenlands estate of Viscount Ham-bleden, to whom not only I personally, but I think all antiquaries, owe much for his liberality in financing the protracted excavations, and in building the Museum to house the results.

Stanley, Co. Glos., is a village on the western slope of a spur of the Cotswolds one and a half miles north of Stonehouse. The village and parish are commonly called Leonard Stanley or Stanley St. Leonards to distinguish them from the next parish of King's Stanley as well as from the Wiltshire Stanley where there was also a conventual house. Occasionally it appears as Stanley Monachorum. But generally it was simply Stanley, and Stanley without qualification is the name which local lips often assign to it even at the present day.

Stanley St. Leonards can boast of two most interesting churches. The older church, now degraded to farm-yard purposes, was the ancient preconquest rectory church, but it is small, a chapel in fact, and therefore, following medieval usage, we shall distinguish it from the greater monastic and present parish church by naming it as the chapel of St. Leonard.

In 1896 the late Mr. Percy Manning, M.A., F.S.A., compiled an archaeological survey of Oxfordshire on the same lines as those already published by the Societyof Antiquaries of London, but for some reason did not have it printed immediately with the result that the manuscript soon ceased to be up to date. Nevertheless from the year 1896 right down to the beginning of the war he was assiduous in collecting every available piece of information about archaeological discoveries in the county, and, as the material collected shows, had evidently some intention of publishing it in a near future. This intention was frustrated, however, by the outbreak of war and later by his death in 1916. He bequeathed his manuscript collections to the University of Oxford and the archaeological portion has been deposited in the Ashmolean Museum.