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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By the most gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen, I bring before the Fellows of the Society two MSS., the one in Latin and the other in English, of one of the several draft schemes which, were drawn up in the reign of Edward the Sixth for a revision of the Statutes of the Order of the Garter. They present the new Statutes as submitted at a Chapter on the 24th of April, 1552, with subsequent alterations and additions made by the king himself and by Sir William Cecil, Chancellor of the Order, with a view to submission to a later Chapter.

The following report forms a record of the excavations on the site of the Roman city at Silchester during the past year (1893), and includes an account of various explorations made in the previous year, which, for certain reasons, have not yet been described.

The work began last May, and was carried on until the month of October, but under considerable disadvantages from the great heat of the summer and want of rain, which hardened the soil to a degree that much interfered with the detection of foundations and rubbish pits. In spite of this hindrance a considerable acreage was examined.