The Museum of English Rural Life at Reading University was for some years interested in a hut on Bucklebury Common, Berkshire, which was occupied as a workshop by the Lailey family who used it for the manufacture of wooden bowls which found a ready market. When the last of these craftsmen bowlturners died without male heirs in 1958 and the workshop was likely to be demolished, the Museum took steps both to secure one of the primitive pole-lathes used by the Laileys in their craft, which is now displayed in the Museum, and also to make a photographic and measured record of the hut itself and its contents. From this record, which the Museum has kindly allowed us to use in preparing this article, it is evident that the hut itself had been a structure of considerable architectural interest. Part of it had a deeply sunken floor which had carried the pole-lathes, and was similar in size and shape to an Anglo- Saxon Grubenhaus of the pagan period. Although the walls and roof were clearly of later date, they could well have taken the place of much earlier predecessors. The purpose of this article is thus to draw attention to the continued use into the present century not only of the bowltumer's primitive craft at Bucklebury but of its housing in a hut which probably began as an Anglo-Saxon Grubenhaus. As such its structure and furnishing may throw light on features that have sometimes puzzled students of excavated Anglo-Saxon Grubenhäuser elsewhere.

Entries in the London Museum Catalogue indicate that the association of a carinated pedestal based bowl with a pair of applied brooches and a bronze fragment in Mitcham (Surrey) Grave 205 almost certainly represents a valid closed find. The continental antecedents of the complete applied brooch from this grave may be dated to the first quarter of the fifth century. The English brooches with this floriate cross design show an insular development with a restricted distribution in south-east England It is argued that the English examples were manufactured during the first half of the fifth, probably towards the middle of that century. This brings the brooches nearer to the date of the pot, which Dr. Myres argues must have been made in the years of Roman–Anglo-Saxon overlap around A.D. 400.

On two occasions during the past year our apartments here have been the scene of festive celebrations unusual in our normally unexciting routine, but none the less welcome for that. On 2 May 1974 we were privileged to entertain our Royal Fellow Queen Margrethe of Denmark who graciously agreed to accept an invitation to be formally admitted to her Fellowship in the course of her State Visit to this country. After the admission ceremony, which followed traditional lines in this room, Her Majesty attended a reception in her honour in the Library at which she was able to meet the Officers and their wives, members of Council, and many Fellows and guests, including a number who had been her teachers or contemporaries when she was studying archaeology at Cambridge some years ago. She also showed great interest in some of our treasures, such as the portrait of her ancestor King Christian II of Denmark, and in a special exhibition of material illustrating our Society's links with the Danish pioneers of European archaeology in the heroic age a century and more ago when her country led the world in the systematic study of prehistory and in the protection of ancient monuments. This exhibition, admirably contrived and displayed by our learned Librarian, showed once again what a wealth of material our collections contain on so many aspects of antiquity. The arrival and departure of the Queen were signalled by splendid fanfares from our good friends the Guild of Gentlemen Trumpeters, and we have reason to believe that Her Majesty enjoyed these outbursts of joyful noise, and indeed the whole delightfully informal occasion, every bit as much as we did ourselves.

In the course of my Anniversary Address last year I welcomed the appointment of Professor Donald Strong as our new Secretary. We were all looking forward with confidence to his succession, for he had, as I then put it, exactly the qualities and the experience to fill the post with distinction. His sudden death in Turkey on 21 September last extinguished these hopes before he had the time to make the happy impact on the Society's affairs which we were all expecting. His loss has been universally mourned both professionally and personally by his very extensive circle of colleagues and friends, but it will be felt nowhere more acutely than in this room, where so much in the conduct of our business has always depended on the occupant of the Secretary's chair. We have been very fortunate in persuading Dr. Ian Longworth, Keeper of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities in the British Museum, to take this vacant seat, and we look forward to the reinforcement which his presence there will provide both generally and in handling those concerns of prehistoric archaeology which are his main field of professional interest.

When I addressed you at the Anniversary Meeting a year ago I mentioned several matters of policy which your Council had been considering, and on which I said that I hoped to have more to tell you in a year's time. The factual record of progress in these matters is mostly contained in the Report of Council and in the Treasurer's statement on the year's accounts which you have already received this afternoon. But I would like to go into a few of them in rather more detail now, partly because you are entitled to have a fuller explanation of their significance than can be given in this way, and partly because this Address, when printed in the Journal, is the most convenient vehicle for conveying such matters to the attention of Fellows who for one reason or another are unable to be present in person at the Anniversary Meeting.