The benign personification of our Society as The Old Lady is a homage which endears itself the more as the years increase enjoyment of her service. We endow her with comeliness, and recognize both her caprice and her gift of growing old more gracefully than her critics, while acquiring in the process, after a wild youth by present-day standards, the sovereign qualities of experience and good sense. Nor does she lack the power of innovation which five years ago led her to choose my distinguished predecessor as her first Lady President. The quality of Dr. Joan Evans's scholarship is well known to all, but fortune has bestowed upon her other gifts as well. She is peculiarly fortunate in her ancestral connexions with the Society and in her ability to exercise in our favour an unstinting generosity. Wealth attracts wealth: during her office and indeed within her family orbit, the spontaneous munificence of Miss Minet rescued the Society from penury and made it possible to set our house in order.

During excavations carried out for Letchworth Museum with the support of the Ministry of Public Building and Works in August 1961, the iron rim of a cauldron was discovered in the ditch of an Early Iron Age enclosure (fig. 1). The latter formed part of a large settlement site at Blackhorse Road which is situated about a mile from the centre of Letchworth (Nat. Grid. Ref. TL/233339). The cauldron-rim was joined to an iron collar and still retained its two ring-handles: the fragment was fairly complete (pl. XLV a).

The British Museum acquired in November 1961 a Roman marble portrait head (pl. XLVI) found at Broadbridge, three miles west of Chichester (fig. 1). It was given to the museum by the late Captain A. W. F. Fuller through the National Art-Collections Fund.

Rather more than forty years ago the late Francis Henry Cripps-Day compiled a county-by-county survey of the weapons and armour still to be found in English churches, either as parish armour, kept there originally against a moment of national emergency, or as a memorial to some person of quality. It appeared as an appendix to the Record of European Armour and Arms which had been left unfinished by Sir Guy Laking at the time of his death, and which Mr. Cripps-Day completed and saw through the press. The information in this appendix was gathered in from various sources, and the editor gave due credit to the individual observers who had had the perception to notice odd helmets or swords in this church or that, and had taken the trouble to communicate with him upon the subject.

In November 1924 Professor A. Kingsley Porter gave to the William Hayes Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a medallion of stained glass which was alleged to have come from Canterbury Cathedral. The foreman of the cathedral glassworks has now identified this panel as one which was given or sold without authorization to a collector early in the 1920's. Now the panel must be attached to a series in the cathedral. This provides an occasion for a brief reconsideration of the style and date of the Canterbury windows.

Thomas Jenkins was born in Rome in 1722, a son of William Jenkins about whom little is known. Thomas was in England during his early life and, as a young man, studied painting with Thomas Hudson (1701–79), portrait painter in London. He returned to Rome as a student-painter in 1753, though whether through his own resources or under the patronage of others, remains doubtful.

In 1964 the Winchester Excavations Committee was joined by the University of North Carolina and Duke University in excavations on seven sites in the city. The work lasted thirteen weeks from the end of June to the end of September and an average of 160 people were employed for the greater part of this period, slightly under £10,000 being spent. A special debt of thanks is owed to Professor U. T. Holmes of the University of North Carolina who was responsible for the initial contacts with the American universities which have resulted in the notable contributions of the universities in finance and personnel to the 1964 and future excavation seasons. Work on this scale involved a great deal of administrative work, the brunt of which was borne by the City of Winchester and the Hampshire County Council, to whose officers and staff warmest thanks are due. We are most grateful to the Army and to the Ministry of Public Building and Works for the quarters provided at Bushfield Camp, and to the many officers who helped in these arrangements.