I must first thank you, very sincerely, for re-electing me as your President; I am just past mid-career of the normal tenure of the office. Still more warmly I thank you for re-electing the officers who make my work possible.

I had thought that this might be a quiet year, in which we might sit back and think. It has been anything but that. You will all remember the sudden and unexpected death of Philip Corder, our Assistant Secretary, only a few weeks after our last Anniversary Meeting. He had been our Assistant Secretary since 1943; and, as aide to Mr. Kingsford, then in failing health, had in fact had charge of much of our business for some years before that. He was a distinguished Romano-British archaeologist in his own right—his tenure of the Presidency of the Royal Archaeological Institute is testimony enough—and his long experience as Editor of our publications had given him a wide knowledge in many fields. His geniality and friendliness had made him widely beloved among our Fellows; his training courses had made him revered by the younger generation. We all mourn him. He will not soon be forgotten under this roof.

Two small-scale excavations were carried out at Verulamium during 1961. In January it became necessary to explore the site about to be occupied by the museum extension, and several trenches were cut on the north-east and south-east sides of the existing museum building. It was not possible in the time and with the resources available to excavate down to natural soil, but only to examine those layers due for removal by the builders. Considerable depths of deposit are known to exist here, possibly filling an early ditch. The site lies in the west corner of Insula XVIII: the earliest structure reached was a timber-framed building, burnt down possibly c. A.D. 155. This was succeeded by an Antonine masonry building with channel hypocausts. Possibly c. A.D. 300 this building was enlarged by encroachment on the street frontages. It clearly extends some way outside the area excavated both towards east and south. The character of the structure is domestic.

In 1958 a rescue excavation was carried out by Miss Mary Rennie, on behalf of the Ministry of Works, in the southern half of Parsonage Field, off the Watermoor Road, on ground now covered by the County Health Centre. Here the remains of a Roman building of some size were partly examined and an interesting mosaic pavement of geometric design and late date was uncovered. In that same year the Cirencester Roman Excavation Committee was set up.

The Cistercian abbey of Vale Royal was, as the name implies, a royal foundation and as such will be included among the buildings described in the forthcoming Ministry of Works publication, A History of The King's Works. In April 1958 Mr. H. M. Colvin approached the writer with a view to arranging the excavation of the east end of the abbey church and so completing the plan, much of which had been obtained by excavation in 1911–12. The project received the enthusiastic support of I.C.I. Salt Division, which had its offices in the present mansion of Vale Royal, and indeed it is true to say that without their very generous provision of labour, equipment, and other facilities no excavation would have taken place. It was hoped that a comparatively short campaign would suffice but in the event the excavation continued from June to December 1958; the complexity of the plan and the wholesale robbing of walls to foundation level or lower meant that an area excavation proved necessary instead of the selective trenching which had been intended.

The appearance of a joint paper more than ten years after the death of one of its authors demands a few words of explanation. Our late Fellow, Herbert Chitty, read before this Society on 21st May 1925 a paper on ‘Fromond's Chantry at Winchester College', printed in the 75th volume of Archaeologia. It was his intention to offer to the Society a companion paper upon the other chantry in the college, that of Warden Robert Thurbern, and from 1926 onwards he devoted time to research into its history, and to the collection of a series of lantern slides, made for him by the late Sydney Pitcher. Other occupations forced Chitty to lay aside this project, and it remained unfinished at his death on 28th December 1949. The basic materials survived him, however, as well as the collection of slides. Meanwhile, the years 1950–60 have seen momentous changes in the appearance of Thurbern's Chantry, adding a new chapter to its history. These functional, architectural, and decorative changes are now complete, and this seems a suitable time to present the results of Chitty's researches, followed by some account of recent happenings.

Dr. Joan Evans wrote in 1953 in her book The History of Jewellery: ‘While it may exceptionally be possible to name the patron who ordered a Renaissance jewel, it is nearly always impossible to determine its nationality, except on purely stylistic grounds.’ It is precisely into these difficult waters I wish to venture, in order to clarify, in the light of the evidence of several newly discovered jewels, what kind of historiated jewellery the English goldsmith was creating for his rich patrons in the second and third quarters of the sixteenth century. The field in this paper is restricted to gold work executed in relief and covered with enamels, translucent and opaque—a technique commonly called ‘encrusted enamelling’. This restriction is due partly to the accident of survival and partly to the fact that the sculptural affinities, together with the iconographic and stylistic aspects of this group, offer a firmer basis for the determining of a national style. England in the first two decades of the sixteenth century was just beginning to see and feel the effects of the Italian Renaissance style in the Arts, and this is reflected in the minor applied art of the English goldsmith in the following years.