Long Presidential tenure can go to the head, and sitting on this Chair your President has sometimes wondered how he may appear to Fellows and guests. The extreme images are Laurence Olivier as Richard III, writhing malevolently and misshapenly on his throne, and Reynolds's ‘Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse’, shown at the Royal Academy in 1784 and now in Dulwich College Art Gallery, in which the actress has adopted an imposing, even monumental, Michelangelesque pose, which she claimed to have invented. But I am fairly certain that these theatric tableaux are not true to life, and that the reality is closer to the somewhat tentative, inconsequential and ephemeral image of Lord Leicester, later Lord Townshend, who served as President for twenty-seven years, two centuries ago, long before a normal seven-year limit was introduced in 1876, to be replaced by the present five-year limit in 1906, as shown in the caricature which the Society purchased last year. At least your President is spared the humiliation of wearing the cocked hat, which threatens to drown Lord Leicester.

Two early first millennium BC assemblages from Selsey Bill are considered, one of Late Bronze Age date and one of Early Iron Age date. Detailed examination of two large features suggests both a common function for the features and a functional similarity between the sites to which they belong. Data from them are tested against a contemporary, regional database. In terms of site activity and settlement form, both belonged to the same cultural tradition. But differences in inter-regional relationships, outlook and resource strategies are identified. The change, paralleled on contemporary Sussex sites, is attributed to population growth and a filling-out of the landscape.

Researchers have often assumed that the Iron Age hillforts of the Welsh borders were densely occupied centres of population. One of these is the Breiddin, occupied in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, which was excavated in 1969–76. At its centre was a natural water reservoir, Buckbean Pond, which provided a radiocarbon dated sequence of deposition contemporary with the later prehistoric occupation of the hillfort. The beetle assemblage from these deposits was never properly studied or published due to Maureen Girling's death and, as a result, its implications for understanding the human impact on the pond's immediate environment were not fully appreciated. Despite the remains of four-post structures close to the pond and of roundhouses and associated deposits in the vicinity, both flora and insect faunas indicate a quiet natural pond with little disturbance other than casual grazing by animals. This ‘evidence of absence’ does not square with the archaeological evidence which is here interpreted as deriving from human activity which was neither permanent nor intensive.

This paper reviews the evidence for the carnyx, the Iron Age animal-headed horn, in its European setting. The starting point is the head from Deskford, north-east Scotland: the results of recent work are described and a revised dating proposed. Excavations at the findspot strongly indicate it was a votive deposit. The nature of the wider European evidence and its biases are reviewed, to provide a firmer basis for commenting on the date and distribution of the instrument. Finally, attempts to reconstruct the carnyx are described.

For a number of years the writer has harboured doubts over the correct interpretation of a number of features found in the 1960s. The millennium year presented an opportunity to reinvestigate part of the site to test whether these doubts were justified. What was once believed to have been an external chalk floor proved to be the floor of a timber roundhouse and what was once believed to have been a stone cottage proved to be a porticus linking the villa with the baths. Several phases of timber structures were found but the most remarkable discovery of all was evidence for a possible bathing pool predating the example discovered earlier.

The identity of the figure with a lamb carved on the upper stone of the Anglo-Saxon cross at Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire, was interpreted by Paul Meyvaert (in 1982 and 1992), as an apocalyptic image of the Deity instead of John the Baptist. Close inspection of the panel, however, makes it difficult to accept such an explanation. Instead, an adaptation of the early Christian images of the Baptist is proposed, and it is argued that the details of the panel are best understood in the light of the introduction of the Agnus Dei chant into the Mass by Pope Sergius I (687–701), and of biblical commentary which saw the Baptist himself as an apocalyptic figure associated with the Lamb, the paschal sacrifice, commemorated each day in the Mass.

We hypothesized that the important early second millennium churches in England may have been aligned using a magnetic compass. If true, the building orientations would enable the post sixteenth-century geomagnetic observatory records to be extended back several hundred years. Directional data were collected from 143 sites, most of which were constructed between the mid-eleventh and late twelfth centuries, including all of the old English cathedrals and many large church buildings in use today, as well as numerous ruined monastic sites. However, processing the data revealed that the compass was not used to align the buildings. Attempting to explain the data, we exhumed Wordsworth's suggestion that church orientation was governed by the sun's position as it rose above the horizon on the feast day of the saint to whom the church was dedicated. The data obtained in the present study suggest that Wordsworth's basic hypothesis might hold for as many as 43 per cent of the churches if sunrise and sunset positions are considered; sun-based Easter Day and equinoctial day orientations could explain a significant majority of the remaining sites.

A small room (which has since been destroyed) located over the north portal of Durham Cathedral has been explained as a watching-room for fugitives fleeing to seek sanctuary at the cathedral that housed the shrine of one of England's pre-eminent saints, Cuthbert. The source behind this identification is an account of the customs of Durham written only c 1593. There is no earlier documentary evidence indicating a function for this room. An examination of the customs and traditions of sanctuary, some aspects of which were unique to England in the Middle Ages, suggests that there was no need for such a supposed watching-room. A search for parallels, especially among cathedral and abbey churches from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, produces no conclusive evidence for the function of similar but larger rooms located over strongly projecting porches sheltering lateral entrances to naves. Although a function as a watching-room may be doubted more than firmly disproved, it can nonetheless be suggested that the room was more likely constructed for a liturgical purpose such as some aspect of the ritual surrounding the arrival of the bishop and his entrance into his church.

Destroyed by fire in 1834, St Stephen's Chapel at the Palace of Westminster was undoubtedly one of the most opulent and enduringly influential English building programmes of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Focusing on the programme of wall-painting which flanked its high altar, this paper seeks to clarify the royal chapel's importance not only in terms of its stylistic innovation, but as an arena for Edward Ill's kingly image-making. The study explores the ways in which the chapel space was used and the audiences for which its dynastically forward-looking images were intended. Scrutinising the representations of Edward III and his family, and the biblical scenes beneath which they kneel, it tests the hypothesis that the Westminster murals reflected more than just conventional mid-fourteenth-century devotional preoccupations and were, in fact, indicative of the Plantagenet's own Christian ideology of his kingship.

The first research project in medieval industrial archaeology in Cyprus originated with the investigation of the Lusignan cane sugar production centre at Kouklia (Stavros Project); it became an incentive for the exploration of the establishments of the Hospitallers at Kolossi and the Cornaro family at Episkopi. Excavations at Kouklia-Stavros (1980–82 and 1987–91) recovered a sophisticated structure of milling and refining installations, and revealed new economic and technological aspects of this important, but thus far hardly explored industry of the island in Lusignan and Venetian times. The wealth of new information gained made it possible to understand for the first time thoroughly how Levantine cane sugar refineries actually worked. The contextual approach of the Stavros Project, interrelating archaeological evidence and written information, suggests further interesting research topics such as the repercussions of the sugar industry on social structure, settlement patterns, and environment, or the transfer of the methods and technology of sugar production from Islamic lands to the western Mediterranean, and finally to the Americas.

In many ancient churches the establishment of chantries and chantry chapels provides a fascinating appendix to the archaeology and history of the building. This paper is a short study of a chantry founded in St George's Chapel, Windsor not long before the Henrician and Edwardian reforms which were to undermine the theological principles upon which such establishments were erected. It refers to the life and the achievements of the founder and seeks to highlight, through the examination of architectural and heraldic evidence the difficulties of tracing the history of the building and decoration of the chantry chapel for which the Foundation Deed and the will of the founder are lost.

In January 1678 John Knight, the Serjeant Surgeon of Charles II, sent to Samuel Pepys a ‘Discourse containing the History of the Cross of St. George, and its becoming the Sole Distinction = Flag, Badge or Cognizance of England, by Sea and Land’. Knight argued that St George's cross should become the dominant feature in English flags and supported his argument with a history of the cross.

A manuscript copy of this discourse, with Knight's original drawings, survives in the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge, and is published here. A brief biography of Knight is presented and an account of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century controversies about St George. The latter was an issue which caused acrimony between Royalists and Puritans. An Appendix reconstructs Knight's library, principally consisting of books concerning heraldry, topography and history.