Volume 80, 2000

        Papers:

  • Anniversary Address 2000 by Simon Swynfen Jervis, PSA

  • Archaeologists, Architectural Historians and the Planning Process: whose agenda? by John Pugh-Smith

  • Development of Embossed Goldwork in Bronze Age Europe by Stuart Needham, FSA

  • The Promotion and Demotion of Whole Relics by Mark Spurrell, FSA

  • St Davids Bishops Palace, Pembrokeshire by Rick Turner, FSA

  • Offa's Dyke: pattern and purpose by David Hill, FSA

  • Monumental Brasses and the Black Death: a reappraisal by Sally Badham, FSA

  • King Henry VIII: connoisseur, performer and composer of music by Judith Blezzard, FSA and Frances Palmer, FSA

  • 'The Cabal of a Few Designing Members': the Presidency of Martin Folkes, PRS, and the Society's first Charter by David Haycock

       

        Shorter contributions:

  • A Newly Identified Figure of the Virgin from a Late Anglo-Saxon Rood at Great Hale, Lincolnshire by Paul Everson, FSA, and David Stocker, FSA

  • Nave Roof, Chest and Door of the Church of St Mary, Kempley, Gloucestershire: Dendrochronological Dating by Beric M Morley and Daniel WH Miles

  • A Note on the Hutton Conyers Charter and Related Fenland Manuscripts by Paul Binski, FSA

  • The Maternal Ancestry of Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), and the Household of Ann Hamilton (c 1612-1689), Countess of Clanbrassil by M J Crossley Evans, FSA

  • The Society of Antiquaries' Sabbath Lamp by Raphael Ralph Emanuel, FSA

  • George Cruikshank's The Antiquarian Society, 1812, and Sir Henry Charles Englefield by Bernard Nurse, FSA, Librarian

  • South Wales Plateway 1788-1860 by John van Laun, FSA and David Bick, FSA

  • A Silver Punchbowl at the Society of Antiquaries by Richard Meager


1. Anniversary Address 2000, delivered 4 May 2000

In 1750 our President, the Duke of Somerset, who had been elected in 1724 when the Marquis of Hertford died. We elected in his place the Duke of Richmond whose portrait, given by our Fellow Richard Hatchwell in 1995, hangs on our stairs: Richmond attended the St George’s Day dinner in 1750 but did little more for the Society until his death in November of the same year. Our Vice-President Martin Folkes, who had been President of the Royal Society since 1741 in succession to Sir Hans Sloane, was elected in Richmond’s place. Folkes successfully steered the Society towards the Royal Charter granted by King George II, our ‘Founder and Patron’, on 2 November 1751, whose 250th anniversary we shall be celebrating next year, although by that time Folkes, who had suffered a paralytic stroke on 26 September, was incapable. A Fellow since 1720, Folkes’s main interests were Roman antiquities and English coins. He was not universally beloved: Stukely called him ‘an arrant infidel and loud scoffer’ who ‘believes nothing of a future state, of the Scriptures of revelation.’ On 2 June 1858 what was said to be Folkes’s cocked hat was presented to the Cocked Hat Club. Late last year the Society was able to purchase at Christie’s a more reliable relic in the form of Folkes’s portrait painted by Jonathan Richardson in 1718 (pictured), which now hangs behind the President’s Chair, 250 years after Folkes’s election to that office. Richardson, the painter, although not a Fellow, is worthy of respect in antiquarian circles: An Account of the Statues and Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy, France etc, with Remarks, edited from his son’s Grand Tour notes, and first published in London in 1722, was valued by our Honorary Fellow, the Abbé Winckelmann, and a French edition was issued at Amsterdam in 1728. Our Library has the first edition, left to the Society by our Fellow Arthur Ashpitel in 1869. The 1754 second London edition and the 1728 Amsterdam edition are surely desiderata.

The year 1750 thus saw three Presidents, one who had served twenty-six years, one who served less than a year, and a third, Folkes, who was to serve for four years only, three of these hors de combat. This President, at the end of his fifth year, is in danger of developing Bourbon tendencies, particularly as you have done him the great honour of electing him to serve the additional year already balloted, the first beyond the lustrum normally statutory since Viscount Dillon’s seven years at the turn of the last century, in succession to Franks. (The relevant statute is Chapter VI, paragraph v, and we think this is the first time it has been used.) Let me first reassure the Fellowship that this exception will not be repeated and second explain that the reason for the extra year was to spread and therefore lighten the Presidential burden in 2001, the 250th anniversary of our Royal Charter, to whose forthcoming celebration I have already alluded. Plans are afoot, but I shall not spoil any surprises by talking of these, and stick to the period from the 1999 Anniversary to this, the last of the second millennium of the Christian era. Thinking that I might have the chance of looking forward next year, it seems appropriate now to look back, in form, if not always in content. I shall therefore be covering our activities under roughly the same headings and in the same order as I did in my first Anniversary Address on St George’s Day 1996, following the pattern of the ‘Public Benefit Statement’ which I drafted in Korea in March 1995.

However, convention and the date dictate a glance at the Society in 1800 and in 1900. In the former year the Earl of Leicester was our President and publications, including the preparation of an index to Archaeologia, were a major preoccupation, although in the background the war between John Carter and his supporters and those of James Wyatt was simmering. On 14 November the Council thanked our Fellow Wyatt, as ‘Surveyor General of His Majesty’s Works’, for facilitating Richard Smirke’s drawings from the paintings discovered in St Stephen’s Chapel. This apparently anodyne gesture must have rankled. Three years earlier Carter would have been employed and Wyatt was still under blackball. One of the salves the Society applied was a seemingly interminable series of readings by the Director, our Fellow Samuel Lysons, at Ordinary Meetings, each of which ended with the formulary: ‘The evening being now far advanced, the Remainder of this curious Collection of Extracts from the Berkeley MSS was unavoidably postponed to another Meeting.’ The sigh of relief is almost audible after two centuries (absit omen). Lyson’s own interest in Roman antiquities is instanced by his report that Admiral Shirley of Horkstrow Hall, Lincolnshire, had erected a ‘Building 25 feet square over the most curious part of the Pavement’, the mosaic discovered there in 1796 and now in Hull Museum, an early example of archaeological protection. Our Library benefited from many gifts including, from our Fellow Sir William Hamilton, ‘the third volume of his collection of vases of Greek workmanship’ and, from our Fellow James Dallaway, his Anecdotes of the Arts in England: his title-page epigraph from Seneca’s letters, ‘Longum est Iter per precepta, breve et efficax per Exempla’, is transcribed in the minute recording the gift. To ‘our new Member, His Royal Highness George, Prince of Wales’ we gave a complete set of the Society’s works. Elections of noblemen and gentlemen continued but the clergy (including Thomas Dunham Whitaker) were perhaps predominant, and two notable classicists, one an archaeologist, Willliam Gell, and the other an architect, William Wilkins, were elected at the end of the year.

In 1900, by contrast, noblemen were rare, although Lord Balcarres came in under the now-defunct instant process for the election of the eldest son of a Peer; gentry and clergy were, however, still prevalent. With Lord Dillon, as I mentioned earlier, our President, there was much on arms and armour, including contributions from our Fellow Alfred Hutton, described in the Dictionary of National Biography as ‘swordsman’ and compared with Don Quixote. But the Ordinary Meetings were dominated by reports from Local Secretaries, a reminder that the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, whose passing, or rather merging, we saluted last year, was not set up until 1908. Thus, although Somers Clarke was our Local Secretary for Egypt, and the work of our Fellow Arthur Evans at ‘Gnossus’ [sic] was mentioned, the focus of our activities, including research grants to excavations at Silchester and Verulamium, was predominantly national. But the Library was thoroughly international, the gifts including Louis Jacobi’s Das Römerkastell Saalburg from its dedicatee ‘His Imperial Majesty the German Emperor’: I looked this out, hoping for a vaingloriously Hohenzollern binding, but it was disappointingly subfusc. The Library was used for a conversazione on the occasion of our Vice-President and former President Sir Arthur Evans’s fiftieth year of connection with the Numismatic Society. A more modern note is stuck by the first rewiring of Burlington House.

Like it or not, the election of noblemen and clergy seems to have dwindled in 2000, but the Fellowship thrives. Indeed, despite the recent rise in subscriptions, we have in the first four months of this year issued a record number of blue papers, fifty per cent up on 1999, and all vetted by the Executive Committee. And thanks to the extra ballot last June we have reduced the waiting list to about one year, which interval Council considers acceptable; if extra ballots are necessary to maintain this balance, they will be held. Last October our General Secretary talked to us about the Society and society in 1799, 1899 and 1999. One statistic that he unearthed is striking. At the end of the eighteenth century we had a Fellowship of 650, which could be expressed as about eight Fellows in every hundred thousand of the population. By the end of the nineteenth century the number of Fellows had risen to six hundred and eighty, but the proportion was about a quarter of what it had been previously: in other words, there were about two Fellows for every hundred thousand. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, we have a Fellowship of about two thousand, one hundred, and the proportion is double what it was in 1899 but half what it was in 1799, with about four Fellows for every hundred thousand of the population. In the long perspective we may thus be perceived to have achieved equilibrium, but the Society does not stand still: in 1998 we decided to move gradually upwards to a Fellowship of two thousand, three hundred.

Honorary Fellows are a much more select band of ornaments to the Society, but even this anthology has burgeoned thanks to initiatives in nomination by Fellows. Since the last Anniversary we have elected Professor Doktor Hansgerd Hellenkemper, a distinguished German archaeologist of the Roman and Byzantine periods, who is Director of the Römisch-Germanisches Museum in Cologne, Professor Roger Curtis Green, the foremost scholar of Polynesian prehistory, not only an archaeologist, but also renowned in the field of historic linguistics, and a skilled geologist, and Professor Doktor Siegmar von Schnurbein, a leading Roman archaeologist, who has played a prominent role in frontier studies, and is now joint director of the Franco-German excavations at Alesia, which for ‘every schoolboy’ used to mean ‘Vercingetorix’.

In the recently published Annual Report of our proceedings in 1999 Fellows will have noticed an omission. Regrettably the Report, for reasons of economy, no longer prints the obituaries of those Fellows who died in the period it covers. However I draw attention to a sentence in the preamble to the list of deaths of Fellows: ‘full obituaries are available from the General Secretary’. They continue to be compiled by the Society’s indefatigable medallist Eva Rhys, and their value for posterity is fully recognized: I hope that a benefaction or improved financial fortunes may allow us to return to printing them in the future. The Society’s record in the past is patchy. In 1800 there were no obituaries, but they were the major feature of the Anniversary in 1900. However, the record is not full: the achievements of the great Gothic architect, our Fellow William Butterfield, who died in that year, were commemorated. But of his friend William White, another muscular Gothic architect, a Fellow since 1864, who also died in 1900, our Proceedings found nothing to record. Yet this gifted eccentric, great nephew of Gilbert White of Selborne, the inventor of the Patent Alpine Porte-Knapsack and the composer of the ‘Alpine Queen or Mountaineer’s Song’, a besotted Baconian, and an advocate of Swedish gymnastics, was quite a somebody: his views on church restoration, for example, were already ‘anti-scrape’ in 1865. If such a one there be in 2000, we will capture him when he falls.

Publication has always been at the centre of the Society’s activities and it is good to note that, as promised at the last Anniversary, Early Incised Slabs and Brasses from the London Marblers by our Fellow Sally Badham and our late Fellow Malcolm Norris did appear, as did the long-awaited Medieval Decorative Ironwork in England by our Fellow Jane Geddes. More recently we have published Monuments of Merv by our Fellow Georgina Herrmann and most recently of all, fresh from the press, Roman Fortresses and their Legions, edited by our Fellow, Richard Brewer. Dedicated to the memory of our late Fellow George Boon, whose widow Diana and son Tim are present today, this work has thirteen distinguished contributors, all of them Fellows, including our new Honorary Fellow, Dr von Schnurbein. Roman Fortresses is the record of a two-day conference held here in 1992 so there has been a wait. But not so long as the wait for the new Catalogue of Manuscripts in your Society’s possession, whose somewhat perfunctory predecessor by our Fellow and then Senior Secretary, the industrious Henry Ellis, appeared in 1816. But I am glad to report that the monumental new work, by our Fellow Pamela Willetts, is in the press and will appear shortly. It promises to be an invaluable resource.

When discussing our publications it is easy to take for granted the regular appearance, on time, of The Antiquaries Journal. But the assemblage and editing, for volume seventy-nine, of ten articles and six notes, supported by variegated illustrations (including a Tudor livery badge in colour), diagrams and tables, not to speak of notes, bibliography and index, and accompanied by twenty-seven book reviews, is no mean feat. In a period when we all, increasingly, run the danger of being confined to our specialist ‘silos’ (I apologize for the management-speak) is it not salutary to be confronted by a volume with the span of our Journal? Who could resist a title such as ‘A historiography of the Irish crannog’? Or not be tempted into the byways of Neapolitan freemasonry in the eighteenth century? Or not be seduced by the exquisite anatomizing of a no less exquisite Iron Age knife? It all adds to the ‘Knowledge of the Antiquities and History of this and other Nations’ in which the Fellowship is to excel. Whether we still believe, in the terms of our Charter of 1751, that these studies can serve ‘not only to improve the Minds of Men but also to incite them to Virtuous and Noble Actions’ I am not sure, but when occasionally, very occasionally, I hear a complaint that ‘there is nothing in this year’s Journal for me’, I am tempted to wonder whether sectarian tunnel-vision is not missing the larger picture, be it that this involves the grand sweep of the ‘Transition to late antiquity on the Lower Danube’ or a precise focus on the correct identification of ‘the "Rufus Tomb" in Winchester Cathedral’. Not that the Society fails to promote a specialization of its own: no book has appeared this year, but the Croft Lyons Committee continues assiduously to pursue heraldic studies and their publication. Unlike the Croft Lyons Committee, Archaeologia, or miscellaneous tracts relating to Antiquity, the series which commenced in 1770, is now, not for the first time, dormant, but it is not defunct: if resources and occasion demand Archaeologia can be resuscitated.

Here at Burlington House our most conspicuous activity consists in our Thursday Meetings. Once again our General Secretary, who has given a paper himself and presented several ballot exhibits, has assembled a variegated and balanced diet. We commenced in October with a melodious twang as our Fellows Dr Judith Blezzard and Dr Frances Palmer, and a supporting choir, illustrated the surprisingly exiguous evidence for music at the court of Henry VIII. The public dimension was aired in a lucid explanation by its Director, Anthea Case, of where the Heritage Lottery Fund had got to and was going, and in a talk on archaeologists and the planning process by a barrister well versed in that field, John Pugh-Smith: to the innocent in the Chair it seemed that the question-and-answer session which followed his analysis was not devoid of polite tensions. Your President particularly enjoyed, towards the end of this Spring season, the contrast between our Fellow Stephen Marks’s talk on the sixteenth-century copper-plate map of London, of which some elements have reappeared by stages, using an edition of a North Country text, published in Finland in the 1930s, as a guide to linguistic and orthographic aspects of London placenames, and, the following week, Dr Peter Mitchell’s survey of hunter-gatherer archaeology in the Lesotho Highlands, illustrated with spectacular slides of African landscapes, in one case covered in snow. Dr Mitchell’s methods included advanced isotopic sampling of soil to establish early patterns of vegetation, but it was notable that physical intervention, still less digging, played little or no part in many investigations. Thus our Fellow David Mason explored Roman Chester, and a remarkable imperial monument therein, by careful study of earlier excavation reports and notes, and our Fellows Simon Keay and Martin Millett relied on visible evidence and resistivity to reconstruct the town of Falerii Novi. Among those who commented at that Meeting was our late Fellow Tim Potter, whose premature death robbed our sister society, the Royal Archaeological Institute, of their President after all too short a tenure.

Perhaps the most stimulating occasion of the year was our December Miscellany, when our General Secretary had given three speakers twenty minutes each to summarize their antiquarian dreams and nightmares for the next hundred years. Our Vice-President Geoffrey Wainwright started matters in optimistic mode, summarizing the progress made in recent decades, and looking forward to steady improvement in archaeological recording and knowledge. Simon Thurley, the Director of the Museum of London, then painted an enticing and convincing Blairite vision of the museum of the future, all interactive screen and high-tech access, before revealing his conviction that this was a dangerous mirage, that it was futile for museums to compete with the international moguls of electronics and their vastly superior resources, and that, instead, il faut cultiver son jardin, in other words the real objects with which, if they are properly presented, no simulacra can compete. And finally our Fellow David Starkey made our blood run cold by maintaining, very plausibly, that the future had been accurately predicted by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World, a world dominated ‘by that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford’s: History is bunk’. No place for antiquaries in the coming synthetic Nirvana; the only comfort that David Starkey could offer was that we might be sent off to one of the islands reserved for ‘all the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy’, and on that dystopian note he abandoned us.

In 1735, in his De Societate Antiquaria Londonensi, Christian Kortholt described ‘a diminutive library whose shelves abound with choice books’. Since then our Library has grown and our responsibilities with it: a crude but telling indication of its national and international importance is the fact that about two-thirds of our books are not in the British Library. Our Library has problems. It has fewer staff than in the early 1950s. We are not spending enough on binding and conservation, our space is under pressure, although, with great ingenuity, our Librarian has rejigged matters so that there is twice the breathing space we had anticipated three years ago, and we have been frustrated in our efforts to secure grants to allow us to improve our cataloguing system and provide better and wider access. But we do not repine. Over the past five years, with generous assistance from the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust, a programme has been completed to conserve twenty-nine of the Society’s most important manuscripts, ranging in date from the tenth to the nineteenth century. The next conservation project, already begun, is to tackle the extensive collection of large rolled items: our Fellows Michael Fulford and Amanda Clarke, who read a paper on Silchester last month, were, I gather, very impressed by the emergence of the drawings executed during the Silchester excavation to which, as I mentioned earlier, the Society gave a Research Grant in 1900. We are also indebted to the financial support received from the Greenhill Estate, through the Francis Coales Foundation, to help the completion of work on the 1,400 rubbings of British incised slabs deposited by Francis Greenhill in 1994 to 1995. Our Fellow George McHardy has continued to work on the catalogue of our remarkable and extensive collection of drawings, over 15,000 in all. We are very grateful to the Getty Grant Program, the British Library, the Royal Archaeological Institute and the British Archaeological Association for their support of this project.

The major benefaction in the past year has been, however, the bequest from our Fellow Kenneth Gravett, who died in November 1999, of the residue of his estate, including his books ‘for the library’. The value is estimated at over £300,000. The following chronological anthology from the hundred or so volumes selected for retention in the Library may give a flavour: the second, 1596, edition of William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent; The Antiquities of Canterbury (1640) by William Somner, Anglo-Saxonist and antiquary; the 1675 edition of Gervase Markham’s Inrichment of the Weald of Kent; Thomas Benge Burr’s 1766 History of Tunbridge Wells and Charles Caraccioli’s Antiquities of Arundel of the same year, which was, according to our Fellow and former Director Richard Gough, ‘most awkwardly contrived from printed books’; Picturesque Views on the River Medway (1793) by Samuel Ireland, whose candidature for election as a Fellow of your Society was blackballed twice, in 1789 and 1790; The History and Antiquities of Horsham (1836), dedicated to the Earl of Egremont, Turner’s great patron, by its author, Howard Dudley, who also printed the book and executed its lithographic and woodcut illustrations from his own drawings, at the age of fifteen; and a richly extra-illustrated copy of Cruden’s History of Gravesend (1843). There are also handsome twentieth-century volumes, including Mrs Charles Roundell’s Ham House, Charles J Phillips’s History of the Sackville Family, Avray Tipping’s English Homes and, as a final digestif, The Hungry Archaeologist in France by our late Fellow Glyn Daniel.

Another important gift of books came from Ruth Wright in memory of her husband, our Fellow Cyril Wright, who died in 1980. It included his heraldic papers and topographical drawings, many of which, if they were not so clearly dated, could be taken to be a hundred years earlier, and books, from which I will single out Thomas Hearne’s 1716 edition of the late fifteenth-century antiquary John Rous’s Historia Regum Angliae; the 1786 edition of James Kennedy’s Description of Wilton House; Leigh and Sotheby’s 1810 catalogue of Richard Gough’s library, incorporating a sixteen-page biographical preface by our former printer, John Nichols; and, a resounding salvo, Bibliomania, the 1811 second edition, Bibliographical, Antiquarian, Picturesque Tour in France and Germany (1821), Reminiscences of a Literary Life (1836) and Bibliographical, Antiquarian, and Picturesque Tour in the Northern Counties of England and Scotland (1838), all by Thomas Frognall Dibdin, who had been a defeated candidate for the Secretaryship of our Society in 1806, when Nicholas Carlisle was elected – an unfortunate choice, as Carlisle’s services, except when he could extract extra honoraria, were minimal, up to his death in office in 1847. Alongside such signal benefactions a constant stream of gifts from Fellows and others make a major contribution to the wealth and the economy of our Library. A recent instance is the gift from Hugh and John Wyatt of two volumes of drawings by their ancestor, our Fellow and benefactor, Thomas Kerrich.

The encouragement of research is one of your Society’s perennial purposes and in the Spring the Research Committee was able to recommend the award of twenty-four Research Grants totalling £32,000: there were sixty-four applicants, and there is no doubt that had there been more money available there would have been no problem in distributing it to worthy projects. Grants, large or small, can make a difference. This was vividly demonstrated when our Fellow Martin Carver talked in January about ‘Sutton Hoo 1939–1999: sixty years of discovery and ideas.’ A re-excavation was first proposed by our then President Dick Dufty in his Anniversary Address in 1981 and from 1984 to 1995 Sutton Hoo was the object of a series of twelve Major Grants from the Society. The forthcoming publications promise to vindicate the Society’s judgement in backing so emphatically the re-excavation of this monument of European importance.

We also promote research by making Burlington House available to other societies, and I am glad that the Society for Nautical Research is now regularly using our rooms for its committee meetings: that discipline’s infrastructure has hit a few rocks, to coin a nautical metaphor, in recent years and we are glad thus to be able to recognize its importance. English Heritage has made considerable use of our hospitality, for the start of its Thames Estuary Project, for a seminar on European funding, and for the launch of its major publication on the palaeolithic era, of which our Fellow, John Wymer, was the principal animateur. What better place for such a palaeolithic event than Burlington House, where the memory of our Fellow John Frere is still revered and axes from Hoxne are on display in our Fellows’ Room? (Incidentally one of those axes, last autumn, travelled to America in the custody of our Librarian, supported by his predecessor, our Fellow and medallist, John Hopkins, to be shown at that convivial annual gathering, the meeting of our American Fellows at Boston.) More recently the Royal Archaeological Institute and the Heritage Lottery Fund held a seminar at Burlington House. These events are but a hint of the constant va et vient of different users, which is as it should be.

Burlington House is also a building of distinction, which the Society must do its best to conserve. Little has changed in our own Rooms in the last year, although some Fellows may have noticed that the Inner Library has been repainted, the ceiling in off-white and the walls in green, both colours chosen by your President: it is not a full archaeological reconstruction, but the room was green formerly, and the new scheme seems to be agreed an improvement on the dirty white which preceded it. Opposite our rooms are those of our neighbours, the Royal Society of Chemistry, who have recently consulted us on redecoration: we were glad to be able to point them towards our Fellow Ian Bristow as a source of advice. That our slightly more distant neighbours the Geological Society are also showing an interest in the possibility of redecoration on historic principles is no doubt a reflection of an increasingly widespread awareness that, particularly in such an important and sensitive complex, the historic dimension needs to be taken into account.

The most conspicuous, indeed unmissable, event at Burlington House is the continuing work on our courtyard. I say ‘our’ because we share it with four other learned societies and with the Royal Academy. But, legally speaking, our courtyard’s landlord is the Crown, represented by the Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR), which is planning, I am delighted to report, to clean all the façades. At the Anniversary last year I described a useful meeting with the then President of the Royal Academy, Sir Philip Dowson, to discuss the Academy’s scheme for the improvement of our courtyard, and a process of mending fences after the rumpus over its erection of pavilions for the Monet exhibition, without planning permission. We welcomed the prospect of a radical reduction in parking in our courtyard and of a continuation of the occasional displays of sculpture which have taken place over the last six years, most memorable for us when a cast of the sculptor, Antony Gormley, was dangling outside our Council Room. And we were delighted when we heard in November that the Royal Academy had secured a munificent gift from the former American Ambassador, Walter Annenberg, to enable a Burlington House courtyard scheme to go ahead. With hindsight it is regrettable that the protocol and strategy for the courtyard which English Heritage and the Society had argued for after the Monet episode were not by then in place. However, the newly elected President of the Royal Academy, Phillip King, responded to our concerns and early this year there were major modifications to the proposed layout and materials, to our satisfaction. Then, at the eleventh hour – it was first adumbrated on 3 February 2000 and a plan first tabled on 20 March – there emerged a scheme for fountains or water jets, and lighting. We had misgivings about the details of the particular scheme, but our more fundamental concern was that individual proposals were emerging sequentially, in a spirit of solvitur ambulando, and that this made a considered, holistic approach impossible. We were on the horns of a dilemma. We, the Society of Antiquaries, occupy part of a major Victorian public monument in the centre of the capital, and must promote its conservation as a whole with the long perspective in view. The Royal Academy was understandably enthusiastic about its fountain scheme, which was particularly calculated to fit in with its recent use of our courtyard for periodic exhibitions of sculpture, the programme was rolling on, and matters of money and time could not be ignored. Other elements of the plan, the Academy felt, could be dealt with seriatim.

It emerged in discussion that the fountains would not, as it turns out, be capable of being completed and operational until next year. The decisions lay with our landlord, the DETR, which has, incidentally, been very sensitive to our concerns and is well aware of the wealth of expertise in conservation planning, not to speak of architectural and urban history, contained within our Fellowship. We proposed a ‘British compromise’: the Royal Academy should be allowed, without prejudice, to carry out the enabling works, but the DETR should immediately commission a Conservation Plan, to whose cost we have offered a significant contribution, which would look at our courtyard and proposals for it holistically, with a structured consultation, and that its production, by the end of the year, should not only resolve the present issues, but leave all parties with a strategy and a mechanism for tackling future issues. This is not a perfect solution. A Conservation Plan should predate works. But we cannot turn the clock back, and this approach offers a positive way forward. It would be idle to pretend that this episode has not involved some occasional tension round our courtyard, and a certain amount of pressure on your General Secretary and your President, to whom Council had delegated the day-to-day responses to what has been a fast-moving situation. But I would like to assure the Fellowship that our relations with the Royal Academy have continued to be friendly, exemplified by the fact that we have made our rooms available to it on occasion, and that, when our Kelmscott volunteers had a Burlington House day out, the Academy kindly allowed them free access to the Van Dyck and Soane exhibitions.

I have already mentioned one addition to the Society’s collections, the portrait of Martin Folkes by Jonathan Richardson, which hangs behind the President’s Chair. In 1999 we also acquired another portrait, that of our Fellow Arthur Lock Radford, father of our Fellow and recent benefactor Ralegh Radford. Now hanging in the Fellows’ Room, it was painted by the Royal Academician John Seymour Lucas, who was also a Fellow. Our painting by Simone dei Crocefissi last year emerged from a long programme of cleaning by the Courtauld Institute not as a simple Crucifixion but as a Dream of the Virgin. A paper on this treasure of the Society formed part of the Miscellany preceding last year’s Summer Soirée, and inside knowledge allows me to reveal that it will be the subject of an article in this August’s Burlington Magazine. Access to our collections may take the form of publication, but exhibition is, as Fellows can judge from the display in our hall on our benefactor Peter Prattinton, another option, allowing us to enjoy such oddities as a notice of the exhibition of ‘The Great Boa Constrictor’ in 1816 or a pin or needle holder bought at Hagley Bazaar in 1838. We also lend to exhibitions elsewhere. The Becket chasse, discovered in Naples and presented to us by our Fellow, Sir William Hamilton, in 1801, went to the Musée municipal de l’Évêché in Limoges and we lent three volumes of broadsides to the British Museum. Late last year we mounted an unusual and innovatory exhibition in our hall of paintings by our Fellow Philip Barker: one was later presented to the Society by our Fellow Peter Fowler.

Although our Fellow John Goodall produced a clutch of Roman Republican coinage recently found in the Society’s possession as a Ballot Exhibit, the supply of such serendipitous discoveries seems to be gradually drying up: all, including the collection of brass-rubbing tools used by our Fellow Mill Stephenson (after whom the Inner Library, where he worked, used to be known as ‘Mill’s Parlour’), all have been religiously given accession numbers as the painstaking work of ordering our museum collections continues.

The Society’s greatest single curatorial responsibility is, of course, Kelmscott Manor, the Oxfordshire home of our Fellow William Morris. In 1990 your Council allocated the running of the house and estate to the Kelmscott Management Committee, whose first chairman was our former Secretary and present Vice-President, our Fellow and medallist, John Cherry. Now, in 2000, John has handed over the Kelmscott reins to our Fellow, Tom Hassall, and it is timely to consider the results of a decade of activity under John’s aegis: over 10,000 visitors a year; an income over £175,000; a long-term programme for the repair and maintenance of the buildings and the conservation of the contents; a restored and revived garden, with Fáfnir, William Morris’s topiary dragon, gradually taking shape; and a small but highly professional staff in place, supported by a faithful band of volunteers, to whom the Society expresses its gratitude. The latest large project is the conversion of the unlisted brick barn to create a new shop: as a result, the brewhouse, which has hitherto housed the shop, and the hall, where book sales have taken place, will be cleared of commerce. The brick barn conversion, as a commercial enterprise, is being paid for from Kelmscott’s own resources. The next challenge, the repair of the roof of the South Road barn, is one of conservation, not commerce, and Council is minded to subvent this from the Ralegh Radford bequest, in accordance with his wishes. Kelmscott has always been a liability, but, whereas once it was a cause for furrowed brows and not infrequent questionings as to the wisdom and fitness of the Society’s involvement, it is now a source of pride, thanks in large measure to John’s leadership. The Society is in this, as in other matters, much in his debt. In two weeks Tom Hassall, John’s successor, is due to speak in these Rooms on ‘The Society’s Kelmscott Landscape Project’, so I shall not attempt to steal his thunder, but I hope that it is clear that the motto at Kelmscott remains ‘Excelsior’. And I urge any Fellows who have not visited to do so – free, although we hope that you will spend freely in the new shop.

William Morris’s name also lives in the William and Jane Morris Fund. Bequeathed by his daughter, the Fund, which has been active since 1939, makes grants for church conservation in line with the principles of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, founded by Morris in 1877. Generously supported by our Fellow, Lesley Lewis, the Morris Committee continues to recommend grants for churches from the Fund. There is no lack of deserving cases, but the Committee is sometimes taken aback by evidence of a lack of understanding of conservation issues in ecclesiastical circles, which may be attributed to a paucity of education and advice.

The Society of Antiquaries does not make a practice of intervening in the public area. We have always preferred not to waste our ammunition or devalue our coinage, and to exercise influence discreetly. But the Society keeps a wary eye on public matters, and continues carefully to watch developments at Stonehenge. There was a brief flurry of concern when the press reported that the Government was planning to send Cotton manuscript Nero D.iv, better known as the Lindisfarne Gospels, permanently back to the north east. Enquiries at the British Library revealed that this was a canard, but antiquaries are in an understandably nervous mood, given the last Government’s opportunistic dismantling of a unique medieval chair-reliquary after 700 years. The ratification of the Unesco convention on the illicit trade in cultural property has long been a desideratum for the Society, so it was opportune for our General Secretary to appear as a witness at the House of Commons Select Committee considering this issue. Although he made the point that, with the proven popular interest in archaeology, popular understanding of and support for such a measure was likely to be much increased, the Government seems as inexplicably obdurate as its predecessor. Your Society is also responding to the enquiry being conducted by English Heritage on behalf of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, into the historic environment. That a Fellow of the Society, Neil Cossons, is the new Chairman of English Heritage is, we hope, a good omen, although I should make it clear that his predecessor, Sir Jocelyn Stevens, was a doughty friend. A final public matter is the coming centenary of our Royal Fellow, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, who became a Royal Fellow on 9 January 1958. We are planning to present to Her Majesty our Fellow Harry Gordon Slade’s forthcoming study of Glamis Castle, and the Fellowship should not be surprised if their Society is also otherwise involved in the celebrations.

As is its duty our Finance Committee keeps the financial health of the Society under constant scrutiny. A regular deficit is not a symptom of health, and given that this has looked set to continue, prudence dictated a response. Some drastic, rapid cuts might be one solution, but would run the danger of wreaking destruction, without furthering the Society’s objectives. The alternative seemed to be some less brutal savings, and a careful look at the Society’s purposes, resources and potential, so that any necessary changes could be planned to bring the greatest benefits, and cause the least harm, if any. It is perhaps predictable that the latter option was supported by your Officers, by the Finance and Executive Committee, and by your Council, which accordingly set up a Review Committee at the end of last year, composed of three Vice-Presidents and volunteers from Council and other Committees. Its report is expected shortly, and at this stage I have four observations only. First, and here I run the risk of sounding complacent, there is no instant crisis: we can go on as we are, for a while, without the immediate prospect of headlong perdition. This situation provides the opportunity to take time for a cool careful look at where your Society stands and where it should be going, without undue pressure. Second, the Review is not constrained: the unthinkable can be thought; taboos, be they ancient or modern, can be broken, and there is no preconceived programme, whether for continuity or for change, no hidden agenda. Thirdly, the Review is independent of officers, Committees and Council. Your President, for example, does not yet know its contents, and has not participated in, or tried to influence, its process. I suspect that there may be matters in it with which I and other Officers, or your Council, may disagree. Which brings me to my fourth and final point. When it emerges, the Review will not present a fait accompli. It will be a document for discussion to which your Council will solicit responses from the Fellowship. It is hoped that it will stimulate reaction and debate, so that whatever conclusions the Council may finally draw are informed by the collective wisdom of the Society. So do not feel inhibited.

Such a Review is no small undertaking: the Society is grateful to our three Vice-Presidents and the many others involved, for all the work they have put into it, as it is, once again, to all the Fellows and others who serve on our Committees, and otherwise assist and advise us. They are supported by a very small staff, led by our General Secretary. I have mentioned some of them by name or office, but all – part-timers and full-timers – are crucial to our operation, and are consistently versatile and dedicated beyond the call of duty. And it is pleasing to be able to report a staff ‘first’. Our Porter, Richard Meager, is working on a paper on the silver punch-bowl presented to the Cocked Hats Club by our Fellow Horace Sandars in 1917, for publication in The Antiquaries Journal. As for the millennium bug, we took all the appropriate precautions. None the less, when the time came, it was our General Secretary who volunteered to spend the fateful night at Burlington House. My image of the event was derived from Edward Poynter’s painting in Manchester of the Roman sentry sticking at his post as the ashes fell on Pompeii, entitled Faithful unto Death. I have been told that, while this image is in essence accurate, the actual events bore a slight tinge of Alma-Tadema’s Roses of Heliogabalus. Be that as it may, Burlington House survived unscathed.

Over the past four years your President has adopted the practice of making some general remarks before the end of his Anniversary Address. In 2000 he has allowed himself all too little time for such musings. However, you may be diverted by part of a letter I came across the other day. It was written in 1859 by our Fellow Edward Augustus Freeman, the great historian of the Norman Conquest, to his daughter, Margaret, who was later to marry our future President, Arthur Evans, himself the son of one President, Sir John Evans, and the brother of another, Dame Joan Evans, the Society’s historian. When the letter was written Margaret Freeman was aged ten. The first part os written in French and the latter part in English, concluding with affectionate greetings to ‘the kitten, Madlle. Thora [a Newfoundland dog], and Monsieur Panshère [a small stray dog adopted by the family and called Pincher]’.

Why, at a time when legal Latin, ‘mens rea’, ‘corpus delicti’, ‘habeas corpus’ and so on, has been banned from our courts, do I quote Freeman for your delectation? At the outset I warned you that this address would be partly retrospective, and your President must own up to some nostalgia for a period when a distinguished historian not only took for granted fluency in, at least, Greek, Latin, French and German, but also expected to pass this on to his small daughter. I suppose also that I hoped that Freeman’s effusion might put my own tendencies to euphuism, gongorism and macaronic affectation in the shade. In this room and among our Fellowship are many whose grasp of languages equals or exceeds that of Freeman. There are others, no doubt, who would regard Freeman’s accomplishments as reflecting a defunct and irrelevant canon, but none the less themselves command an equivalently wide and international range of scholarship. My simple point is that our Society inherits a rich hinterland of history and knowledge, which is and should be continually celebrated, refined, renewed and increased. Indeed this very Meeting Room is, to use an overworked phrase, a living ‘theatre of memory’. The breadth of our Fellowship and its interests is such that we rarely can, or should attempt, homogenization or synthesis, but those who speak at the lectern here, or elsewhere, or publish their findings in the Society’s publications, or elsewhere, are effective exemplars, to adapt Dalloway’s Senecan epigraph. Each specialism may possess its own hierarchies, each specialist, as your President regularly witnesses from this Chair, may be, indeed almost invariably is, an enthusiast for his own discipline. But your Society can and does bring together independent scholars, without requiring them to sign up to a servile relativism. Hence the Society’s independence and authority.

Talking about ‘the change agenda’ is a recent fad. It is salutary to go back to 1955 when Sir James Mann, our then President, was introducing Dame Joan Evans’s History of your Society, at a time when, as he saw it, ‘changes are occurring at a faster rate, and of a more wholesale nature, than ever before’. He pronounced, in a statement distantly redolent of Sir Thomas Browne, that: ‘Were it not for continual change, there would be no need for antiquaries’. Plus ça change? Let us stick with the long perspective, cherish our independence and assert our authority. They may be needed in the coming millennium.

For what seems like a considerable part of this millennium, in fact over fifteen years, Mrs Eileen Cunningham prepared our tea and presided over the Thursday tea-urn before our Meetings. Our General Secretary informs me, although I find it hard to credit, that certain Fellows are in the habit of coming for the tea and leaving before the Meeting. That Fellows, who are by Charter ‘eminent ... for Piety Virtue Integrity and Loyalty’, have been tempted to such a course is a tribute to the quality of Mrs Cunningham’s teas. When Council heard, with great regret, that she could no longer work for the Society it was agreed that the Fellowship should be given an opportunity to contribute to a presentation: appropriately, a collecting box at the Thursday teas was a vehicle for donations. The presentation comes in two parts, a lamp, which suitably echoes the Society’s emblem, and an envelope containing a cheque. I am glad to say that Eileen Cunningham is present today, and I call upon her to accept these presents, which come with the Fellowship’s great affection and gratitude.

Now I turn to medals. The first to be announced is the Frend Medal, named after its donor, our Fellow William Frend. It is awarded for contributions to knowledge of the archaeological and material remains of the early Christian Church. The Frend Medal for 2000 goes to Professor Günter P Gehring, whose life has been devoted to the study of the early Church and urban archaeology. His three-volume account of his excavation of the church, originally a Carolingian basilica, and settlement at Unterregenbach, published in 1972, and his two volumes, with Barbara Scholkmann, on the church of St Dionysius at Esslingen on the Neckar, published in 1995, are landmarks of European church archaeology. He has also made a speciality the study of early wooden churches and has developed many insights into the relationships between liturgy and church plans. I am sure that Professor Gehring will be a worthy recipient of the Frend Medal, which our General Secretary will arrange to be transmitted to him.

The greatest honour that the Society can bestow is its Gold Medal, awarded ‘for distinguished services to archaeology’. In 2000 we honour an archaeologist who has been a Fellow of your Society since 1956, and, since our Anniversary Meeting on 23 April 1996, an Honorary Vice-President. Professor Gordon Randolph Willey, Bowditch Professor Emeritus of Mexican and Central American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, is probably the most influential American archaeologist of the last hundred years. In the 1930s he worked in the eastern United States and his Archaeology of the Florida Gulf Coast, published in 1949, was so influential that it was republished in 1999. In the early 1940s he moved into Peruvian archaeology, a move that resulted in his pioneering monograph, Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Virú Valley, Peru, published in 1953. Elected to the Bowditch Chair in that year, his attention then moved to the Mayan lowlands where he has conducted a series of major excavations, all published. His Method and Theory in American Archaeology of 1958 codified for the first time an explicit theoretical basis for New World prehistory, and his magisterial A History of American Archaeology, written with our Fellow, Jeremy A Sabloff, is now in its third edition. Gordon Willey has been publishing prolifically for over sixty years, not only as an archaeologist - he is also a novelist and a playwright - and has been generous in the encouragement of his younger colleagues. He has received many American honours, but has also maintained close links with this country, spending two years in the 1960s as a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge, where he was the recipient of an honorary doctorate in 1977. He has been a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy since 1966, and in 1979 he was awarded the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Gordon Willey, who regularly attends the annual dinners of our American Fellowship in Boston, had hoped to be here to receive our Gold Medal in person, but this was not to be. However there could be no more appropriate person than our Fellow and Local Secretary in North America, Norman Hammond, to receive the Society’s Gold Medal on behalf of our Fellow and Honorary Vice-President, Gordon Randolph Willey.