Volume 83, 2003

Papers:

Anniversary Address 2003 by Rosemary J Cramp, PSA
Stone Circles, Oval Settings and Henges in South-west Wales and Beyond by Timothy Darvill, FSA, and Geoffrey Wainwright, FSA
A Later Bronze Age Well Complex at Swalecliffe, Kent by Robert Masefield, Nicholas Branch et al, Peter Couldrey, Damian Goodburn et al, and Ian Tyers
The Economy of Dürrnberg-Bei-Hallein: an Iron Age salt-mining centre in the Austrian Alps by Thomas Stöllner, with contributions from Horst Aspöck, Nicole Boenke, Claus Dobiat, Hans-Jürgen Gawlick, Willy Groenman-van Waateringe, Walter Irlinger, Katharina von Kurzynski, Richard Lein, Wolfgang Lobisser, Klaus Löcker, Vincent Megaw, FSA, Ruth Megaw, FSA, Graham Morgan, FSA, Erich Pucher and Trivun SormazThe Archaeology of Beirut: A Report on Work in the Insula of the House of the Fountains by Dominic Perring, FSA, with contributions from Paul Reynolds and Reuben Thorpe
An Early to Middle Saxon Settlement at Quarrington, Lincolnshire by Gary Taylor, with Carol Allen, Justine Bayley, FSA, Jane Cowgill, Val Fryer, Carol Palmer, Barbara Precious, James Rackham, FSA, Tessa Roper and Jane Young
The Congresbury Carvings – an eleventh-century saint's shrine? by Catherine M Oakes and Michael Costen, FSA
Queen Elizabeth's Coaches: the wardrobe on wheels by Julian Munby, FSA
The Will and Probate Inventory of John Holmes (d 1629): instrumental music at Salisbury and Winchester cathedrals revisited by Ian Payne, FSA
Perspectival Restoration Drawings in Roman Archaeology and Architectural History by Frank Salmon, FSA
Shorter contributions
An English Romanesque Mount and Three Ninth-century Strap-ends by Richard Jewell, FSA
Did the Late Twelfth-century Nave of St Davids Cathedral have Stone Vaults? by Malcolm Thurlby, FSA
The Use of the Rebus on Medieval Seals and Monuments by John A Goodall, FSA
Lord Hussey's Windows – martyrdom through defenestration in Lincoln? by David Stocker, FSA
Three Tudor Silver Dress-hooks by Dora Thornton, FSA, and David Mitchell
A Seventeenth-century Portrait Miniature of Charles II as Prince of Wales? by Mark A Rickard

1. Anniversary Address 2001

Delivered 8 May 2003

By Rosemary Cramp, PSA

This year the Anniversary is not celebrated on St George's Day because of the difficulties of the date of Easter and other public holidays, but this is not as late as the Anniversary Address has sometimes been delivered – as one discovers by consulting the dates in the Proceedings of the Society. In those historic volumes, the changing fortunes of the Society, as well as the preoccupations of the Presidents, are vividly – often sonorously – recorded. It strikes me, though, that in reviewing the year past, it is often not prudent to envisage the year ahead in similarly explicit terms. In the year of 1914, just before the outbreak of the First World War, our President Sir Charles Hercules Read began his Anniversary Address with noteworthy complacency: ‘I am happy in meeting you again ... to record a prosperous year. Although it has not been marked by any outstanding events, we have pursued our even course usefully, I think, and may regard our present position with a fair amount of satisfaction' ( Proceedings , xxvi , 165). I would have liked to feel that the year since my last address had been one of such prosperity and calm: it has not – yet I can record ‘a fair amount of satisfaction' that despite financial strains – and even the involvement of our country in a war (to which I will refer again later) – many of the initiatives of last year have continued, and borne fruit, whilst others have just begun.

We no longer begin our Anniversary Addresses with the obituaries of distinguished Fellows. These are well cared for elsewhere by Mrs Eva Rhys, who has recently announced her retirement from the editing team, but who has agreed to continue for a time with the Obituaries. The Society has, however, suffered the loss of a considerable number of very distinguished members this year, whose names are recorded in the Annual Report, but after the date of the current report we lost two outstanding past Presidents: Arnold Taylor on 24 October 2002, and Michael Robbins on 21 December 2002. The Society will honour the achievements of Arnold Taylor in a seminar later this year, and Michael Robbins' life and work were fittingly remembered in a service organized by the Society and his family at St James's, Piccadilly, on 19 March 2003. Both of these past Presidents contributed significantly to the academic output of our Society and continued to take an interest in the Society and its activities until their deaths. They will be sadly missed by the Fellowship.

In the natural order of change, members of Council and Officers come to the end of their term, and are replaced. Now that the Charity Commission places greater emphasis on the role of Trustees, members of Council and Officers bear a serious responsibility, and we must all be grateful that they are able and willing to give up so much of their time to assist with our affairs. This year we lose Paul Williamson, our Senior Vice-President, and thank him for his help, in particular with advice on our collections. This year the term of office of Susan Youngs, our Secretary, also comes to an end, and she will be a considerable loss. Her experience as a curator in the British Museum equipped her admirably for the chairmanship of the Library and Museums Committee, and these areas have flourished under her care. She has given selfless support to her fellow Officers (especially the President) and has been an effective conduit for transmitting the opinions of the Fellowship to the Executive and Council. We shall very much miss her helpful presence and hope to continue to see her often at Society lectures and events. We welcome her successor, Taryn Nixon, Director of Archaeological Services at the Museum of London, who brings her own museological and administrative strengths to the office, and I am sure she will struggle as manfully as her predecessor with the General Secretary's hand-written minutes.

We come now to the General Secretary himself, who has announced his intention to retire at the end of February 2004, when he will have reached the statutory age at which this is possible. After the unremitting administrative toil of these last few years, in which he has dealt so ably with our statutory obligations, and undertaken the chairmanship of the Courtyard Secretaries in their struggle to maintain the rights of tenure in Burlington House, we can scarcely begrudge him the opportunity to take up his archaeological interests again. Nevertheless, it will be difficult to replace someone as many-faceted as David Morgan Evans. His ebullient presence has invigorated and enlivened the Society in so many ways, and his new initiatives have raised its profile in a highly successful manner. By retiring before the next Anniversary Address he may feel that he has escaped listening to the formal appreciation of his achievements during the twelve years in which he has served the Society, but he will not escape entirely. I have already announced through SALON that there will be an appropriate leaving event on 19 February 2004, when Fellows will be able to convey their appreciation of his work. We hope to make a new appointment by the end of July this year, but meanwhile he is in control until 1 March 2004. Whatever the decision on the tenure of the Burlington properties, I think it is right to record now how deeply we are indebted to the General Secretary, and also to our Librarian, Bernard Nurse, for their hard work in providing the evidence to support our case.

Bernard Nurse has also played a leading part in the preparation of detailed evidence for the fund-raising that we have initiated for the improvement of the Society's activities and the conservation and improved access to its holdings. A small group, consisting of the General Secretary, the Librarian, myself and our administrator, Jayne Phenton, has met regularly to work out a strategy and programme, and special thanks must be given to Jayne Phenton who has not only attended training sessions in fund-raising skills and taken on the co-ordination of our efforts, but has produced initiatives of her own, including the introduction of a Society tie and scarf.

Our efforts have been well rewarded this year, first by a generous grant from the Francis Coales Charitable Foundation of £32,500, spread over five years, towards the preservation of some of a group of our important brass rubbings and drawings. This fund has been very helpful to us in the past but this enhanced grant was to commemorate the memory of one of its Trustees, Elliott Viney, who was also a Fellow. This grant will enable us to employ a part-time Library Conservator from July of this year to undertake this very necessary work. The second award, from the Headley Trust, is a grant of £25,000 in each of two years to encourage research in British archaeology, and will be awarded through our Research Committee in the form of bursaries. You may remember last year that I mentioned how distressing it was that we could not disburse more money for research, and this is a welcome addition which could encourage young scholars and practitioners to bring their fieldwork to a state where it is ready for publication and in addition encourage contacts between the academic and public sectors of archaeology. We will be publishing the terms and conditions of these awards as soon as the details are agreed with the Headley Trustees.

Our Library holdings still remain the first priority for our fund-raising, and last year I noted the milestone which had been passed when our Cataloguer, Ortun Peyn, completed the catalogue of the post-1988 books, and I added then that the next stage was to complete the pre-1988 collection. This was planned in two stages, and thanks to the accurate assessment and thorough planning of Ortrun Peyn, together with the efficient service of the American Company, MARC Link, the first stage was completed below budget and before time. The on-line catalogue has more than doubled in size since last year, with 38,000 monographs and 625 periodical titles added by converting records from the author card catalogue, making over 70,000 bibliographical records now on-line and freely available. This achievement so impressed Council that it agreed to fund the next phase, which will add the remaining 27,000 records, during the coming year. The Society is able to pay for this thanks to the generous bequest of our late Fellow Dr Ralegh Radford.

The Society has the third largest collection of topographical drawings in this country and we would very much like to see their catalogue completed, with the most important being made available on-line. The first group of almost one thousand images has already been made accessible on the internet as part of the Church Plans Online project. This consists of the architectural drawings and building specifications of nearly 400 churches that applied to the incorporated Church Building Society in the first half of the nineteenth century. The selection was given to the Society of Antiquaries in 1889; the rest were more recently deposited in Lambeth Palace Library. Thanks to a grant from the Lottery's New Opportunities Fund and a generous gift-aid donation from one of the Society's Fellows, the two collections can now be accessed together as an aid to researchers.

One can see from this report how generously and usefully Fellows have supported the Society in the past and how they continue to do so. Thanks to the internet, more of them can keep up with news of the Society, and its important and varied programme of lectures, as well as benefiting more easily from its rich collections in pursuit of their research interests. The development of closer contacts between the various groupings of the Fellowship is one of the aims of my Presidency, and this has continued this last year. In May 2002 Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and our Fellows, many of whom are members of both Societies, met in the idyllic setting of Kelmscott Manor on a hot Bank Holiday weekend. The manor and gardens were looking splendid, and everyone enjoyed the conducted tour of the village, the account of the research activities of the Kelmscott Landscape Project (KELP), as well as the visits to some of the nearby Anglo-Saxon churches. The President of the Scottish Antiquaries marked the occasion by a generous gift of books to the Library. In March of this year the Society held one of its Thursday meetings in Cardiff, and we heard a very thought-provoking lecture by Paul Loveluck on ‘Museums and national identity in post-devolution Wales'. Here we were pleased to meet members of the Cambrian Archaeological Association, whose current President is our Treasurer, and enjoyed seeing new finds in the museum and admiring the magnificent collection of twentieth-century paintings in the galleries where we were entertained. I hope that we can continue these external meetings and also the contacts with other Societies; such contacts form a historic part of the activity of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

We turn now to public affairs. Last year I mentioned some of our interventions in public affairs, where indeed, if we accept that we exist for the public benefit, we cannot, in the words of a former President, ‘allow ourselves to be forgotten by those who are entitled to look to us for help and guidance'. I believe that this is our unique role as a body that is truly independent of government: to offer help and guidance (even education) in the fields with which our Fellowship is involved, to those who have the power to influence events. We are not constituted as a lobbying group, but our relationship with the All-Party Parliamentary Archaeology Group (APPAG), to whom we have given a link on our website and a place for meetings at Burlington House, is an important way in which we can inform parliamentarians of both Houses. We cannot, perhaps, devote as much of our attention to this parliamentary group as some of the other Learned Societies in the courtyard do to theirs, but I hope that we can continue and develop this inter-relationship. The first report of the Group was published in January 2003, and contains many important recommendations. It rightly observed that many of the difficulties faced by bodies concerned with the historic environment derive from the diversity of government departments that are involved, and the lack of common policies. In a private capacity, I have written to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), suggesting that it might act on the proposal that it should establish an interdepartmental committee, but I think that it will be a hard task to move entrenched interests. It will be just as hard to fulfil another APPAG suggestion that ‘there is need for a single non-governmental organization to lobby for archaeology'. Since the Council for British Archaeology, the Institute of Field Archaeologists and the Institute of Historic Building Conservation are more distinctive in their basic constituencies and roles than the Report recognizes, a federation in which the constituent organizations could lobby within clearly defined fields might be a more effective way forward. It is too early to see if the newly created Heritage Link, which also contains quasi-governmental bodies, can operate in this way. At least the issues of common purpose and common voice have been raised again.

The report also highlights the needs for common access to educational and research resources across Britain. I believe that most Fellows would support such recommendations as that Sites and Monuments Records should be made statutory, with a minimum standard of content and service, by means of additional funding from central government. Likewise, at a time when museums of all types are inadequately funded, and many in the regions are under threat of closure, it is timely to urge that there should be adequate public museum provision by local authorities in all regions ‘to meet the reasonable needs of those whose residence or place of work is within the area of the authority'. It is easy in times of financial stringency to feel that the historic environment must inevitably have a low priority in public spending, but if we believe that it forms an important element in the general welfare of our society then we must be prepared to say this strongly, and, I fear, over and over again.

I hardly need to remind Fellows of recent horrific events that demonstrated very clearly the low esteem in which the historic environment can be held. The sacking and looting of the National Museum in Baghdad and the burning of the National Library in an uncontrolled frenzy during the Iraq war was brought vividly into our homes almost as it was happening. I know that several of our Fellows had written to the Government before the events, warning of the dangers to historic sites, buildings and collections in Iraq, and we hope that the wider outcry since may have prevented further depredations. But there have been irreparable losses from sites of world importance.

I wrote on your behalf to the Prime Minister, and the relevant Secretaries of State, and received a full and helpful reply from the Minister in DCMS, Lady Blackstone, in which she also addressed my concerns about the possibilities of the illicit sales of looted items, particularly in our own country. Since then, thanks to the efforts of the Secretary of State for DCMS, the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Bill has been fast-tracked through the Commons. This bill is very important since its aim is to make it an offence to traffic in unlawfully removed cultural objects world-wide and therefore to remove the commercial incentive to those involved in theft and looting from historic sites. Since the offence will apply irrespective of the place where the cultural object was illicitly excavated or removed, it may also help in stemming the tide of thefts from historic properties in Britain. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings has recently demonstrated that these include not only museum objects, but church monuments and the very fabric of historic buildings, which can hardly be removed to safety. This last is a relatively new phenomenon and one can contrast this pillage with what happened as a general rule to unprotected historic buildings during and just after the last war.

In hindsight it is extremely sad that the important contents of the Baghdad museum were not removed for safety before the catastrophe, as the contents of the British Museum and others were in the last world war, or indeed as was our important library, but irreplaceable parts of a nation's history are lost in any war. I read again Sir Alfred Clapham's solemn roll call of the historic buildings lost in London after the Blitz and his sorrowful speculations as to what had probably been lost on the continent. In those pre-television days, when war correspondents were not beaming back news from the centre of the action, there was widespread ignorance as to what had been destroyed by either side in conflict. There is little excuse for ignorance now, and in a world where global issues are part of our everyday concerns, educating politicians, and the military, to value and respect the heritage of all nations must form part of the efforts of a Society like ours.

Let us finally return to more domestic concerns – the award of medals. The Frend Medal is awarded each year for outstanding contributions to knowledge in the fields of the archaeology, history and topography of the early Christian Church. Today we award it to Philip Rahtz, one of the most influential and colourful figures in the last fifty years or so of British archaeology. When I told William Frend that Philip was this year's nominee he said, as I am sure many others would have said, ‘Oh, but I thought that he had got it already' – since he has such a longstanding and important record in this field. Philip has bravely written his autobiography, Living Archaeology , which charts the development of his archaeological achievements from the 1940s to 2001 and so I will not rehearse again his early life and its transition from schoolmaster and photographer through peripatetic archaeologist to university lecturer and finally as the first professor of archaeology at York University in 1978. His career is curiously linked with that of one of today's Society medallists, John Hurst, in that John encouraged him in 1953 to become a full-time itinerant archaeologist. Much later, when Wharram Percy was drawing to a close, Professor Philip Rahtz and a team of students from York University undertook the excavation of a part of that site, under John Hurst's general direction.

Philip Rahtz brought to all of his excavations an open and questioning mind, a microscopic understanding of stratigraphy and soils, professional photographic skills and an elegant style of drawing that has survived distinctively throughout his career. He has an infectious enthusiasm for archaeology, which I found inspirational the first time that I met him, when he was excavating Cheddar, and which he has since communicated to generations of colleagues and students. This enthusiasm, which has persisted undimmed into what is now his maturity, is combined with a generous ability to give credit to other people for their achievements and to provide help and comment on a wide range of archaeological issues. He is also a good collaborator, as is demonstrated in his very substantial bibliography.

Not all of his work has been concerned with ecclesiastical archaeology, but although he has maintained a detached and somewhat quizzical attitude to the material culture of some modern religious practices, his research and excavation has been concerned with a range of important ecclesiastical sites. Cheddar was a formidably impressive forensic examination of a sequence of high-status timber buildings, and although it has been suggested since that it was a minster site, the detailed analysis of the evidence which led Rahtz to identify it as an Anglo-Saxon palace has yet to be overturned.

Within the context of the Frend Medal he has contributed to some of the most significant Christian sites in Britain. I can review them only briefly, beginning with those in his native Somerset. In the investigation and subsequent collaborative publication of the sub-Roman cemetery at Cannington, we have the fullest and most enduring evidence for a cemetery of this period in Britain. The excavations around the numinous site of Glastonbury at the Chalice Well, Glastonbury Tor, and Beckery Chapel were each models of the demystifying of sites obscured by legend, through the application of purely archaeological criteria. To each site Philip brought a freshness of approach and new interpretation. The site of Glastonbury Tor was one of the most physically challenging I have ever encountered. To arrive at the top was an achievement in itself, as I vividly remember, but to wrest a story from the thin soil covering of the slopes needed the highest possible excavation skills. Glastonbury and its environs remained an interest, and nearly thirty years after his first excavations there he produced Glastonbury , a synthetic publication of the history of research at that influential site.

Similarly, in the study of Whitby Abbey in Yorkshire, the reports of his early excavations of the periphery of the site have been followed by contributions to the interpretation of the site in succeeding decades. He has never allowed a site on which he collaborated to sink into an unpublished or half-published limbo. The groundbreaking collaboration with Harold Taylor and Lawrence Butler in the dissection of the history of St Mary's Church at Deerhurst (one of our major research projects) is a case in point. Here Philip Rahtz published the report of his excavations in 1976 and – after the death of Harold Taylor – he and Lorna Watts summarized the detailed work contained in the archive and completed the drawings and synthesis of the results of the investigations, thus completing as far as possible the comprehensive study of this church.

In his retirement he and his wife Lorna have carried through a more leisurely investigation of the little church dedicated to St Gregory at Kirkdale in Yorkshire and of its surroundings. Here their investigations have added to the structural history of the church, revealed a complex series of burials which could span a period from the late Roman to the tenth century, and produced a new Anglo-Saxon inscription. Only this year they have set this work in the wider context of settlement in north Yorkshire in Three Ages of Conversion at Kirkdale . This includes the vintage Rahtz section on ‘observations and speculations', of a kind that have been so challenging to us all for the last forty years. Philip, for all that you have done to illuminate Christian archaeology in the early Middle Ages in Britain, we would like you to accept this medal.

The Society's Medals are awarded by Council to those who have provided outstanding service to the Society or the aims of the Society, and today we are awarding two such medals.

John Hurst was elected a Fellow in 1958, served on our Council and as Vice-President, and has been a regular attendee at the Thursday meetings, as well as a constant library user, until the recent tragic incident when he suffered a vicious, senseless and unprovoked attack in his own village. The resulting injuries were severe and he died on Tuesday 29 April. John had been pleased at the award of the medal, and had discussed it, only recently, with his family. Naturally we wondered what to do today, but although we will mourn for a long time a great scholar and a dear friend, it seemed right for us, in consultation with the family, to award this medal on the day on which he had been expecting it.

John decided, as a child, that his chosen career would be as an archaeologist, and he never deviated from this aim. In 1952 he was appointed as an assistant in the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments working with Gerald Dunning; in 1954, he was appointed Assistant Inspector, rising up until, in his final years of service, he reached the position of Assistant Chief Inspector, after the Ministry had been translated into English Heritage. He was the last to be called by that title. He belonged to that generation of inspectors who learnt on the job from those more senior, and in that way acquired a deep knowledge of the national monuments in their care. This was an era also when there was the opportunity for inspectors to specialize, and to publish their academic research, and this John did in about 230 publications.

John Hurst entered the very new field of medieval archaeology by excavating as a student at Cambridge and then by postgraduate research on medieval pottery. Over the next fifty years his work, together with that of his collaborators – most notably Maurice Beresford – advanced the knowledge and study of medieval archaeology so substantially that he is almost synonymous with the subject. His pioneering research on pottery involved generously assisting almost all the archaeologists of my generation, myself included, in the identification of their excavated medieval pottery, and his last contribution was published earlier this year. He was well known on the continent and it was only fitting that he should have been the first President of the Medieval Pottery Research Group.

He was a natural teacher, as those who attended his evening classes at Goldsmiths College have testified, but perhaps his most significant teaching achievement was to those involved in the excavation of the deserted medieval village at Wharram Percy. This, according to Jean le Patourel, one of its veteran volunteers, was the longest continuous excavation in this country. He and Maurice Beresford assembled there, year by year, a remarkable multi-disciplinary teams of helpers – amateurs and professionals – whose legendary loyalty was annually reinforced at their reunions. This site, as its publications testify, reflected in a remarkable way the changing priorities of medieval archaeology over the last half century: lordship sites, peasant communities, church archaeology, environmental influence on settlement, boundary archaeology, culture change. In all of these fields the contribution of the Wharram Percy excavations transformed our thinking.

John Hurst lived to see his achievements recognized in a festschrift and books dedicated in his honour, but he was a very modest and understated person and when, this year, I briefly spoke to him about the medal, he was at pains to point out that he regarded it very much as a recognition of the growth of medieval archaeology and of teamwork over the last fifty years. There was leadership, nevertheless, and if there had been a ‘This is Your Life' programme for him, I think practically every medieval archaeologist in the country, and many in Europe, would have thronged forward to say that they had worked with him and were indebted to his inspiration. Today we posthumously present him with our Medal.

Our last medal today is presented to one of the best-known figures in the Society – Beatrice de Cardi. She was elected a Fellow in 1950 and between 1976 and 1980 was successively Vice-President and Director. Whenever she has time in her busy life she comes to the Thursday teas and lectures, and in this way we keep some track on her journeys for research and survey in the Middle East. Beatrice was born in London, the younger daughter of Edwin, Count de Cardi, a member of an old and distinguished Corsican family, and it was he who seems first to have roused her interest in archaeology. The first really formative influence, however, which began during her time as a student at University College London, was Mortimer Wheeler. She dug with him at Maiden Castle and became his secretary at the London Museum in 1936. She seems to have found this a challenging, but not a daunting, task.

In 1944 she was lent to the Civil Service – first to the Foreign Office, where she was posted to China, and from there, in her spare time, she travelled extensively in China and India. She was then transferred to the Board of Trade as Assistant UK Trade Commissioner in New Delhi. After the partition of India she opted to work in Pakistan, serving in Karachi and Lahore. Her first archaeological survey was in Baluchistan and this established the archaeological pattern of her life in survey and pottery studies. Wheeler was initially not keen on her adventurous survey trips, which by 1948 had extended to Afghanistan, but she tells of a fascinating incident when she had returned from an expedition with the evidence for a new pottery distribution. He was lying in bed sweating with fever, but in her eagerness to demonstrate her findings she decanted the sherds on to his bed for him to see. I asked her what he said at this point: ‘Publish it' was the terse reply.

Then, between 1949 and 1973, she began a dual life in Britain and the East. In Britain she became Assistant Secretary and then Secretary of the Council for British Archaeology (CBA), building for it an administrative and financial structure on a solid foundation. Her achievements in developing the importance and influence of the CBA are recognized by the annual De Cardi Lecture, instituted in her honour. In her periods of leave, however, she continued to work in Pakistan and Baluchistan until it became too dangerous – even for her. She then moved nearer to her long-term area of research, in directing excavations at the important site of Bampur, and here she provided evidence from the ceramic sequence for a link across the Lower Gulf in the third millennium bc . By 1968 she had begun research in Ras al-Khaimah, the state which has seen her most enduring archaeological commitment ever since. She has surveyed in Qatar and Oman, but at Ras al-Khaimah she has been asked to devise programmes of research, to select archaeological material for its national museum, and to direct surveys from the 1960s into the 1990s. Her special status in that country has been recognized by the ruler in the award of the Al-Qasimi medal for services to the Emirate. She received her OBE for services to British archaeology as long ago as 1974, but over this last decade honours have been showered on her: awarded the Burton Memorial Medal for services to oriental research in 1992, elected President of the Society for Arabian Studies in 1994, to a Fellowship and then visiting Professorship at the University of London, 1996, and in 2002 to a Senior Fellowship at the British Academy.

At the beginning of this year she was once more working in the museum at Ras al-Khaimah, when it was visited by the ruler, and a journalist in his entourage asked her age. Although Beatrice considered this an ill-mannered question, she did reply accurately, and at that point the ruler patted her head – only a ruler would dare to do that – and as for her age that is surely an irrelevancy for a working archaeologist.

Beatrice de Cardi: will you now accept the Society's Medal to add to your store, presented to honour your achievements and in thanks for your constant support to the Society of Antiquaries of London.

2. Stone Circles, Oval Settings and Henges in South-west Wales and Beyond

Topographical and geophysical surveys carried out in August 2002 at three monuments in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire are reported: Bedd Arthur, Gors Fawr and Meini Gwyr. Previously unrecorded features were revealed at all three sites, most spectacularly at Meini Gwyr which, from the evidence of geophysical survey, appears to be a multi-phase monument that includes a double pit-circle, hengi-form monument and embanked enclosure with an internal stone circle. Comparisons are made with plans prepared by Flinders Petrie in 1926, published here for the first time. A viewshed analysis of the surveyed sites and others of similar kind in the area allows an appreciation of landscape setting and intervisibility. It is suggested that the stone circles are sited in relation to upland stone sources. All the monuments considered here are compared with contemporary structures recorded elsewhere in the British Isles. It is concluded that while the stone circles and oval setting fit comfortably within a distribution pattern that extends across most of the British Isles, the later phases of Meini Gwyr at least belong to a more localized tradition of monument building focused on the Irish Sea region.

3. A Later Bronze Age Well Complex at Swalecliffe, Kent

This paper examines the significance of seventeen later Bronze Age wells found during construction at Swalecliffe, in north-east Kent. The unusual depth of the features made for exceptional preservation of wooden structural elements, including steps and revetments, demonstrating rare evidence for woodworking and woodmanship. Extensive biological remains facilitated environmental reconstruction, and a lengthy dendrochronological sequence corroborates the internationally important Flag Fen chronology. Dendrochronological and radiocarbon dates demonstrate around 500 years of seemingly continuous use and replacement of wells. Votive deposits and apparatus used for water collection provide glimpses of small-scale ritual and domestic activities. The highly unusual concentration of wells is compared to contemporary sites regionally and elsewhere.

4. The Economy of Dürrnberg-Bei-Hallein: an Iron Age salt-mining centre in the Austrian Alps

For the first time in English, we present a summary of the international programme of excavation work carried out between 1990 and 2001 in and around the Iron Age salt-mining complex of the Dürrnberg region, south of Salzburg. First we describe the results of excavation in the prehistoric adits, and of work to locate and survey associated settlements. This is followed by a series of specialist reports embracing floral and faunal remains, palaeodiet and parasitology, leather and woodworking and other crafts. The evidence suggests that a complex inter-relationship existed between the Dürrnberg and other communities in the Alpine foreland. It is assumed that the Dürrnberg was under the control of an elite – perhaps a local dynasty whose wealth is reflected in the graves.

5. The Archaeology of Beirut: A report on work in the Insula of the House of the Fountains

This insula, which lay on the western margin of the earlier Iron Age city, was uncovered during post-war reconstruction work carried out in Beirut during 1994–6. Laid out in the Hellenistic period, the insula was filled out with a series of small courtyard houses after the Roman annexation. A public portico was added along a main street in the second quarter of the second century, before a period of relative inactivity. The district was revived and rebuilt in the middle of the fourth century and was home to a series of handsome town houses in the fifth century, before being devastated by earthquake in AD 551. The site was then left derelict until the early nineteenth century. This interim report sets these findings within their broader historical and archaeological context, as well as summarizing the results of recent work on the site's ceramics and stratigraphy.

6. An Early to Middle Saxon Settlement at Quarrington, Lincolnshire

Excavations undertaken at Quarrington, near Sleaford, Lincolnshire, revealed part of an Early and Middle Saxon settlement with associated fields or enclosures. Several timber buildings were identified, both round and rectangular, and there was evidence of ferrous and non-ferrous metalworking at the site. Finds included a large and regionally significant pottery assemblage, showing that Quarrington had an extensive trading network and obtained pottery from Lincolnshire and Leicestershire in the Early Saxon period. Pottery from the Northamptonshire area dominated the assemblage in the Middle Saxon period, with a smaller component from Lincolnshire and a limited quantity from Ipswich. Spatial variations in the Saxon ceramic assemblage suggest that the focus of settlement shifted towards the west or north west in the Middle Saxon period.

Few rural sites of Early and Middle Saxon date have produced sufficient faunal material to permit an analysis of changes during the fifth to eighth centuries until now; the large bone assemblage from Quarrington indicates changes in diet and the husbandry of domestic animals through time, with sheep becoming more important as pig diminished. Alterations to the slaughter profiles of cattle and sheep were also evident and may indicate changes from subsistence to surplus production. An apparently isolated Neolithic cremation and a post-medieval stone building were also revealed.

7. The Congresbury Carvings – an eleventh-century saint's shrine?

The discovery of a small group of sculpted fragments at Congresbury in Somerset seven years ago set in motion a period of research, reflection and analysis that has given rise to this paper. It opens with an account of the circumstances of their discovery and a description of their appearance. Then follows a proposed date and provenance. It is suggested that the quality of the sculptures and the evident scale of the monument to which they once belonged indicate a structure and a site of high status, possibly the shrine of the Welsh missionary saint Cyngar, whose cult enjoyed some popularity in the high and late Middle Ages. A review of the history of the site and evidence from its place-name and from archaeological investigations corroborate this thesis.

The style of the sculptures when compared with dated manuscript illuminations and with sculptural fragments surviving from Anglo-Saxon Wessex is in line with a late tenth- to mid-eleventh-century dating. The historical circumstances of Congresbury at this time further suggest that this date may be narrowed down to the period between 1033 and 1060. The original structure of the shrine to which the fragments may have belonged is considered in the light of contemporary documentary evidence and research carried out on the remains of comparable shrine structures.

8. Queen Elizabeth's Coaches: the wardrobe on wheels

The origins of the coach in England have never been clearly documented, but the very complete records of the royal wardrobe in the reign of Queen Elizabeth reveal her part in their introduction, and the extent of her lavish expenditure on the creation and repair of coaches from 1564 until her death. Detailed descriptions of eleven new coaches, and the repairs to a number of gifts from her courtiers, record the astonishing richness and quality of these machines. This suggests that the furnishings, decoration and trappings of both horse and carriage were both an extension of the queen's costume, and also a significant part of the public persona of the monarch.

9. The Will and Probate Inventory of John Holmes (d 1629)

The recent discovery of probate material relating to John Holmes (d 1629), a provincial Jacobean cathedral organist and composer, provides three valuable references to the use of musical instruments at Salisbury Cathedral before the Civil War. These prove that the Choristers' House, where Holmes lived, contained in 1629 a consort of viols, with other (unspecified) instruments, four virginals and an organ. This evidence, though fragmentary and circumstantial, may be read in the context of what is known about the practice of instrumental music in other English cathedrals. The references can then be used to support three generally accepted theses, first, that viols were used for teaching purposes (and possibly also in a flourishing adult musical circle centred on Salisbury Cathedral, for which there is strong circumstantial evidence), rather than in liturgical contexts; second, that sackbutts and cornetts most probably doubled the voices in the choir; and third, that the organ remained the principal instrument of choral accompaniment even in the first decade of the Restoration period. Holmes had previously served as organist and master of the choristers at Winchester Cathedral, where there is also circumstantial evidence of viol-teaching activity since 1618, where wind instruments were employed (probably liturgically) in the sixteenth century, and where Holmes may have composed at least one piece of instrumental consort music, most probably for teaching purposes.

10. Perspectival Restoration Drawings in Roman Archaeology and Architectural History

This paper is concerned with the graphic means deployed since the Renaissance to restore the appearance of ancient Roman architecture, and specifically with the use of various forms of perspective. Disdained by architectural theorists from Leon Battista Alberti onwards because of its supposed subjectivity, the perspective nonetheless became a valuable tool in the second half of the eighteenth century for studying Roman architecture and urban form in pristine condition. It remained so until, with the consolidation of a more scientific approach to the discipline of archaeology in the last third of the twentieth century, it was reduced to schematic form and supplemented by isometric and axonometric projectional restorations, notably in English-language histories. The discipline of architectural history has not, however, been well served by this development, and an argument is made here for the retention of perspectival restoration and for the furtherance of the recent development of restorations modelled with the aid of computers.

11. An English Romanesque Mount and Three Ninth-century Strap-ends

This note discusses several recent English finds of early medieval ornamental metalwork shown at the Society of Antiquaries on 16 May 2002: most notably, a Romanesque mount with open-work foliate decoration having clear parallels with Norman and Anglo-Norman ornament of c 1100–25. Four ninth-century Anglo-Saxon strap-ends are also described and illustrated, two of which have decorative features with links to contemporary larger-scale works but rarer within the corpus of surviving strap-ends; the other two being unusual examples of East Anglian niello and silver-wire inlay.

12. Did the Late Twelfth-century Nave of St Davids Cathedral have Stone Vaults?

It has been suggested that the nave of St Davids Cathedral was planned for aisle and high vaults but that the vaults were not built. Evidence is here presented that the vaults were indeed constructed. The high vault would have been of tufa, according to a well-established tradition in the West Country. The narrow springers of the aisle vaults are allied to near-contemporary vaults at Dore Abbey and Llanthony Priory.

13. The Use of the Rebus on Medieval Seals and Monuments

The rebus played a distinctive role in medieval seal design as well as on monuments, in architectural ornament, and on the glazing quarries or other subsidiary details of windows. Seals are the largest group and they provide a valuable source of dated material, because they can usually be identified with the user. In this they can be joined to a lesser extent by examples found on monumental brasses or, more rarely, on tombs. Accordingly the present study has been based on a survey of published English medieval seals, with comparanda from the examples found on monumental brasses and tombs.

14. Lord Hussey's Windows – martyrdom through defenestration in Lincoln?

This paper is a study of a fragment of folklore that became assimilated into serious academic discussion; it investigates the story that John Lord Hussey, who was executed in Lincoln following the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536, was dragged to his execution through a window. If it were true, this would be an early example of the iconography of ‘defenestration' which, by the seventeenth century, connoted the martyrdom of adherents of the Old Religion by Protestant extremists. On examination, however, the persistent story of Lord Hussey's defenestration would seem to be a post hoc fabrication. It is argued here that the story may have been invented in the early eighteenth century, at a period when there was, once again, strife between High and Low Church, and when accounts of previous religious controversies were being recruited by antiquarians as weapons in their contemporary disputes. It is further suggested that the power of the image was still strong in the nineteenth century and it might have played a role in the preservation of a window in Lincoln Castle, even though it had no documented association with Hussey and is too small to climb through.

15. Three Tudor Silver Dress-hooks

Since the Treasure Act (1996) came into force in England and Wales, museums have been able to acquire whole new categories of artefacts. One such category consists of sixteenth-century silver and silver-gilt dress-hooks, which have until now been poorly represented in public collections. In volume 82 of the Antiquaries Journal , Gaimster, Hayward, Mitchell and Parker presented a classification of these ornamental hooks and, through analysis of contemporary inventories and documents, suggested how they were used. In this note, the authors publish three further finds, two recently acquired by the British Museum for its type series, and a further hook, one of only two so far recorded to feature a maker's mark.

16. A Seventeenth-century Portrait Miniature of Charles II as Prince of Wales?

This small portrait miniature emerged in the sale, by an anonymous vendor, of part of the contents of a country house near Stamford, in Lincolnshire, on 16 February 2002. The image is painted in watercolour on a pale carnation ground with a support of either card or vellum and is in good condition with only one marginal abrasion. To the right of the miniature, against the pale blue background and parallel to the boy's left shoulder, is the monogram of ‘G' above ‘I'. The frame is an oval seventeenth-century silver locket with a flat back measuring 33mm x 28mm. The convex glass is held in place by a gold band, and attached to the back is a gold loop secured by a thin flat plate, which is possibly a later addition.