Towards the end of the twelfth century the Carthusian monastery of Lugny or Luvigny, near Langres in Burgundy, contained a lay brother named Viard. In him the fire of religious enthusiasm burned so bright that he obtained leave from his abbot to retire into a cave in the Val des Choux—Vallis Caulium, the ‘Kail Glen’ as we call it in our homely Scottish speech—a sequestered glen amid the neighbouring wooded hills. Here he led a life of such austere devotion that his fame waxed great through the land of Burgundy, and in the end drew to his lonely hermitage Duke Odo III, then about to start on the Fourth Crusade. So impressed was the duke by his interview with the recluse that he vowed, should he return in safety from the Holy Land, to establish a monastery in the Kail Glen, and to place Viard at its head. In this way, shortly before 1200, was founded the monastery of the Val des Choux. Odo's first grant, making over the Kail Glen to the brethren, was made in 1203; and by 1206 the new order of monks—for such it was—had aroused the interest of Pope Innocent III, who by a Bull issued in that year recognized the Valliscaulian Order and confirmed their rule. It was one of exceptional severity. All the brethren, prior included, were to dine in the common frater, sharing the same fare, and abstaining from meat and gravy. They were not allowed to work, save in tending the monastic gardens, and were therefore enjoined to live off their own revenues. They were bound to silence, and prohibited from leaving the cloister save on the business of their Order. They were to wear hair shirts, and to sleep fully clothed and in their shoes, and on beds without a mattress. Small wonder that so drastic a rule was found untenable, and in 1223 a second Bull allowed the monks of the Kail Glen a considerable measure of relaxation.

One of the techniques employed by the Anglo-Saxon jeweller has hitherto been ignored, or at least passed over as being foreign, and the intention here is to bring it to more general notice. The relevant material is more plentiful than has been suspected, and a closer examination of objects already in museums or now being taken from the earth will aid investigations, and perhaps increase the value of the objects themselves as exhibits. Further studies in the subject may provide useful additions to the defective criteria perforce used in dating early Anglo-Saxon objects.

In the summer of 1954 the archaeological investigation of a habitation-site of the second half of the first millennium A.D. began on a little island about 30 kilometres west of Stockholm in Lake Mälar. The island, known as Lillö, lies in Ekerö parish in the province of Uppland. The resultant finds were extraordinarily rich and interesting, and the outcome of the investigations now in progress, which will take in also a number of small burial-grounds connected with the habitation-site, is awaited with some excitement.

The ‘reliquary’ of the Resurrection which Henri II of France gave to the cathedral of Rheims on his coronation in 1547 still survives. It was long considered to have been made for that occasion, but recently M. Pierre Verlet has recognized both it and the ‘Nef de Sainte Ursule’, given to the cathedral by the same donor, as being works of earlier date furbished up for the occasion. The whole of the Resurrection ‘reliquary’, indeed, is late medieval except for the initials and crescent devices which Henri II caused to be added to it.

Bantham is a small hamlet in the parish of Thurlestone, South Devon, five miles west of the market town of Kingsbridge. During the summer of 1953, to celebrate the Coronation, the people of Bantham arranged an exhibition of material illustrating their village history. The organizer, Mrs. Clare Fox, asked me to help in identifying some ‘Roman’ pottery and other objects that had been collected from the sand-dunes at the mouth of the river Avon near by, by Mr. H. L. Jenkins of Clanacombe in the late nineteenth century. The finds had been presented subsequently to the Torquay Natural History Society's Museum by Mrs. M. Radcliffe, his daughter-in-law, and were lent by the museum for the Bantham exhibition. The finds were found to include fragments of imported amphorae of Dark Age date, similar to those found at Garranes and Tintage and therefore to merit wider recognition. I am much indebted to Mrs. Fox for guidance to the site and for the history of the discoveries; to the Council and Curator (Mr. A. G. Madden) of the Torquay Museum for the loan of the objects; to Miss Theo Brown for their illustration; to my husband Cyril Fox for help with the map (fig. 5); and to Mr. G. C. Dunning for his description and drawing of the medieval finds.

The object of this paper is to invite opinions on the purpose of a certain type of heraldic panel which is akin to the hatchment but is, in fact, quite distinct from it. The writers also wish to enlist help in recording further examples, whether lost or surviving, and to urge the preservation of the latter. They also desire to establish the number of cases where a monument of a permanent nature to the same person, as is commemorated by a panel can be found in the same church or churchyard; the only instance of a panel and corresponding memorial, other than the nineteenth-century examples at Lindfield, traced by the writers so far is in Salisbury Cathedral (see p. 83).