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Mr. John H. Mowll draws attention to the
visit of their Majesties the King and Queen to Dover on 18th October, at
the end of four years of cross-channel shelling. The Town Hall building,
where their Majesties lunched, incorporates much of the former Maison
Dieu which was founded by Hubert de Burgh under Royal Charter. It is
understood that the last reigning monarch to visit the Maison Dieu was
Henry VIII who afterwards dissolved it. Many earlier visits of English
kings are recorded. Mr. Mowll has presented to the Society a special
page to be inserted in Lyon’s History of Dover showing the
modern Dover Municipal Buildings on the Maison Dieu site.
Early in March a huge bone was dug out of beach gravel on
the ground of the British Quarrying Company, near Lydd. The bone was
identified at the Natural History Museum as one of the vertebrae of a
whale, which must have been buried in the accumulation of beach for many
centuries.
Mr. R. F. Jessup states that there has been serious destruction
of the Iron Age lynchets and Saxon barrows on Barham Downs. He also
reports as follows:
"The Canterbury Excavation Committee, to which I was
appointed the Society’s representative, was formed in April, 1944, in
pursuance of a resolution passed by the Canterbury Archaeologica1
Society. The inaugural meeting, at which the late Archbishop of
Canterbury took the chair, was held in July, 1944, and the Executive
Committee formed on that occasion has met twice. The Committee was
fortunate in securing, through the Ministry of Works, the valuable
services of Mrs. Audrey Williams, F.S.A., as Supervisor of Excavations,
and of Mr. B. H. St. J. O’Neil, F.S.A., as Technical Assessor. Our
member, Major F. W. Tomlinson, F.S.A., combines the onerous duties of
Secretary and Master of the Volunteer Diggers, who numbered some eighty
in all. |
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It was found necessary to employ four paid labourers for part of the time. A
précis of the preliminary Report of the Committee, compiled by Mrs.
Williams, appears in the 1944 volume of Archaeologia Cantiana.
"The whole project was carried out in an eminently
satisfactory manner, and the Canterbury Society is to be congratulated
on its undertaking."
Members will recall the excavations at Oldbury Hill, Ightham,
carried out under the auspices of the Society in 1938 by Professor J. B.
Ward Perkins (Arch. Cant. LI, 137-181). The owner of the
property, Mr. H. A. Hooker, has recently died and all antiquaries and
lovers of places of natural beauty will be gratified to learn that he
has devised the hill and its surroundings, 155 acres in all, to the
National Trust. The area so devised includes all the wooded part of the
early Iron Age hill fort. The northern half of the fort, which remains
private property, incloses cultivated fields.
The Council support and heartily commend to all members of
the Society the printed appeal for the Restoration of Libraries issued
under the auspices of the Conference of Allied Ministers of
Education, a copy of which accompanies the current volume of Archaeologia
Cantiana.
Mr. F. Burgess of 1 St. Stephen’s Cottages, Broadham Green,
Oxted, Surrey, a writer on English Sepulchral Monuments, would be
grateful to any members who would send him notes, drawings or
photographs of post-Reformation monuments, particularly of the
seventeenth century, in country churchyards, or reminders of published
references to such memorials.
The Council again invite all members to pay their
subscriptions promptly. Subscriptions should be remitted; not to
the Hon. General Secretary, but to the Collector, Mr. A. H. Taylor, 27
Nunnery Road, Canterbury. |