ornaments are the memorials of a benefactor and of his wife, who contributed to the rebuilding of the chancel.
Mr. Birch, of the British Museum, communicated to the Committee a drawing of a peculiar barrel-shaped vase of pale red ware, measuring in height about 8 in., presented to the British Museum, in 1839, by the Right Hon. C. Shaw Lefevre, Speaker of the House of Commons. Mr. Birch stated that the engineer of the South Western Railway, Mr. Albinus Martin, informed Mr. Lefevre that this vase was found in the winter of 1839 in the chalk-cutting, about 400 yards east of the Reading-road bridge, in the parish of Basingstoke, at a depth of from three to four feet from the surface. With the barrel were discovered also parts of four other vessels, a scull, and some human bones, apparently the remains of a female. An ineffectual search was made for coins. Mr. Birch observed that Mr. Long, of Farnham, has conjectured, in a pamphlet privately printed, that the Vindonium of the Romans was not at Silchester, but at a point nearly identical with that where these remains were found.
Mr. Evelyn P. Shirley, M.P., exhibited a remarkably perfect mazer bowl of the time of Richard II. The bowl is formed of some light and mottled wood highly polished, probably maple, with a broad rim of silver gilt, round the exterior of which, on a hatched ground, is the following legend in characters slightly raised—
En the name of the trinite
fille the kup and drink to me.
Mr. Hodgkinson, of East Acton, submitted to the inspection of the Committee a fine Psalter of the latter part of the 13th century; on the first folio are emblazoned the arms of Clare and England. The initial letters are large, and of a design uncommon in English MSS. Mr. Hodgkinson stated that from the occurrence of the autograph of "Robert Hare, 1561," on the first folio, he had been led to conjecture that the volume may have once belonged to the cathedral of Lincoln, as the Hares of Derbyshire were connected with the family of Bishop Watson, the last Roman Catholic prelate of that see, who gave several relics appertaining to his Cathedral to the same Robert Hare, and amongst them the ring of St. Cuthbert. In the calendar is a memorandum of the obit of Sir John Giffard, in 1348. Mr. Hodgkinson exhibited also a walking staff carved with a calendar in runic characters, the date of which is probably about the end of the sixteenth century, and a bronze tankard embossed with the representation of a boar hunt, of about the same date, and of German workmanship. A detailed account of a similar staff, with representations of the symbols, has been published by Jens Wolff, formerly Norwegian Consul at London, under the following title: Runakefli, le Runic Rim-Stock, ou Calendrier Runique. Paris, 1820.
Mr. Way laid before the Committee a sketch of a singular example of construction, technically termed "joggling," of which some remains are to be seen in the field on the south side of the nave of Tewksbury abbey
