The Rev. J. T. Evans, who has described the Church
plate of six Welsh counties and of Gloucestershire, has now perffirmed this valuable service for Oxfordshire. The need for such systematic surveys of the Church's artistic heritage as The Church Plate of Oxfordshire, finely produced and admirably illustrated (Oxford : Alden Press, 21s.), is shown by the author's statement that, though experts of the last generation went over the ground, he found that " some plate had disappeared, notably an Elizabethan chalice." Such losses may be set down to carelessness rather than dishonesty, but they are none the less regrettable. Mr. Evans's photo- graphs show how much fine silver has come down from Tudor and Jacobean days and remains in Oxfordshire parishes. At Cropredy there is an oval pyx of tin—the only example of its kind that is known to have survived the Reformation in any church in this country, though every church had one or more in 1547. The " pax of little price," which Bardolph in Henry the Fifth was hanged for stealing, may have been a pyx like this Cropredy relic which is now rare indeed.
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