"Say no more"

It shows many similarities with the coat of arms of Death in Hans Holbein's famous 'Dance of Death' series'. What would your Halloween coat of arms include?

It also includes a wide selection of fictitious arms of legendary figures, including this full-page allegorical representation of the arms of Death. The arms are supported by a skeleton and a female figure, surmounted by a helm, hourglass and clock as crest, over which two arm bones hold a rock.

Is there a coat of arms more suited to the Halloween season than this one?! This image comes from a German manuscript made up of a collection of coats of arms which relate mainly to the Holy Roman Empire. It was probably written in southwest Germany or Switzerland, around the early 16th century.

Sammes’ wicker image is inspired by the classical concept that Druids carried out human sacrifice to save others from sickness or war – he believed that the giant statue was filled with live men & set on fire! No one show this image to Lord Summerisle, we don't want to give him ideas...

Sammes’ thesis was that Britain had been first settled by the Phoenicians, a proposition that had respectable antecedents. Yet, Sammes overplays his hand: he not only advocates for a flourishing Phoenician civilisation but even claims Phoenician as the original language of Britain.

Aylett Sammes, a maverick among the antiquaries of the seventeenth century, produced one of the most bizarre books of the age - 'Britannia antiqua illustrata: or, The antiquities of ancient Britain, derived from the Phœnicians'.

This image of it is from our 1491 copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle (Liber cronicarum, : cum figuris et ymaginibus ab inicio mundi), which has illustrations and portraits from history, starting with the beginning of the world.

It's October, so you know what that means - all things ghosts & ghouls! The Danse Macabre (Dance of Death) is a popular allegory from the medieval period that considered the universality of death & frailness of life. A personification of Death summons the living to dance to their graves.

As notation became more sophisticated, manuscripts with imprecise forms of notation such as those found in the packing of the Winton Domesday quickly became obsolete, and now often survive only through their subsequent reuse in bindings of other manuscripts.

Both scholars and practicing musicians explored several systems for writing music during the early Middle Ages, with the adoption of the 4-line staff becoming widespread in the 11th century.

Conserved and rebound in 1997, some folios include an early form of music notation, typical of the period: cheironomic (staff-less), adiastematic (unheightened) neumes. Music notation in the 10th century was relatively rudimentary, and various forms coexisted both in theory and in practice.

This is one of 26 leaves of fragments of a 10th century Gregorian sacramentary, removed between 1773-1790 from the original binding of another manuscript, the Winton Domesday, where they formed the packing of the boards.

The panel of Cleopatra was likely to be painted by one the female associates of the firm (of whom did most of the painting). The other panel, labelled ‘If Hope Were Not Heart Should Break’ has Burne-Jones’s initials on it, suggesting it was painted by him.

These were William Morris’s firm’s most popular designs, and can be found in the form of stained glass and embroidery. Other heroines include Dido, Lucretia and Philomela.

These tiles, located at Kelmscott Manor in their collection, come from a series depicting heroines from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 'Legend of Goode Wimmen', a poem recounting stories of virtuous women who suffered or died through love.

It was where a Church formerly stood, dedicated to Saint Bartholomew, which was by then long since demolished.