These notes are an expanded and updated version of a course of lectures which I gave at King's College London during the summer term 1979. The main topic is the Hermitian classgroup of orders, and in particular of group rings. Most of this work is published here for the first time. The primary motivation came from the connection with the Galois module structure of rings of algebraic integers. The principal aim was to lay the theoretical basis for attacking what may be called the "converse problem" of Galois module structure theory: to express the symplectic local and global root numbers and...