All of It War-Gear

On 5 July 2009 a man with a metal detector walked over a recently ploughed field near Lichfield and found the largest quantity of Anglo-Saxon gold ever recovered anywhere.

Terry Herbert spent the next five days getting it out of the soil. He filled two hundred and forty-four bags. Then he rang the finds liaison officer.

What is in it

Almost four thousand six hundred items and fragments. Something over five kilos of gold, a kilo and a half of silver, and around three and a half thousand pieces of garnet set in cloisonné cellwork of extraordinary fineness.

The workmanship is at the absolute top of what early medieval Europe could do, and there is enough of it that specialists have had to revise what they thought seventh-century goldsmithing was capable of.

And then the composition.

It is all war-gear. Sword pommels. Hilt collars and hilt plates. Scabbard fittings. Pieces of at least one helmet. Nothing domestic. No brooches, no dress fittings, no buckles from a woman’s grave, no coins, no vessels. Nothing specific to female use at all.

The exceptions are two or three religious objects, including a large gold cross — which had been folded up before it went into the ground.

What is not in it

The weapons.

Every one of these fittings came off something. The pommels have been detached from swords, the collars from hilts, the plates prised off. The blades are absent, the wooden and leather parts are absent, the iron is absent.

Somebody sat down with a large quantity of high-status weaponry and stripped the precious metal off it.

That is not a burial and it is not a treasury. It is the output of a workshop or a camp processing loot — the gold reduced to portable, meltable, divisible material, with the rest thrown away or reused.

The folded cross fits that reading uncomfortably well. Folding a gold object is what you do to make it stack and travel.

Whose

The field lies just south of Watling Street, in what was Mercia, in the seventh century — the period when Mercia under Penda and his successors was fighting more or less continuously with Northumbria, East Anglia and the Britons of the west.

The gold was buried, on current dating, somewhere around 650 to 675, and the objects themselves were made over the preceding hundred years, which means much of it was already old when it went in.

Beyond that, nothing is settled. It has been read as the spoils of a single great battle, as a war-chest hidden in an emergency, as the accumulated tribute of a king, as a craftsman’s stock of scrap, and as a deliberate deposit made for reasons we would call religious.

There is no consensus and there may never be one, because a hoard by definition arrives without context. Whoever put it there did not come back, and nobody wrote it down.

The field

The hoard was in the ploughsoil. It had been dragged about and scattered by cultivation, which is why the excavation area was only about nine metres by thirteen — everything had already been spread within that.

Which means it had been coming up towards the surface for years, being broken and moved a little further each season, and would have gone on being ploughed until there was nothing recognisable left.

Afterwards

It was valued at £3.285 million under the Treasure Act, and the money was divided between Herbert and the farmer, Fred Johnson, in equal shares.

The two men subsequently fell out badly.

The hoard is split between Birmingham and Stoke, and a great deal of it is on display, cleaned and mounted.