Sharing the Wealth: Spoils of Christian Kings Enrich British Metal Detectorist and Land Owner
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In March 2009, Terry Herbert was metal detecting in a field in Staffordshire in the middle of England, just north of Birmingham. When his detector gave a beep, he dug down and retrieved what he originally thought was the brass key plate from a lock. He soon realized, however, it was not bronze but gold. Over the next few days he continued to find more and more gold objects, most of them small and broken up, but many highly decorated and some set with red garnets. He carefully bagged the objects as he discovered them, keeping them together in groups as far as possible, until eventually he had accumulated over 240 bags of miscellaneous objects that he thought were probably Saxon. Over many years of metal detecting, he had learned a lot about how to date the objects he found.
He then rang up Duncan Slarke at Birmingham Museum, the local Finds Liaison Officer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Duncan was suspicious at first, but he came out to view the find, and when he did he was totally amazed. He took the objects to Birmingham Museum so that they could be kept securely, 056and he contacted Roger Bland, Head of the Department of Portable Antiquities and Treasure at the British Museum who runs the national scheme for recording finds made by members of the public, sending him an e-mail with photo attachment of some of the objects.
This was clearly a discovery of major importance, so Kevin Leahy, the country’s leading authority on Anglo-Saxon metal work, hurried across from Brigg in Lincolnshire to begin the huge task of assessing the hoard. There was still more to be discovered, but there was a danger that nighthawks, the illegal metal detectorists who raid sites by night without permission of the landowner, would come and raid this site too. The site could easily be discovered, for it was in full sight of the M6 toll motorway that forms the northern bypass to Birmingham, and it could be seen by tens of thousands of drivers every day. An excavation was carried out on the site; the landowner told his neighbors that they were “looking for a body”—a story that was, surprisingly, accepted without a second thought! The area around the find was thoroughly excavated and the last remaining objects recovered.
But what was the hoard? It is here that the problems begin, for it is not only unusual, but unique and very odd. It consists mostly of the fittings from the hilts of swords, stripped from their iron blades before burial. We do not know what happened to the blades; they may have been reused or destroyed, the hilts perhaps being kept as trophies, a sort of Anglo-Saxon scalp hunting. Although most could be pagan, there were a handful of Christian items, notably a pectoral cross, an altar or processional cross that had been all crumpled up, and a gold strip that contains a quotation (written in Latin) from the Bible “Rise up O Lord, and may thy enemies be scattered and those who hate thee be driven from thy face” (Numbers 10:35; cf. Psalm 68).
The most obvious absence from the hoard was anything feminine or any form of civilian objects. Although it was mostly military, with a few Christian objects, even the Christian objects could be seen as trophies—crosses carried into battle and captured.
We do not know why the hoard was buried; nothing like it has been found before. Perhaps the objects were trophies, carried off after some battle or perhaps after a series of battles, the hilts hung up to decorate the walls of some royal hall. Then, panic, the hall was threatened, so the trophies were stripped off, carried away, buried, and never 057058059recovered. They must date to the seventh and eighth centuries, when Christianity and paganism were fighting it out for supremacy and Christianity had not yet won out. It appears in this case that the Christians were on the losing side of the battle, but we can’t assume that only pagans were capable of trashing Christian objects: The Christians themselves were quite capable of doing it to each other!
The place of discovery, too, was most interesting, for it is not in the usual heartland of Anglo-Saxon England, in East Anglia where the Angles settled, or in Sussex where the South Saxons settled, or in Wessex where the West Saxons settled. Instead it was in the Midlands, in the heart of the mysterious Anglo-Saxon kingdom known as Mercia. Mercia was expanding in the seventh century under kings such as Penda, a pagan who was responsible for the deaths in battle of three Christian kings (they were subsequently made holy by the great bishop St. Chad). The new hoard was found halfway between the Mercian capital at Tamworth and the ecclesiastic center at Litchfield. Hitherto little has been known of the archaeology of Mercia, but the discovery of this hoard suddenly shoots it into prominence as being one of the richest of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Can we call the objects in the hoard Mercian? Or do they reflect the artistry of other kingdoms, which had been captured by the Mercians?
The smooth recovery of the hoard has been a triumph for the Portable Antiquities Scheme. The scheme was set up following the Treasure Act of 1996, which regularized the rules for the recovery of treasure in Britain. Even earlier, England had one of the most effective systems in the world for dealing with gold and silver objects, where rewards were always paid to the finders of gold and silver objects declared to be treasure trove. Under the new law, all objects of gold and silver more than 300 years old are declared to be “Treasure.”
The principal law remains that objects found in the ground belong to the landowner; it is only objects of gold and silver, coin hoards and hoards of prehistoric objects that must be declared. However, there was criticism of the new act that it would not work as effectively as the old system, and as a result the Portable Antiquities Scheme was set up, based at the British Museum, which now has more than 40 Finds Liaison Officers, scattered around the country in museums and local authority offices. It is essentially a voluntary scheme, for although all potential 060Treasure must be declared, other antiquities need not be. Even so, the finders of other objects, not all of them metal detectorists, are encouraged to report their discoveries, which are assessed, identified, recorded and returned to the finder.
All potential Treasure is reported to the local Coroner (a Crown Officer whose responsibilities also include sudden deaths). Reports are prepared on each find, and the Coroner decides if it is Treasure. If it is found to be Treasure, museums have the option of buying the find at its full market value (assessed by the independent Treasure Valuation Committee); the rewards are normally split between the finder and the landowner.
The system is working extraordinarily well, and English archaeology is being revolutionized by the discoveries being made, not just of Treasure; there are now more recorded Roman coins from the English county of Wiltshire than there are from the whole of North Africa. All of the finds recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme can be seen on their online database at www.finds.org.uk, which now includes more than 600,000 nontreasure objects, a record unique in the world. In 0612010 more than 90,000 finds were added to the database (up 36 percent from 2009) and more than 850 treasure cases handled (a 10 percent increase).
The Staffordshire hoard is the most spectacular find so far. The Treasure Valuation Committee set its value at £3.285 million, that is, approaching $5 million, which will be divided between Terry Herbert, the metal detectorist who made the find, and Fred Johnson, the farmer who owned the field and had given Terry permission to detect there. This sum had to be raised by the local museums, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum in Stoke on Trent; the government does not pay. The museums launched a fund-raising campaign, and with the help of a grant of £1.3 million from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and thousands of small donations, the hoard is now safe. Cleaning and study can now begin, but already the history of Anglo-Saxon England is being rewritten.
Perhaps the most remarkable part of the story is the response of the public to this find. At Birmingham more that 40,000 people queued for up to 5 hours to see a small part of it. A few months later a similar display in Stoke on Trent attracted 53,500 people who queued patiently for hours in the snow. The Art Fund, which managed the fund-raising campaign, was stunned at the public response; never had one of its appeals attracted so much money from the public. It seems that the Staffordshire hoard has given back to the people of England part of their past.
Whether this British scheme has any application to Israel and the Middle East, I cannot say. Of course the situation in the Middle East, where looting (especially of tombs) is rampant, is far different from England. But the principle of enlisting the finders when they cannot be stopped is a principle worthy of consideration.
In March 2009, Terry Herbert was metal detecting in a field in Staffordshire in the middle of England, just north of Birmingham. When his detector gave a beep, he dug down and retrieved what he originally thought was the brass key plate from a lock. He soon realized, however, it was not bronze but gold. Over the next few days he continued to find more and more gold objects, most of them small and broken up, but many highly decorated and some set with red garnets. He carefully bagged the objects as he discovered them, keeping them together in […]
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