The Staffordshire Hoard

On 5 July 2009 a metal detectorist walking a freshly ploughed field near Hammerwich, a few miles from Lichfield, began to pull gold out of the soil. Over five days he recovered 244 gold objects before calling the local Finds Liaison Officer of the Portable Antiquities Scheme. With the farmer's agreement, archaeologists funded by English Heritage excavated the spot that summer. Ploughing had already scattered the metal through the topsoil, so they opened an area about 9 by 13 metres, lifted soil blocks for X-ray, and eventually recovered several thousand pieces. A return visit in 2012, after another ploughing, produced 91 more items, 81 of which were judged to belong to the hoard.

The total is almost 4,600 items and fragments, with about 5.1 kg of gold and 1.4 kg of silver. Nothing else from Anglo-Saxon England comes close in quantity: the gold from the Sutton Hoo ship burial weighs well under half as much. What makes the hoard strange is its narrow range. There are no dress pins of the kind women wore, no coins and no tableware. Almost everything comes from weapons and armour: gold hilt collars, garnet-set hilt plates, pommel caps of many types, and the silver-gilt panels, crest and cheek-pieces of one magnificent helmet, which accounts for roughly a third of all the fragments.

The pieces were not lost by accident. Most had been prised or torn from the objects they once decorated; the iron blades, the wooden grips and the helmet's iron cap were left behind. Several pieces, among them the inscribed strip and the largest gold cross, had been folded before burial. The workmanship is consistently superb, from cloisonné cells holding thousands of tiny cut garnets to filigree as fine as anything known from early medieval Europe. Scientific work at the British Museum suggests that some of the gold came from melted Byzantine coins and that many garnets were cut from stones that travelled from South Asia.

Among the few explicitly Christian objects is a slim gold strip inscribed, on both faces, with a Latin verse from Numbers 10:35: "Rise up, Lord, and may your enemies be scattered, and those who hate you be driven from your face." The lettering is usually dated to the late 7th or 8th century. It may have come from a cross or a piece of war-gear; either way, it is a battle prayer.

The hoard was buried, most likely in the third quarter of the 7th century, on rising ground just south of the Roman road later called Watling Street, in the heartland of the kingdom of Mercia. This was the age of Penda and his sons, when Mercian kings fought almost continually against Northumbria, East Anglia and the Welsh. Who buried it, and why, is unknown. Ideas include battlefield trophies stripped from defeated enemies, a royal store of war-gear handed over as death duties by noblemen, a votive offering, or a stash of metal awaiting recycling. None can be proved.

Because the find was reported promptly and excavated properly, archaeologists could show that it was a single buried deposit rather than a grave, and could map how ploughing had spread it. A six-year research project commissioned by Historic England then cleaned, joined and catalogued the fragments, recognising around 600 significant objects among them, and published the results in 2019. The hoard has changed how specialists date Anglo-Saxon metalwork and how they picture the aristocratic warrior culture celebrated in poems such as Beowulf.