From The New Yorker, November 09, 2020:
Leominster, in the West Midlands area of England, is an ancient market town where the past and the present are jumbled together like coins in a change purse. Shops housed in half-timbered sixteenth-century Tudor buildings face the main square, offering cream teas and antiques. The town’s most lurid attraction is a well-preserved ducking stool, a mode of punishment in which an offender was strapped to a seat and dunked into a pond or a river while neighbors jeered; the device, last employed in 1809, is now on incongruous display inside the Priory Church, which dates to the thirteenth century. Christianity has even older roots in Leominster: a monastery was established around 660 by a recent convert, the Saxon leader Merewalh, who is thought to have been a son of Penda, the King of Mercia. For much of the early Middle Ages, Mercia was the most powerful of the four main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the others being Wessex, East Anglia, and Northumberland. In the tenth century, these realms were unified to become the Kingdom of England. Although the region surrounding Leominster (pronounced “Lemster”) is no longer officially known as Mercia, this legacy is preserved in the name of the local constabulary: the West Mercia Police.
On June 2, 2015, two metal-detector hobbyists aware of the area’s heritage, George Powell and Layton Davies, drove ninety minutes north of their homes, in South Wales, to the hamlet of Eye, about four miles outside Leominster. The farmland there is picturesque: narrow, hedgerow-lined lanes wend among pastures dotted with spreading trees and undulating crop fields. Anyone fascinated by the layered accretions of British history—or eager to learn what might be buried within those layers—would find it an attractive spot. English place-names, most of which date back to Anglo-Saxon times, are often repositories of meaning: the name Eye, for example, derives from Old English, and translates as “dry ground in a marsh.” Just outside the hamlet was a rise in the landscape, identified on maps by the tantalizing appellation of King’s Hall Hill.
Powell, a warehouse worker in his early thirties, and Davies, a school custodian a dozen years older, were experienced “detectorists.” There are approximately twenty thousand such enthusiasts in England and Wales, and usually they find only mundane detritus: a corroded button that popped off a jacket in the eighteen-hundreds, a bolt that fell off a tractor a dozen years ago. But some detectorists make discoveries that are immensely valuable, both to collectors of antiquities and to historians, for whom a single buried coin can help illuminate the past. Scanning the environs of King’s Hall Hill, the men suddenly picked up a signal on their devices. They dug into the red-brown soil, and three feet down they started to uncover a thrilling cache of objects: a gold arm bangle in the shape of a snake consuming its own tail; a pendant made from a crystal sphere banded by delicately wrought gold; a gold ring patterned with octagonal facets; a silver ingot measuring close to three inches in length; and, stuck together in a solid clod of earth, what appeared to be hundreds of fragile silver coins.
The find had all the hallmarks of a hoard—the term used by archeologists to characterize a collection of valuable objects that was deliberately buried or hidden, usually with the idea that it would later be retrieved. The Vikings, whose name means “raiders,” began making plundering incursions into Anglo-Saxon Britain from Scandinavia in the second half of the eighth century. Although the Vikings did not use coins as a form of currency, they had a bullion economy—the trading of metals, based on weight and purity—and appreciated coins as portable forms of wealth. They coveted silver, which was not mined in their own lands; gold was even more prized. To obtain these precious metals, the Vikings stole or requisitioned the contents of Anglo-Saxon monastery vaults, which often included finely worked silver or gold, and chopped them into pieces, for purposes of trade—archeologists call such fragments hacksilver or hackgold—or melted them into ingots, for ease of weighing. A Viking hoard typically contains these forms of metal, and also coins minted by the Anglo-Saxon kings whose lands they had invaded.
Powell and Davies snapped a few photographs while their discovery was still embedded in the soil, then took more pictures after removing some of the dirt and laying the treasures out on a white plastic shopping bag. They also took photographs of the field where they’d made the find, so that they could locate the spot on a return visit.
Such technology would have been extremely useful to the Viking warrior from Denmark who, more than a thousand years earlier, had buried the valuables, probably to protect them from theft. That anonymous invader, who would have been gathering spoils as a member of the Great Army, which progressed through the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the 860s and 870s, would have had to make do with rudimentary reminders of where he’d hidden the stash: twenty paces to the left of that footpath, halfway between those two trees. Historians of England contend that the difficulty of accounting for where, exactly, something important has been buried is one reason that Viking hoards and Roman caches of silver denarii are still there for the finding—or, for that matter, for the stealing.
Gareth Williams, the curator of early-medieval coinage and Viking collections at the British Museum, became entranced by the Norse world as a small child, while paging through a library book. His grandmother, encouraging his passion, made him a helmet and a shield out of cardboard. He went on to study medieval history at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, where he completed his Ph.D., and then joined the British Museum. Williams, who has a well-developed salt-and-pepper beard and a lively manner, still needs little persuading to dress up like a Viking; he makes educational videos for schoolchildren in which he wears a belted jerkin and a helmet made from leather boiled in beeswax.
In the summer of 2015, he was approached by a contact in the coin trade. As Williams told me recently, the contact informed him that several pieces of what appeared to be a Viking hoard were being offered to dealers. Some of the coins were Two Emperors, a type so rare that numismatists knew of only two extant examples: one was discovered in 1840, the other in 1950. A Two Emperor coin had never appeared on the open market, and a single one was valued at a hundred thousand dollars. A hoard with a substantial number of rare coins could be worth more than ten million dollars. The fact that individual coins were being offered to dealers suggested that the hoard was in danger of being broken up and vanishing onto the black market. According to Williams, the contact told him that he hadn’t personally seen the coins but “understood immediately from the description that this must be undeclared treasure.”
The word “treasure” conjures everything from a religious relic to a pirate chest spilling over with booty. But in British law the term has a specific meaning: the Treasure Act of 1996 defines a treasure as any object that is more than three hundred years old and at least ten per cent gold or silver. Because finds of single coins are quite common, they are exempted from this rule, no matter their metallic content or rarity, but a find of two or more coins in the same place—and certainly of a hoard—qualifies as treasure, and the finder is legally obliged to report the discovery to local authorities.
The Treasure Act was passed, in large part, because metal detecting had become such a popular activity. During the Second World War, the technology was used to help sappers find buried mines, but by the nineteen-seventies detectors had become consumer products that were relatively inexpensive and easy to use. Hobbyists began spending their Sundays scanning beaches, parks, and archeological sites. Scholars warned that treasure hunters were vandalizing history, seizing finds as trophies and subverting the possibility of archeological interpretation by destroying the context of their discoveries. Detectorists resented the stigmatizing of their hobby: many of them are amateur history buffs who eagerly take their finds to local museums. As with so many aspects of English life, the conflict was inflected with class antagonism; working-class hobbyists often felt that they were being maligned by a professional élite.
In 1983, two detectorists in Surrey found a number of coins at the site of a Romano-British temple in the village of Wanborough. They informed local curators, but before the site could be properly excavated illicit treasure hunters, known as nighthawks, descended. As many as forty of them scanned the site by moonlight, plundering antiquities and selling them for profit; some dealers bought objects straight out of the ground. The looting of Wanborough helped usher in the Treasure Act. It replaced ancient common law holding that, when the owner of a buried treasure could not be identified, it became the property of the Crown. Under the terms of the current law, treasure still belongs legally to the Crown, but in practice it often ends up in a museum. (In the U.S., comparable laws vary from state to state, but most of them stipulate that someone who finds an object of value or a stash of money is entitled to keep it if the owner cannot be located.)
The Treasure Act provides an incentive for detectorists to declare their discoveries by establishing the right to a reward for the finder, who typically receives half the market value; the other half goes to the landowner. Some forty Finds Liaison Officers across the U.K. urge detectorists to report not just discoveries of gold and silver but also those of more humble metals, which can help explain the daily lives of earlier Britons: fallen brooch pins that might indicate the route of a Roman pathway; copper pennies dropped in a medieval marketplace.....
....MUCH MORE
