Gold in the Furrow: The Staffordshire Hoard

On 5 July 2009, Terry Herbert was working a newly ploughed field in Hammerwich, near Lichfield in Staffordshire, with a metal detector when he began pulling gold from the soil. Over the following five days he kept digging, and with permission from landowner Fred Johnson, archaeologists soon opened a full excavation of the site. What emerged was staggering: almost 4,600 items and fragments, weighing 5.1 kilograms of gold and 1.4 kilograms of silver, adorned with roughly 3,500 pieces of garnet cloisonné jewellery. It was, and remains, the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork ever discovered, dwarfing even the famous 1.5-kilogram hoard from the Sutton Hoo ship burial of 1939.

The excavation, contracted by English Heritage to a unit from the University of Birmingham's archaeology department, opened a 9-by-13-metre trench, its exact location kept undisclosed given the site's sensitivity. By the time the find was publicly announced on 24 September 2009, 1,381 objects had already been catalogued — 864 weighing less than 3 grams, 507 weighing less than a gram, and just ten larger pieces. High-tech scanning provided by the Home Office confirmed the field held no further treasure, and investigators determined the hoard had not been buried as part of a grave. The announcement caused an immediate sensation: the official website drew ten million hits in its first week, and by 13 October, 40,000 visitors had filed through Birmingham Museum to see the first items on display. The most significant pieces were sent to the British Museum for cataloguing, cleaning and conservation, and in March 2010 archaeologists returned for a follow-up dig, aimed not at recovering more objects but at understanding the landscape as it existed when the hoard was buried.

What startled scholars most was not just the quantity but the character of the find. Apart from two or possibly three crosses, nearly everything in the hoard was martial — sword fittings, hilt plates, and pommels — with no domestic vessels, eating utensils, or feminine jewellery of the kind usually recovered from Anglo-Saxon sites. The contents, historians observed, show every sign of having been carefully selected. Among the weaponry were 66 gold sword hilt collars and numerous hilt plates, many inlaid with cloisonné garnet in zoomorphic patterns. The 86 sword pommels recovered constitute the largest such collection ever found in a single context, spanning many types — some previously unknown — suggesting manufacture across a wide span of time.

Examination of the pieces revealed a technical secret of Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths: depletion gilding, a method of altering the surface of gold to make it appear purer than it was, a skill not previously credited to Saxon craftsmen. The garnets set into 28 of the pieces are thought to have travelled from as far as Sri Lanka or Afghanistan, likely arriving in Britain during the Roman period — a striking testament to trade networks reaching deep into antiquity.

Among the non-martial items, the crosses stand out. The largest is missing some of its decorative settings, though these survive loose nearby, and the whole object had been folded — possibly to fit a small space, possibly by pagans indifferent to its Christian meaning, or possibly by Christians deliberately removing its sacred character before burial. Scholars remain divided on which explanation is correct.