It’s been called the greatest archaeological discovery in Britain since the second world war, and it’ll now be permanently housed near where it was discovered. The Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent museums will share the artifacts, thanks to private fundraising and a major grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund:
A grant of £1,285,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) will keep the glittering treasures of the Staffordshire hoard, the most spectacular heap of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, in the region where an amateur metal detector found it last summer after it spent 1,300 years buried in a nondescript field.
[. . .]
When the find was announced in September the news went round the world. The gold was found by Terry Herbert, a passionate amateur metal detector whose best previous find was a broken piece of medieval horse harness, on farmer Fred Johnson’s land near Lichfield in July. When Herbert had covered his dining room table with gold, and was becoming thoroughly alarmed at the scale of his find, he called in the experts. The archaeologists and forensic scientists who hit the field – under the cover story from the local police that they were investigating a murder – found most of the pieces just below the surface, and some tangled in clumps of grass which had grown up through the delicate filigree gold: eventually they retrieved 2.5kg of silver and 5kg of gold. One gold-and-garnet Anglo-Saxon sword pommel would be regarded as a find of international importance: there were scores in the hoard, along with unique and enigmatic objects still baffling the archaeologists such as the wriggling gold serpents, and a biblical inscription on a strap of gold folded in half like a shirt collar.
Starkey said: “These are pieces from the period which we were brought up to call the dark ages, and they prove that it was no such thing. When the Normans invaded in 1066, they may have been better organised chaps — but it wasn’t that they were the civilised ones invading a primitive backwater, they came because they were desperate to get their hands on the wealth of Harold’s England.”
Earlier posts on this discovery here and here.
In contrast to my usual “the government has no business doing x” attitude, this is actually something in which I think the government has a valid role to play, and this is the sort of thing they should be doing in cases like this: paying a fair market value (rather than the usual governmental response, which is to expropriate, tax, or regulate).
