Treasure in the News

ANGLO-SAXON TREASURE FOUND IN LONDON

LONDON – An amateur treasure hunter prowling English farmland with a metal detector stumbled upon the largest Anglo-Saxon treasure ever found, a massive seventh-century hoard of gold and silver sword decorations, crosses and other items, British archaeologists said Thursday.
One expert said the treasure found by 55-year-old Terry Herbert would revolutionize understanding of the Anglo-Saxons, a Germanic people who ruled England from the fifth century until the Norman conquest in 1066. Another said the find would rank among Britain's best-known historic treasures.
"This is just a fantastic find completely out of the blue," Roger Bland, who managed the cache's excavation, told The Associated Press. "It will make us rethink the Dark Ages."
The Anglo-Saxons, a group of Germanic tribes, gradually invaded England by sea starting in the fifth century in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Originally, they came from what is now the coastal region of northwest Germany.
Their artisans made striking objects out of gold and enamel and created poetry including "Beowulf," an anonymous epic poem about a warrior who does battle with monsters and a dragon.
Archaeologist Kevin Leahy, who catalogued the find, said the stash appeared to be war loot and included dozens of pommel caps — decorative elements attached to the knobs of sword handles. He noted that "Beowulf" contains a reference to warriors stripping the pommels of their enemies' weapons as mementoes.
But much other Anglo-Saxon literature and artwork has been lost through warfare, looting, upheavals and the passage of time, leaving scanty evidence for scholars of the period.
Bland said the hoard was unearthed in what was once Mercia, one of five main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and is thought to date to 675-725 AD.
The hoard consists of at least 650 items of gold and 530 silver objects weighing more than 2.2 pounds (1 kilo), along with some copper alloy, garnets and glass.
A total of 1,345 items have been examined by experts and 56 lumps of earth were found to contain metal artifacts detected by an X-ray machine, meaning the total will likely rise to about 1,500.
Most of the objects are ornaments for weapons and other military artifacts, some inlaid with precious stones.
"I think wealth of this kind must have belonged to a king but we cannot say that for absolute certain," Bland said.
Leslie Webster, the former curator of Anglo-Saxon archaeology at the British Museum, said the amount of gold uncovered — about 11 pounds (5 kilograms) — suggested that early medieval England was a far wealthier place than previously believed.
She also said the crosses and other religious artifacts mixed in with the mainly military items, might shed new light on the relationship between Christianity and warfare among the Anglo-Saxons.
Herbert, from the western English town of Burntwood, found the gold on a friend's farm on July 5 and spent the next five days scouring the field for the rest of the hoard, recovering the first items before professional archaeologists took over the excavation.
"Imagine you're at home and somebody keeps putting money through your letterbox, that was what it was like," Herbert said. "I was going to bed and in my sleep I was seeing gold items."
The hoard was officially declared treasure by a coroner, which means it will now be valued by a committee of experts and offered up for sale to a museum. Proceeds would be split 50-50 between Herbert and his farmer friend, who has not been identified. The find's exact location is being kept secret to deter looters.
Bland said he could not give a precise figure for the worth of the hoard, but he said the treasure hunter could be in line for a "seven-figure sum."Herbert said the experience had been "more fun than winning the lottery," adding that one expert likened his discovery to finding Tutankhamen's tomb.
"I just flushed all over when he said that. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up," Herbert said.
The treasure is in storage at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Some of the items are due to go on display starting Friday.
One of the most intriguing objects in hoard is a small strip of gold inscribed with a warlike Latin quotation from the Old Testament, which translates as: "Rise up, O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face."
The strip may have been fastened to a shield or a sword belt.
Bland said archaeologists were still baffled by the function of many of the pieces.
"There's lots of mystery in it," he said.

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Associated Press Writer David McHugh in London contributed to this report.

'Stunning' Viking find bought for the nation

Vale of York hoard seen as most important discovery of its kind since 1840

Wednesday, 2 September 2009

A thousand-year-old chalice full of silver coins and jewellery and described as the most important Viking find for 170 years has been bought for the nation.

Words such as "astonishing" and "stunning" were used over and again at an event to mark the news at the British Museum today. They would probably be shared by the men who found it in a remote field near Harrogate – father and son metal detector enthusiasts David and Andrew Whelan, who now, along with the field's owner, share the £1,082,000 that the find was valued at.

The Vale of York hoard, as it is now known, will be jointly owned by the York Museums Trust and the British Museum in London, which described the find as being of global importance. The institution's curator of medieval coinage, Gareth Williams, recalled the huge and growing excitement after the hoard came to the museum in 2007. "It was clear as soon as the vessel came in that we had something very important. Once we got the x-rays we could see it was packed with silver. Even then, I don't think we anticipated how much."

The hoard turned out to be a gilt silver chalice – probably looted or given in terrified tribute by a church or monastery in what is now France. The contents of the chalice amount to a rich Viking man's life savings, including 617 coins, some from as far away as northern Russia and Afghanistan, and the type of jewellery given by Viking kings as rewards to their warriors, including a rare arm ring.

Who owned the treasure is probably unanswerable, but he was clearly rich. Museum experts believe the Viking probably buried it to keep it safe with the intention of going back for it.

The hoard was buried in approximately AD927 during what is a key transitional period in English history. Around that time the Anglo-Saxon King Athelstan – son of Alfred the Great – managed to conquer Viking Northumbria and then, wrongly, began calling himself king of Britain.

The Vikings were not going to take this lying down and Williams believes the hoard's owner may have been a follower of the Viking leader Guthfrith, who attempted and failed to defeat Athelstan. "It certainly seems likely that it was buried with the intention of him coming back for it and for whatever reason he did not," said Williams.

The exact location of the find is not being revealed but it is isolated and remote. "The hoard seems to have been buried in the middle of nowhere but presumably there was some sort of landmark there, a tree or a big rock to tell him where it was," said Williams. "Maybe there wasn't. Maybe that's why he never recovered it."

In total £200,000 was raised through a public appeal, while the biggest donors were the National Heritage Memorial Fund, which gave £507,100 of government money, and the charity The Art Fund, which gave £250,000.

The Vale of York hoard is the most significant find of its type since the Cuerdale hoard was found by the Ribble river in Lancashire in 1840 and the plan is for it to go on public display at the Yorkshire Museum in York on 17 September before being shown at the British Museum in London.

In a statement released on behalf of the Whelans, the father and son said they had always dreamed of finding a hoard. "The contents of the hoard we found went far beyond our wildest dreams and hopefully people will love seeing the objects on display in York and London for many, many years to come."

Mary Kershaw, director of collections at York, said the "once in a lifetime" find highlighted the excitement of discovery but would also give visitors a purely aesthetic pleasure.

Williams said the find added greatly to our understanding of "trading connections, cultural contacts and cultural diversity in the Viking world".

It also showed different sides of a people who often got a bad press. "We use Viking as a shorthand term and there's the traditional raping and pillaging image of the Vikings. That was replaced in the 1970s by what I think of as the fluffy bunny school of Viking studies which said, actually, they're all peaceful traders and farmers. The truth is they are both."

A professor with his nose deep in a library archive in London has stumbled upon 47 previously unknown letters from, to and about Benjamin Franklin.

The sensational find, announced in the upcoming issue of the William & Mary Quarterly, centers on Franklin's interactions with Gen. Edward Braddock after he and his soldiers arrived on the banks of the Potomac and during their disastrous march to the Forks of the Ohio in 1755. The discovery not only adds texture to a key chapter in early American history, it raises the question of what else about the founding generation might be lurking out there.

The professor is Alan Houston, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego. In the spring of 2007, while researching a book on Franklin ("Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement"), he was poring over manuscripts in the British Library. Late in the afternoon of his last day in the country, he requested of the library staff a certain Volume 4478b, a collection of miscellaneous papers, including "Copies of Letters relating to the March of General Braddock."

He was shocked to see that the first such letter was a copy of one written by Benjamin Franklin to the secretary of the governor of Maryland. He had never seen the missive before. Houston believed he'd seen everything Franklin ever wrote, but he quickly checked his own files as well as the authoritative "Papers of Benjamin Franklin" and saw no mention of it.

"I felt kind of a lump in my chest," Houston said. "I started to bounce. I wanted like a rocket to shoot out of my chair."

It being a library, he merely exited the room and called his wife with the news.

What Houston had found was the handiwork of Thomas Birch, secretary of the Royal Society and a famously compulsive copyist of manuscripts. Birch had dined frequently with Franklin in London during the summer of 1757. Franklin by then was famous as a scientist for his experiments with electricity, but he wanted to show his British hosts that he was also politically important in the colonies. Thus he carried with him, as a kind of calling card, a bound book of letters written by him, to him and about him during the Braddock affair.

In his autobiography, Franklin referred to carrying a "Quire Book of Letters during this Transaction." The original book has not been found, but Birch copied it.

"It's an extraordinary find," said Scott Casper, visiting editor of the William & Mary Quarterly. "What this find shows is that caches like this, which are under some title that doesn't include that Framer's name, which are in collections that are not specifically associated with the Framer, might come to light when someone is doing research on something else entirely."

Franklin met Braddock in 1755, ostensibly on post office business. In fact he hoped to ease Braddock's violent dislike of the colonist and of Pennsylvanians in particular. Franklin smoothed things over. He rounded up wagons, horses, volunteers. He cut deals with farmers, using Braddock's money. He rallied public support for Braddock's campaign. The "wagon affair" is a well-known chapter in Franklin's life, but the letters shed light on the tricky nature of the negotiations and the anxious sentiments of the colonists at being asked to supply the imperial army. Houston said the letters give him a better appreciation for Franklin's genius at getting people to cooperate.