I recently had the pleasure of meeting Terry Herbert, the finder of the largest Anglo-Saxon hoard ever to be found in the UK. He found the hoard in 2009 near the village of Hammerwick Staffordshire England. The hoard consisted of 3,490 individual items made of gold or silver. These items were eventually declared treasure, and a reward of £3,285,000 was awarded and shared evenly between Terry and the landowner.
The treasure was originally deposited in the 7-8th century and it consists of items stripped from military weaponry like swords etc. In total the hoard consisted of 5.094 kilos of gold, 1.442 kilos of silver and over 3,500 cloisonné garnets. What was remarkable was the large number and quality of sword pommels, 97 in total, and many of these were jewel encrusted with garnets. The closest parallel to the quality of these items is in the Sutton Hoo ship burial.
This period of British history was particularly violent, called the dark-ages. There were constant battles between the different Saxon kingdoms. This was also the time of the emerging religion of Christianity, so some of these battles may have been religious; Pagan versus Christians. This is borne out by a number of gold crosses in the hoard, and an inscription on an item written in Latin reading ‘Rise up, O Lord, and may they enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face.’
When this story hit the media, it was reported that Terry found the hoard with a basic metal detector, not surprising as some of the items were literally laying on the surface. What wasn’t widely reported was that Terry turned to his trusty Minelab Explorer II metal detector to dig the bulk of the hoard that was a lot deeper.
The Minelab Explorer II metal detector used to find the deepest items
Now as many of you already know, we have been producing a series called “The Heritage Interviews” for MLOtv, so Gary Brun and myself travelled to Staffordshire and filmed an interview, asking the questions other media companies hadn’t.
You can see our interview on MLOtv here:
www.mlotv.com/view/984/terry-herbert-s-staffordshire-hoard
To see some more images and the latest news/research of this fascinating hoard, visit:
www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk
I’m sure we’ll all agree, this is the one of the best ever finds ever to be found with a metal detector!
So get out there and find something!
Gordon Heritage
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