Saxon Hoard - Saxon Hoard A Golden Discovery

in July 2009 one lucky find lifted the lid on a long-lost world we all love buried treasure this sense of it it's like a fairy story these glorious things emerging from clods of Earth there's a sort of magic of an astonishing treasure trove of gold and silver hidden in a field in Staffordshire in the Midlands you never really ever get involved it finds with sort of precious metals this is real sort of Indiana Jones tight stuff I'm going to take you on a journey to unlock some of the mysteries of this newfound anglo-saxon horde were they looted as a result of battles were they given to the mercian King as tribute by his some people we found them dismembered and bent now were they crammed into a box to be taken away and I'll discover just how it could help transform our understanding of one of the most fascinating periods in our history finds like Staffordshire hoard show that this was a vibrant and colorful and bright societies as much as anything else and it helps us to think about this time in a completely different way this is the story of the greatest find in generations I want to take you back about 1,400 years to seventh century England - around the time when the Staffordshire hoard was hidden days of Roman Britain had long past we'd entered a new era as the Romans withdrew bands of adventurers arrived on our shores from northern Germany and Scandinavia the Dark Ages the name tradition given at the time between the Romans leaving and William the Conqueror arriving it's a time we have only a very dim and distant knowledge of you can see why this is cat home in Staffordshire and that doesn't look like much today but it's actually the site of one of the finest Dark Age finds ever made in the Midlands this was an Anglo Saxon settlement of the 7th century a thriving community with more than 60 buildings anglo-saxon katholm would have looked very much like this villages where people raised livestock and grew crops we know from archaeological evidence that average life expectancy which is 30 with people facing not just the hazards of war and feuds but at risk from famine and epidemics as people abandoned Roman cities the lifestyle of this largely pagan literate people has left his stories with a challenge trouble is when the Romans left they took their stone building techniques with them and that meant when the anglo-saxons built they used wood and their buildings have long since rotted back into the soil what they have left are a few bits of fired ceramic this is a weight the weaving loom and this is a delicate handmade urn basically they didn't leave too many clues behind them this has left historians with a major problem how do you tell the story of this era with just a few occasional teasing glimpses into life in these long-forgotten kingdoms it's taking pieces of a puzzle you know you've got a thousand-piece puzzle and you've only got eight of the pieces that's the sense in which we've been working up until this point the discovery of astonishing weaponry in the Staffordshire hoard shown a new light on our anglo-saxon past the traditional view is that life in the Dark Ages was nasty brutish and short and it's this idea that everyone lived in huts and cobbles and really didn't have much quality of life that's why we get this term Dark Age associated with it but that's so far from the truth so can this find tell us more about in England divided among warring kingdoms in the center was Murcia a kingdom that stretched across the Midlands and a land with a reputation for aggressive warriors but archaeological evidence has been very thin on the ground with few finds of any significance we just had tantalizing glimpses the the artifacts we have covered the whole date range from the 5th to the 11th century but just one or two items but just a few pieces didn't really give us a full idea of how things were at that time you could use documentary material and you could use the fact that you've got saxon carve crosses and so on to put some flesh on to it but the human element was somewhat lacking in the summer of 2009 all that changed when a reluctant farmer from Staffordshire was finally persuaded to allow metal detectorists onto his land we'd had several requests in the past for people to come metal detecting and until the motorway was announced we never allowed anyone on and then a chapel ruining a club proud to me and he said you might as well let someone on now because he says anything there and the motorway takes it it'll be lost forever with any got a good point anyway I think 8 often came at the weekend and went all over the whole farm and they only found buttons and buckles what our thought was rubbish and then Terry approached me and I told him now several times bison because I didn't particularly like him anyway yeah yeah he come and asked me if we could come on this field specifically and I thought well he can't come to any arm down there and he won't find anything Fred couldn't have been more wrong metal detectorists teri Herbert not only struck gold he made the find of a lifetime I was working in the yard and he came up for mid-morning and he said sit down what's the matter with you sit down he said that's what's the man he saw soundeth I found a Saxon horde well I didn't I didn't believe him it wasn't until the archaeologists came on and I came and had a look myself that I realized wasn't found when the experts arrived the true extent of the horde started to become clear this was a find unlike anything they've seen before I was not really believing it because he'd sort of seen the odd piece like this in some of the some of the books but to have row upon row these things are just quite incredible so I think my first thought was very much you know how lucky the detector must have been to have found all this and they couldn't possibly be anything left to find so we got to the site and within seconds there was this large oval gold piece with garnets and it just sat there on the surface and we thought gosh this really is real isn't it normos within seconds of breaking the ground there's a piece after piece was coming up so we've got quite quite hectic just from right from the front from the dot you never really ever get involved in fines with sort of precious metals this is real sort of Indiana Jones type stuff the largest horde of anglo-saxon gold and silver ever discovered in britain has officially been declared as treasure it may have seen that the stuff movies were made of but this treasure trove of gold and silver was very real it was a fabulous find that would make Terry a wealthy man as he revealed in a rare interview at the time it came cordially shock actually but when the archaeologist was on that on the field the bond told me he came up to me and he said mr. danger this uses y'all end up being a millionaire and that happened and yes yes how much did he get altogether 1 million six hundred and forty two thousand and five hundred family Fred also got his share of the find but despite his sudden wealth he's carried on farming his land near Litchfield it's thought he may have brought the treasure near the surface when he had problems with his plow that year but he's still not claiming any of the credit I feel very lucky I think it's more luck than judgment that I actually ended up owning it you know no people have asked me if I feel proud but are nothing prides the right thing you can be proud of something you've done or something you've made something you've achieved but I think this is pure look it is a multi million pound discovery but their story ins the hoards real worth lies in what it can possibly tell us about our distant past we now have thousands more clues into anglo-saxon times pummels from the top of swords pieces of warrior helmet strange serpents and mangled crosses a boy's own collection of warrior bling and it captured the imagination of the world so you think that all metal detector even all banged up one no good you say man mate I'm going to be to use at six it's the biggest haul of anglo-saxon gold and silver ever found it comprises it's I never ever in my career thought I would be holding this kind of treasure it's it's the sort of thing you dream of I think the fact we made the lead item on the six o'clock news so it was a big hint that maybe things were going to be big it is the earth yielding up its treasure it literally came from the soil a staff of checkers deliberately put there it was removed from it 1,500 years later but it needs to keep those roots it's very big it's 1500 objects and it's 11 pounds of gold and God knows how much more silver it's a huge fine and I think if one were to do simple arithmetic this is a multiple of several times everything else that we've got from anglo-saxon England it wasn't just the press's appetite was insatiable the public we're also desperate to find out all they could that's incredible halt I've just think it's outstanding out of the quality of the work and the quantity as well this is I guess only a small amount of it but a very impressed it's absolutely fantastic it hasn't disappointed one little bit being brilliant a modulus I wear quite a thrill to have a look at it to be honest but it speak people were waiting for hours to come in and see horde to get 42,000 people through one gallery in a 19 day period is unequalled here I'm an astonishing and it was our experience of the blockbuster and it was wonderful the hoard was huge packed with beautifully crafted artifacts but what does it actually tell us can one lucky find really change our thinking about anglo-saxon England well before the hoard was found we already had some idea about what life was like in this period there really haven't been that many large anglo-saxon finds made in Britain about the biggest and best-known before the hoard was here at this incredible set of burial mounds at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk in the 1930s an archaeologist from the local museum excavated this mound here and in it he made a series of incredible finds find that gave us a stunning insight into a world that had previously only existed in legend the last remotely comparable find I mean normally you find a couple of brooches and this kind of thing if you're lucky the odd ring where you actually discover the royal ring of an anglo-saxon King which is pretty amazing and but this is the only thing that's comparable to it is the great discovery in the 1930s and call the Sutton Hoo ship which is in East Anglia the Sutton Hoo ship is a deliberate burial it's a wonderful ceremonial burial what they did it must be a king we think it's red wild the king of the East Anglian sand they dragged this great longboat up from the river they lay the Kings body there and this surrounded with these incomparable treasures and they dress it so he's got his great helmet on he's got his massive sword by his side Sutton who is it creation it's a grand ceremonial funeral is like something out of one of the sagas except usually in the sagas for example the death of Beowulf they deliberately destroy they it's a funeral pyre the thing is consumed with fire this was a burial so its preserved so that really is the English tomb of to tanker moon in Sutton Hoo we really have a idealized sense of the Hall in miniature for the afterlife so the King if we can say it's a king the deceased has been buried with everything they would need for the afterlife and what we get is a real glimpse of the life of the Hall in anglo-saxon times so we have drinking horns we have cauldrons we have everything they would need a lyre to play music on it's like opening a window onto the time in terms of looking at it as this this vibrant whole life this is this kingly or noble life of the Hall certain who may have been a significant find but such windows into the past have been few and far between for much of their understanding of this era scholars have had to rely on historical texts the anglo-saxon Chronicle Arushi compiled under the orders of King Alfred the Great of Wessex gives us one account of this time a further picture is painted by a man who may have been this country's earliest historian beed writing in the late 7 20 s the early seven 30s was the first to give shape to English history and he one has to imagine that he is writing in it in a vacuum he has to he in effect is the first person who determines the narrative of of English history in this very early period and so his contribution was was absolutely staggering and he he articulates that the whole of that period he characterizes the difference he identifies and characterizes the different kingdoms we see how they interacted with each other we see what made them tick we see all of these things for the first time in any kind of detail from Beat ecclesiastical history so it's it's the most extraordinary source but it has but it sees everything from a northumbrian perspective and we would dearly like to have other views of that period written from other parts of the country although there's debate about the balance and accuracy of these texts they are two of the most valuable sources we have for the anglo-saxon period but we also have one of England's most important poems written an old English somewhere between the 9th and 11th century bail tells of a warrior hero who set out to destroy a man-eating monster called Grendel in a story which captures many of the beliefs and attitudes of the time Gould Latini Angoon negative glittering gold spread on the ground the old dawn scorching Serpent's Den packed with gamma so rich literary sources like Beowulf bead and the anglo-saxon Chronicle along with wonderful if rare finds like Sutton who have given us an intriguing insight into life during the dark ages but there is one particular gap in our knowledge of these times a lack of literary finds from the biggest anglo-saxon kingdom of all Murcia immerseus fascinating because I mean we we don't have much in the way of documentary references to Murcia because what we have we have the anglo-saxon Chronicle which is really digging up Wessex it's all about how wonderful Alfred was and how wonderful Wessex was and we have beed venerable bead who has an agenda to say how wonderful Northumbria was we don't have an equivalent for Murcia what everybody said was the merchants were a violent rapacious lot he went around hunting shooting killing people they didn't get a chance to tell their side of the story but that's where the Horde could help it was discovered at the center of what used to be this huge Kingdom and it could give us more clues about how these mysterious merchants used to live so what can it tell us I've come to Tamworth north east of Birmingham a few miles from where the hoard was found we know that in the middle of the seventh century which is about when the hoard was buried Tamworth was at the very heart of mercy and royal power the mighty mercy and Kings would fight their enemies beating off invasion or trying to expand their empire and then they'd return here to Tamworth to sign treaties and charters and of course reward their loyal followers and warriors with gold and today Tamworth Castle stares down and what was the heart of this royal estate even before the Horde was found historians thought they had a pretty good idea of the importance of Tamworth and the kind of people used to live there the royal court wasn't a hoot the delicate people all wearing silk and satin imposing it was a warrior band the warrior elites surrounding the King lived and died with him if he succeeded they got pots of gold pots of lamb pots of women lots and lots of nice horses and life was great and if the King failed they died horribly yeah well actually we'd come out and up onto the tower you get a fantastic sense of the setting of Tamworth and why it was such a special place why it was so important I liked gorgeous it is stunning isn't it yeah and you can see the castles very strategic spot we're looking at all that would summon a tall this ground here don't we and of course the river crossing there Marian blockly is an archaeologist and an expert in anglo-saxon history for her the hoard is further proof of the wealth and power of Tamworth so this is a major British royal settlement is important as anywhere else in the whole of the modern UK definitely I mean I worked in Canterbury I worked in York and many other places and and I have this feeling poor town with it tends to feel neglected but actually it was exceptionally significant more charters were signed here at important times of the year at Christmas at Easter the royal court travelled round and term with was the place they wanted to be the hoard was discovered not far from where we're standing Marian likes to imagine it could be proof of a battle with Welsh warriors in the 7th century Midlands recorded in a later poem how many ideas hurt when I got there nearby 2 miles away was a battle famous battle and where two kings more vital and conklin were involved in a battle of the Britain's and it's possible as they fled that they may have taken the Horde with them and buried it hoping to come back sadly they were killed so I goes that's I'm Dylan of Palace allied himself to ruler called more villains ago they launched a terrifying raid against a settlement called kilo equate which some people think this today is literally the eyes were ruthless fighting was fierce and bloody many were killed as Muslim practice time they ransacked the town and they left with the spoils of war and the booty they've captured a kilo elite the battle was recorded and around the 9th century in a lament for one of the Welsh leaders before Luke quoits they triumphed there was blood beneath the Ravens and fierce attack glory in battle great plunder before kya Cluett quoits war vial to kit that's really rather wonderful isn't it to think that actually might be so yeah well it's very exciting that is quite exciting I mean I'm not saying it's true but you know it may well be this could be a rare teasing moment of clarity in a very murky history the trouble is that this poem was written around 200 years later than we can date anything in the horde and battles like this weren't exactly unusual turf wars were an everyday feature of anglo-saxon life we can understand it now I think better than it's ever been possible since because we have gangland culture back in Britain it's gang warfare and you know what happens is when you take over the territory of a rival gang the lot get bumped off usually in extraordinarily unpleasant ways a close examination of the Horde throws up more questions than answers there are definitely bits of weaponry which perhaps belong to high status warriors but they're also an extraordinary number of them especially the ornate pommels and so these are these are pummels for that for that top of the sword only that's right they're the highly decorative I mean the stunning thing is that there are more than 90 of these in this heart I mean I couldn't believe it you know I spent 30 years digging anglo-saxon sites finding one or two of these objects and to see some literally my jaw drop this quantity of swords is quite remarkable one possible explanation is that the Horde was part of a king's collection it may have been on its way to the palace here at Tamworth when it was somehow intercepted Tamworth was a royal treasury at that time Kings used to receive gifts of Harriet something known as Harriet that warriors elder men the important sort of middle-class people of the of the society at that stage would actually bequeath their most significant items of weaponry their best swords their best helmet to the king and often the King would then distribute high-quality swords back to their favored warriors so it sort of gives us a context for this group of objects it's possible it's possible and there's so many interpretation but it is possible that this group of objects which are mainly weapons with the exception of a few crosses were actually acquired by a king they were given to that King over a long long period of time and that King then redistributed them to his his most favored warriors or someone sort of pulled the heist against the king and and ran off it yes I mean that's a intriguing thing because it's been I mean there's all kinds of ways we can interpret the fact that it's been bent to sum the way the hoard is broken and twisted suggests it could record the very moment when it was taken perhaps as spoils from a bloody battle you look at it you look at that cross and you can see exactly what it once was you can see the moment it was crumpled you can practically see how the hands tore it off again I think it's a pommel where you could actually see some gem it off does that moment of action gets frozen forever the Horde also offers proof of the wealth of sections of this society this piece isn't actually from a sword it's a sort of guard where you'd have a single-sided stabbing knife called a C X oh I see it so but it's that almost this piece exactly yes it quickly it's the equivalent to this piece here but it would have been from a single sided solid gold a solid gold I mean yeah the owner of that must have been yeah I mean amongst the most rich and powerful man in the kingdoms surely yeah and if you look I mean its exquisite details the light catching it these gripping birds I mean it it is unbelievable beautiful the guys who wore and carried these these items of decorative jewelry were it's been they were described as the strutting peacocks they were this was their sort of show armour very little of this stuff shows any evidence of being you know hacked about in battle this was the stuff you wore on the parade ground in examining the hoard we come across another mystery we have a really interesting problem I think with the Staffordshire hoard in that you have all the attachments to weapons but there aren't these these sword blades and we read in in the literature about how finely wrought these things were from examples at Sutton Hoo you can see that these things were incredibly complicated to make the actual blades of swords and were very very prized so why weren't they deposited in this hoard what we may have here is that these elements of decoration are the sort of personalization was thought that the blade will be passed from one warrior to another their sword was their battle friend they gave names to this or will know about Excalibur my favorite sword Excalibur well these swords were symbolic of the power of a great warrior absolutely exquisite it's a work of art on a weapon for killing people quite incredible really yes one of the country's leading anglo-saxon experts from the University of Cambridge believes that looking at where the Horde was found beside an ancient Road close to Tamworth may help us to understand what it actually is to my mind as a historian the most remarkable thing about the Staffordshire hoard is the location of the find the hoard was found on the side of the Roman Road known as Watling Street now known as the a5 and that is very close to some of the other known recorded centres of mercy and power Tamworth is is very close by Litchfield where the bishopric of the merchants was established that also is very very close so it's found in the heartland of the kingdom of the mercy ins but equally it's found on the side of Watling Street which is the major road leading from the heart of the kingdom of the mercy ins down into London and onwards the fact that the horde is sitting there on Watling Street means in effect that it could have come from the south it could have come from East Anglia it could have come from almost any other part of Britain so one has then to look at the material itself and to see whether archaeologists and experts in 7th century metalwork and and art history are able to say more about the associations of the material once it has all been properly cleaned studied related to other surviving objects and so on what it would be nice to know is more about the circumstances by which the hoard got there you know is it some kind of ritual deposition is it somebody in a panic hiding it who never comes back for it and if you knew that you would then have a better sense of the significance of the road in that the landscape where the hoard was found could explain why it was buried here for decades modern traffic has passed by the site on what's now known as the a5 but which then was an important route between London and the Midlands in the anglo-saxon times this area would have been totally remote and almost silent quite unlike today with the Waterloo Street blasting grass the Watling Street was there in anglo-saxon times but the rest of the area was wood pasture it was woodland and Eastland open woodland because it was used probably early on the summer pasture by estates way to the west and to the east this area too was on a boundary but not an exact boundary but over to the West was the penka Ciutat tribe and to the east Tom's Theatre to folk regions in Murcia dr. della hook is a landscape specialist and she's come up with three major theories as to how and why the Staffordshire hoard came to be buried in this Midlands field close to Watling Street there are various suggestions that one could make about the hoard firstly the village over there is hammer which and the name means the hammer place the hammer settlement which suggests metalworking but on the other hand has nothing else been found in hammer which parish to suggest metalworking on a great scale just one little pendant and but the hoard wasn't strange because it was mostly gold so the second suggestion is that it was deliberately placed even below a Barrow but there was no body and as a sort of votive offering in a way when somebody Dahmer used you will you had to get rid in anglo-saxon times when gold was imbued with magic because ill-gotten gains had to be buried and it's just possible that it was buried there on this sort of frontier location between the two folk groups as a magical ritual like the one in Beowulf where the gold the Beowulf had taken was buried on his day the FRA glossary is an area which maybe HAP's be nearer to the truth isn't quite so exciting but he could just have been pushed into a hole near hillock which could be recognized again by someone fleeing along the Watling Street remember it was all a very small collection in one bag it would have been a heavy bag too and if someone was chasing them well they would stolen it from somewhere somebody's trophy collection they could have put it down there and just never been in a position to retrieve it because it's very close on this hill to the watling's trees some of these items have come from Northumbria some of them have come from Kent some have probably come from Scandinavia so so that's an interesting element were they looted as a result of battles by the merchants were they given to the mercian King as tribute by his sub peoples and we found them dismembered and bent now were they crammed into a box to be taken away and where they were located right beside Watling Street the location is very prominent but but also hidden and was somebody trying to escape from a battle were they trying to come away from the royal treasury at dam worth or where they're coming perhaps from the settlement at wall it looks most like as if it's some kind of treasure that has been recovered from a battle field I think the most telling thing to my mind about it quite a bit is not so much the sheer quantity as the the folded cross those other gold objects which which speak volumes I think for the context from which it came the Staffordshire hoard may also have something to teach us about trade those sparkling garnets which were discovered in their thousands in a muddy field with a jewel of choice for anglo-saxon warriors but where did they originally come from access to the sea allowed them to trade and bring in luxury goods from far afield bronze bowls from Egypt lapis lazuli from a single mine Afghanistan and amethyst pendants from India all found their way to these shores the Lindisfarne Gospels these richly decorated Christian manuscripts drawn on the island of Lindisfarne further up the east coast in the late 7th or early 8th centuries use a color red that can only be extracted from certain insects living in trees next to the Mediterranean these garnets probably came from India or Sri Lanka and we can do research on the I mean the fascinating it's very likely that very early on in the period large garnets came from India and Sri Lanka later on when the trade routes broke down they had smaller garnets which are coming from places like Portugal and Bohemia so you're looking at a remarkable international trade in this stuff globalization globalization until all the sort of end of the mid to late 7th century you don't have any formal trading sites but they do start to emerge in this period so the sites at London and Southampton and hips which they're engaged in very very extensive trade networks with northern Europe and down into the Frankish kingdoms as well and throughout the 5th and 6th centuries Western Britain was engaged in trade and down the Atlantic coast routes as well so you know people conceptualize this this period as a dark ages but actually that's that's really not fair you know it's a it's a society that is thoroughly engaged in all kinds of networks and contacts you know life keeps going and it keeps going at a fairly fairly good level desire for wealth and riches led to battles and around the time when the hoard may have been hidden Murcia had its sights set on expansion it had become one of the most feared kingdoms of Mercian Kings at this moment were the winners and so you see little kingdoms to the west bigger kingdoms to the east are sucked and absorbed first of all you roll Northumbria back then you take over lands tour towards Wales and the Welsh Marches then of course the merchants absorbed Kent London they swing over into East Anglia so you're creating this huge Middle Kingdom it's a period of unbelievable turmoil political and religious it's when England remember that isn't England tour England is yet to be invented the word barely exists instead though these rival warring anglo-saxon kingdoms that behave like the first the worst kind of takeover bidders in the city they sort of decapitate each other literally it has to be said not metaphorically they aggregate they come together they take over they destroy and Kingdom after Kingdom is swallowed up by the 8th 9th century Murcia is certainly the largest Kingdom geographically it covers the largest portion of the British Isles in that respect so what can the Horde tell us about the people who carved out the kingdom of Mercia we have very few records and those we do have are written by outsiders we know precious little about the kingdom of the merchants we we know the major figures we know that there was a figure in the first half of the 7th century called Pender who emerges quite clearly in the pages of B toklas yeah school history mainly as a fairly aggressive figure someone who was active against the Northumbrian who was also active in the East and in particular against the east angles and so we get the sense of Mercia as effectively a predatory power there out to to expand perhaps but most of all probably to to rage to to acquire treasure to acquire resources that they don't have in their own part of the country what many would like to believe is that the hoard could have belonged to one of the last great pagan kings Pender a man with a formidable reputation who went on to father a line of famous Mercian leaders he held on to the Old Religion at a time when many around him were turning to Christianity the timing might well be right Panda was a mighty Overlord who ruled Murcia during its early rise to power you mother stands at the time he was particularly ruthless he posed one king he killed two others he dealt with one particularly grisly way legend has it that after he defeated Oswald king of Northumbria at the Battle of maser field he had his disembodied arms and head stuck on stakes in the ground all to be Pender who is the famous king of Mercia Pinder is the king in the early 7th century of Murcia and he's fighting a huge program of expansion against Northumbria which had adopted Christianity quite early and to begin with he's immensely successful he defeats and peculiarly unpleasantly dispossess on it presumably in ritual sacrifice to Northumbrian kings and it will be lovely if this really is the monument of one of those battles Penda really doesn't get the recognition that he deserves in the texts because most of the history at this point is written down by the venerable bead he's a northumbrian and a Christian and therefore an enemy of this pagan mercian King the last of the pagan Ratheon Kings bead hates Penta because he defeats and does horrible things to northumbrian kings and there's there's there's and also of course he's the wrong side he is a pagan and and beed is a very great historian but great historians are not impartial biddies writing for a purpose the Horde has yet to give us any direct evidence of Pender but that's not to say the two aren't linked Pender was the one king who held out while everyone around him was converting to Christianity in 655 when he died fighting against his enemies Christianity consumed this final kingdom the conversion of Mercy England's last great pagan kingdom marked the beginning of a new era in English history and the Staffordshire hoard has held to shine a light on exactly how and when this transformation occurred one of the most intriguing finds in the hold was a piece of gold with an inscription from the Bible that may help us date a crucial turning point in our history the conversion to Christianity changed the whole fabric of our society bringing with it the written word and the rule of law but despite its importance to British history no one knows exactly how or when it came about litchfield has been an important religious Center since the early Christian days of Murcia and this book is the earliest documentary evidence of the religion in the Midlands this is the cathedrals greatest treasure and we call it the sin Chad Gospels we think it was almost certainly creatives to adorn Chad's shrine so Chad died in 672 so this book has been associated with this building for 1,300 years something like 1300 years the gospel and the horde date from around the same time a crucial turning point in the religious history of Britain and in the horde or a mixture of pagan and Christian symbols so with a mercy and who owned the Horde Christian convert or the last of the pagans or could the crumpled crosses and Latin inscriptions be the looted possessions of another defeated Christian enemy my hunch is that the hoard items gives us the last glimpse of pagan murcia and a gospel book like this the first glimpse of Christian Murcia you know looking at some of the symmetrical patterns and the floor pans some of the inlay on on the hoard goods is actually not totally dissimilar is absolutely part of the same cultural family the kind of the kind of interlacing and also the zoomorphic creatures in the in the decoration very reminiscent of some of the Horde oh yeah there's lots of animals depicted in the hoard and on here as well just beautiful we know that it was not uncommon for for monks and bishops to to be on the battlefield not necessarily as combatants more likely mostly as non-combatants and but but but bringing with them as it were and the power in which their army believed and this is interesting because this is a quote on here which actually refers to a sort of military activity yes it's a it's a Latin text from the Bible and from the Book of Numbers chapter 10 verse 35 and a translation of the text is arise Oh God and let your enemies be scattered let those who hate you flee before you and you can quite see why a kingdom a Christian Kingdom going into battle particularly against a pagan neighbor might want to inscribe exactly that text onto a cross that was being perhaps led to to lead the the Christian warriors into battle it's a very personal piece isn't it you can imagine someone clutching it yes you can you can you can usually go into battle and the fact that it ends up in a hole in the middle of mercy it means that perhaps the owner that Fiona didn't have the God on his side absolutely you got to feel that term that the universe was on the losing side that day yeah here the Horde throws up more questions than it answers this was a religious turning point but whose and rather than being the last pagans a largely Christian world were the merchants actually a bit of both subscribing to two religions at the same time just to make sure I think definitely we find in a number of anglo-saxon objects this idea of hedging your bets that we are talking about a transitional moment a spiritual transitional moment but also a cultural transitional moment so you have the protective talisman of the processional cross that that idea of carrying Christ into battle being protected by him and then you have these talismans these these serpents these traditional anglo-saxon battle beasts it's no peace-loving text this isn't you know love thy neighbor turn the other cheek thou shalt not kill it's none of that it is sword jade dominate rise up O Lord and let thine enemies be scattered those who hate thee be driven from thy face this is the church militant the church warlike of course Christianity adapting itself to context if you try and plant Christianity in a warrior culture it's got to assume the elements of a warrior culture so here you have more like pagans of fighting warlike Christians we shouldn't underestimate just how important the Horde is when it comes to telling the story of Britain's conversion to Christianity it's a story which was also sketched out in the Peak District by an amateur enthusiast in the 1800s well the Horde was dug up probably the most important anglo-saxon find ever made within the old kingdom of Mercia made by this man here Thomas Bateman whose tomb today sits surrounded by his beloved peak district landscape now the Victorian period this man was known as the Barrow Knight and he dug up around 200 some say even more barrows or burial mounds and the sight of his most important discovery just a few miles that way the anglo-saxons often reuse prehistoric barrows to bury their most important dead and it was in a grave that probably belonged to an earl or prints that Bateman uncovered one of the few helmets ever to be discovered opening a new chapter in the military history of a warlike people this replica of the helmet is in a Sheffield Museum along with the original files which archaeologists now believe come from the same period as the Staffordshire hoard and show a country on the cusp of moving from paganism to Christianity oh this is it this is where it was found you can see the round sort of ditch late in the middle here absolutely he finally found the remains of a helmet which had a bore on the crest and a silver cross set into the the nose piece remains of a leather cup which had two silver crosses on that are some iron chain and some disks that were from a large a bronze hanging bottle which would have been used for some ritual purpose whether it would be for drinking or hand washing we're not sure and you think that all signifies this was a man of some some stature oh yeah this is we call this a princely burial this is someone of really high status in this region I mean how important is what was found here well when it was found in the middle of the 19th century is incredibly important because it gave us really our first insight into the the anglo-saxons and Germanic culture in the in the pink districts and it showed us the ways in which the Mersin kingdoms have expanded into this region I don't think at the time the the find was as widely publicized as it might have been it disappeared into a provincial museum when it perhaps hasn't attracted the attention that it that it should have had but it still retained incredible importance even in the light of the discovery of the hoard what do you think that is interesting a little clues the bore and the cross or what didn't they signify well primarily the boar signals our strength courage aggression and these are the kinds of images that our warrior would want to portray themselves as possessing in the in the 7th century at the cross is obviously self-evidently a Christian symbol I don't think it's the case of hedging your bets between paganism and Christianity I think it's a perfectly appropriate I for a Christian seventh-century mango Saxon prinster to project his image with and besides conversion wasn't necessarily a permanent thing in anglo-saxon England it's sort of it's almost like an ebbing tide you know it comes into an area and then it might go away again in the seventh century conversion was very much a political act so if you were trying to convert an area you went straight to the top you went to the king you tried to get the King to convert so that's what you see in Kenton in East Anglia and sometimes it would suit those Kings to convert and so they would but then twenty years down the line it didn't suit them anymore and so they would revert so you do see some of these areas flip-flopping between Christianity and paganism and it's not really until the end of the seventh century that most areas of the country are consistently Christian so ever buried the Horde has left us with a snapshot of a moment in time when England changed forever but what other secrets might it still hold the painstaking process of cleaning examining and testing the hoard will continue for decades as archaeologists and scientists try to turn speculation into facts there's still an awful lot of analysis to do you know you can do lots and lots of technical analysis you can analyze the composition of the gold and the garnets and you might be able to get some dating evidence out of that you can do much more with the inscriptions you know looking for parallels for those and actually just analyzing the composition of the hoard itself we don't quite know what that hoard represents you know we don't know whether it's the aftermath of battle we don't know whether it's you know a king's treasury that's been taken captive on the road and buried in secret so we don't know why it got there we don't know when it got there you know it might tell us something very different if we know it was buried in 650 compared to if we knew it was buried in 750 so you know that dating of it is really going to be quite key in terms of understanding its significance Kevin Lee he the National finds advisor from the portable antiquities scheme has been responsible for cataloguing the hold one extraordinary collection but the other thing is they're very diverse but those sorts of different objects some of them I don't even know what they are almost a little bit neither do we in some cases this is part of the great great fun we've moved into new grounds on this material things that we've not seen before we always find that it's not the object you identify straight away that are going to give us the story it's the things that we don't know what they are does this piece over here which is truly remarkable beautifully decorated with garnets on three phases and that's a groove there that something would have gone in there yeah yes I mean I've speculated this it's the edging from a book so that's why this could be all sort of bent and shattered someone just ripped apart this jeweled book cover and it became someone's swag yes it's been torn off the cover though while a lot of the material is bent and broken there's been no systematic attempt to trash here row upon row of amazing artifacts give us a new understanding of the ways in which our ancestors lived I particularly like this material because of the strange scene shown on it they're made out of silver foil it's a technique that we call press black a German word for want of a better name in English there show scenes of processions of warriors you'll see the round shields and the spears these probably came from a helmet they were used in panels along the sides of a helmet we get that at Sutton Hoo amazing going into battle with these extraordinary images on the side of your helmet it's incredible and then there's this lovely thing this hold at the side of an anglo-saxon warrior who must have habitually rested his left hand on his sword and look at the polish on the top of that where the man's hand was resting on his most treasured possession that the hilt of his sword this all meant something to someone it's not art for art's sake there are stories and things in here what the Lord has laid bare here is the existence of a rich ruling class these weren't ignorant savages they were people with incredible wealth and skill who prized great beauty they would spend a lot of time in the company of their weaponry and so meditating and ruminating on the imagery and how the piece works and how one beast begins and another ends that's part of the beauty of them for their original audience as well the thing that strikes you as you look at them I think is twofold apart from the engineering it's first of all the amazing linear sense it's like art deco either art deco or perhaps art nouveau these wonderful sinuous curling animal tree plot particularly animal fighting fighting lions fish and twine they love serpents warlike serpents chewing each other winding themselves around each other's tails and so this is immensely powerful linear sense and you also have a craftsmanship in terms of the matching of gold and jewels which I think you've got to get to Faberge before you have anything is good I suppose the plain truth is isn't it really that after all the anglo-saxons are German so this is the origin it's a kind of BMW style engineering and which we unfortunately have grown out of but they still have to mate under the microscope it just you see even more detailed oh it's absolutely incredible we're now seeing this in greater detail than the person who owned it ever saw it it's phenomenal you've got carefully cut garnets laid into it intricate cells each stone carefully shaped and gone is a tricky material to work it's not a particularly rare stone but it can't be it can't be just sheared off like a slate if you want thin garnets you've got to cut them thin and then millimeter perfect aren't they into these I think they're all going to be cut into these special shapes and they've all got to be absolutely perfect modern-day jewelers say that we would need four times magnification to do the detailed work seen on the hoard as the animals had the two little ring like eyes you have to pinch yourself through myself how small is I mean how did they cut these shapes to fit so perfectly with a knee within the gold it's incredibly intricate this piece here it's mind-blowing the more you look at it the more incredibly comes that pattern of cells fitted together even more startling under H garnet you've got a small piece of waffle patent gold foil is to scatter the light back so that it glitters just like the reflectors on a motor car that's what we're seeing here yes when you get the measurements up on the screen it shows just how I mean it's just how small those I mean each one of those is point zero three of a millimeter across it's absolutely incredible something like this could have been worn by royalty itself I mean Penda the great mercy and King for example it could easily have been attached to him or his family I guess yes or one of the people that he sent into the next world this this is material that belonged to the losers not the winners and this could have been taken from Oswald of Northumbria or Edwin of Northumbria or sicker Bert of Kent we don't know its death it's dangerous to try and attach names to material like this but it's great for the discovery of warrior treasure has put a splash of color into our black and white view of 1400 years ago the traditional view is that life in the dark ages was nasty brutish and short and it's this idea that everyone lived in huts and and hovels and really didn't have much quality of life and that's why we get this term dark age associated with it but that's so far from the truth as I've traveled across the old kingdom of Mercia it's become clear to me just how important the discovery of the Horde really has been it shone a light into the Midlands of the Dark Ages revealing a powerful wealthy and sophisticated people who were a force to be reckoned with in the anglo-saxon world England remember isn't England poor England has yet to be invented instead though these rival warring anglo-saxon kingdoms they sort of decapitate each other literally it has to be said not metaphorically they aggregate they come together they take over they destroy and Kingdom after Kingdom is swallowed up in an amazing stroke of luck it's also captured a moment a turning point in our history when Britain became a Christian land my hunch is that the hoard items gives us the last glimpse of pagan Murcia and a gospel book like this the first glimpse of Christian Murcia as we found the discovery also raises as many fresh questions questions that scientists and historians will spend years trying to answer the Horde will have many more surprises for us and it may yet force us to reevaluate everything we think we know Oh

Channel: marionblockley

Views: 504,624

Rating: 4.7708459 out of 5

Keywords: Saxon, Hoard, Marion Blockley, Heritage

Id: 6ofCNSfF3vM

Length: 58min 56sec (3536 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

i'm not sure it helped my homework

[u/redthrawn]

FYI 11 pounds of gold is only worth about $250k in today's prices

[u/peter_marxxx]

Amazing craftsmanship

[u/alllie]

I suspect it's bent up from the plough.