38 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
LETTER FROMTHEU.K.
MONEY PIT
Two metal-detector enthusiasts discovered a Viking hoard. It was worth a fortune—but it became a curse.
BY REBECCAMEAD
L
eominster, in the West Mid-
lands area of England, is an
ancient market town where the
past and the present are jumbled to-
gether like coins in a change purse.
Shops housed in half-timbered six-
teenth-century Tudor buildings face
the main square, offering cream teas
and antiques. The town’s most lurid
attraction is a well-preserved ducking
stool, a mode of punishment in which
an offender was strapped to a seat and
dunked into a pond or a river while
neighbors jeered; the device, last em-
ployed in 1809, is now on incongru-
ous display inside the Priory Church,
which dates to the thirteenth century.
Christianity has even older roots in
Leominster: a monastery was estab-
lished around 660 by a recent convert,
the Saxon leader Merewalh, who is
thought to have been a son of Penda,
the King of Mercia. For much of the
early Middle Ages, Mercia was the
most powerful of the four main Anglo-
Saxon kingdoms, the others being
Wessex, East Anglia, and Northum-
berland. In the tenth century, these
realms were unified to become the
Kingdom of England. Although the
region surrounding Leominster (pro-
nounced “Lemster”) is no longer offi-
cially known as Mercia, this legacy is
preserved in the name of the local
constabulary: the West Mercia Police.
On June 2, 2015, two metal-detec-
tor hobbyists aware of the area’s her-
itage, George Powell and Layton Da-
vies, drove ninety minutes north of
their homes, in South Wales, to the
hamlet of Eye, about four miles out-
side Leominster. The farmland there
is picturesque: narrow, hedgerow-lined
lanes wend among pastures dotted
with spreading trees and undulating
crop fields. Anyone fascinated by the
layered accretions of British history—
or eager to learn what might be bur-
ied within those layers—would find
it an attractive spot. English place-
names, most of which date back to
Anglo-Saxon times, are often reposito-
ries of meaning: the name Eye, for ex-
ample, derives from Old English, and
translates as “dry ground in a marsh.”
Just outside the hamlet was a rise in
the landscape, identified on maps by
the tantalizing appellation of King’s
Hall Hill.
Powell, a warehouse worker in his
early thirties, and Davies, a school cus-
todian a dozen years older, were expe-
rienced “detectorists.” There are ap-
proximately twenty thousand such
enthusiasts in England and Wales, and
usually they find only mundane detri-
tus: a corroded button that popped off
a jacket in the eighteen-hundreds, a
bolt that fell off a tractor a dozen years
ago. But some detectorists make dis-
coveries that are immensely valuable,
both to collectors of antiquities and to
historians, for whom a single buried
coin can help illuminate the past. Scan-
ning the environs of King’s Hall Hill,
the men suddenly picked up a signal
on their devices. They dug into the red-
brown soil, and three feet down they
started to uncover a thrilling cache of
objects: a gold arm bangle in the shape
of a snake consuming its own tail; a
pendant made from a crystal sphere
banded by delicately wrought gold; a
gold ring patterned with octagonal fac-
ets; a silver ingot measuring close to
three inches in length; and, stuck to-
gether in a solid clod of earth, what
appeared to be hundreds of fragile sil-
ver coins.
The find had all the hallmarks of a
hoard—the term used by archeologists
to characterize a collection of valuable
objects that was deliberately buried or
hidden, usually with the idea that it
would later be retrieved. The Vikings,
whose name means “raiders,” began
making plundering incursions into
Anglo-Saxon Britain from Scandina-
via in the second half of the eighth
century. Although the Vikings did not
use coins as a form of currency, they
had a bullion economy—the trading
of metals, based on weight and pu-
rity—and appreciated coins as porta-
ble forms of wealth. They coveted sil-
ver, which was not mined in their own
lands; gold was even more prized. To
obtain these precious metals, the Vi-
kings stole or requisitioned the con-
tents of Anglo-Saxon monastery vaults,
which often included finely worked
silver or gold, and chopped them into
pieces, for purposes of trade—arche-
ologists call such fragments hacksil-
ver or hackgold—or melted them into
ingots, for ease of weighing. A Viking
hoard typically contains these forms
of metal, and also coins minted by the
Anglo-Saxon kings whose lands they
had invaded.
Powell and Davies snapped a few
photographs while their discovery was
still embedded in the soil, then took
more pictures after removing some
of the dirt and laying the treasures
out on a white plastic shopping bag.
They also took photographs of the
field where they’d made the find, so
that they could locate the spot on a
return visit.
Such technology would have been
extremely useful to the Viking warrior
from Denmark who, more than a thou-
sand years earlier, had buried the valu-
ables, probably to protect them from
theft. That anonymous invader, who
would have been gathering spoils as a
member of the Great Army, which pro-
gressed through the Anglo-Saxon king-
doms in the 860s and 870s, would have
had to make do with rudimentary re-
minders of where he’d hidden the stash:
twenty paces to the left of that foot-
path, halfway between those two trees.
Historians of England contend that
the difficulty of accounting for where,
exactly, something important has been
