44 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
paper towels, were the three items of
gold jewelry: the bangle and the fac-
eted ring, both later confirmed to be
from the ninth century, and the crys-
tal orb, which is from the fifth or sixth
century. Powell seemed ignorant of the
objects’ provenances. Lodwick printed
a map of the area where Powell said
that the items had been found, and the
detectorists marked several spots on it,
claiming that the jewelry had been bur-
ied under a tree. When Lodwick later
checked the area on Google Earth,
there were no trees to be seen.
At the end of the meeting, Powell
and Davies showed Lodwick two sil-
ver Saxon coins, of a style known to
collectors as cross and lozenge. The
pair was worth perhaps forty thou-
sand dollars. Although the surface tint
of the coins suggested to Lodwick
that they had been buried together,
the detectorists insisted that they had
found one coin each, in separate fields,
thereby obviating any need to declare
them as treasure.
The next day, Powell returned to
the Leominster area and visited the
home of Mark Conod, the tenant
farmer, excitedly recounting to him
and his wife, Amanda, that on a recent
scan of their property he had found
some jewelry, which was now at a mu-
seum. He showed them photographs
and said, “There might be money in
this.” They all went outside, and, from
a distance, Powell pointed to indicate
that he’d discovered the items at the
top of the field belonging to Conod’s
mother, Yvonne.
That July, Reavill alerted the West
Mercia Police to the possibility of a her-
itage crime, and, because of the poten-
tial multimillion-dollar value of the al-
leged find, an investigation was launched.
Around this time, Simon Wicks, the
coin dealer, returned to Dix Noonan
Webb with nine equally remarkable
coins, which the auction house also took
into its custodianship. All the coins were
soon turned over to the police.
The next month, the British Nu-
mismatic Trade Association issued an
unusual warning to its members, stat-
ing that coins believed to be from an
undeclared hoard were sneaking onto
the market, and that buying any of
them would violate the Treasure Act.
On August 18, 2015, a little more thanboys. It needs to be declared. Tell them,
‘Don’t fuck around.’ ”
But Powell and Davies didn’t con-
tact the authorities, and nine days after
the discovery Powell travelled to a gas
station on the M4 motorway, which
connects South Wales with London,
and met with Simon Wicks, a coin
trader and a detectorist from Sussex.
Wicks has a blighted reputation, having
been convicted in 2014 of nighthawk-
ing. “He is, without question, not a
dealer,” Chris Martin, the chairman of
the British Numismatic Trade Asso-
ciation, told me. “He’s a vest-pocket
person who happens to buy things
from people, but doesn’t really know
what he’s buying, and doesn’t really
care what he’s buying. He could be
buying coins today, motorbikes tomor-
row, and old military-cap badges the
next day.”
On June 18th, Wicks went to Lon-
don and took seven of the coins to Dix
Noonan Webb, a blue-chip auction
house in the Mayfair area. James Brown,
a coin cataloguer there, later said, “One
coin like that would be an incredibly
lucky find. To have seven offered at
one time is really unusual.” It was ob-
vious to him that he was examining
objects from a hoard: such items are
exposed to the same soil composition,
and all seven coins featured rusty-
brown staining. Hoard coins often bear
a half-moon imprint indicating where
one coin has overlain another. Those
in the middle of a cache can be in al-
most pristine condition, having been
protected from soil exposure by sur-
rounding coins. Brown told Wicks that
he could not give a valuation on the
spot, and he retained the objects in a
safe on the Dix Noonan Webb prem-
ises. Later, Brown estimated that the
consignment of seven coins was worth
nearly four hundred thousand dollars.
Powell and Davies did make one
gesture toward legitimacy after receiv-
ing Peter Reavill’s e-mail. Two days
later, on July 8th, they went to the Mu-
seum of Wales to meet with Mark Lod-
wick, the Finds Liaison Officer with
whom Davies had often dealt. Usually,
Davies was chatty, but Lodwick noted
that on this occasion he seemed anx-
ious. Powell did most of the talking,
and at one point produced a plastic
takeout container. Inside, wrapped in
two months after their trip to Leomin-
ster, Powell and Davies were arrested.
Powell warned the police, “I ain’t gonna
make it easy.”I
t’s impossible to measure how much
of a role the black market plays in
archeological finds made by detector-
ists, but it isn’t hard to turn up dealers
who promise discretion. Nor is there
any shortage of collectors who, in their
eagerness to create a set of coins, may
be willing to overlook a sketchy prov-
enance or two. Coins are simple to
move around, including overseas, and
the fact that the Treasure Act permits
the retention of single-coin finds means
that a cunning detectorist, over a pe-
riod of time, might sell a number of
valuable coins one by one, without
drawing undue attention. But such an
approach is not foolproof. In 2017, a
detectorist from Norfolk, David Cockle,
was sentenced to a sixteen-month
prison term for theft, after selling off
a hoard of ten extremely rare Anglo-
Saxon gold coins, having previously
declared them as individual finds from
various sites around the U.K. Cockle
happened to be a police officer, a cir-
cumstance that likely added to the vigor
with which his case was pursued. Pros-
ecutions of rogue detectorists are un-
common, as criminal-investigation de-
partments contending with cases of
rape, murder, and armed robbery are
disinclined to dedicate their limited
resources to the disappearance of ob-
jects whose original owner might have
been dead for more than a millennium.
Powell told the police that he was
a longtime hobbyist, having started
metal detecting with his father. He in-
sisted that the gold he had handed in
to Mark Lodwick at the Museum of
Wales came from lands occupied by
the Conods, from whom he had per-
mission to detect, although he acknowl-
edged that he had not sought permis-
sion from the Cawleys—“Lord and
Lady of the Manor,” as he character-
ized them. Powell denied all knowl-
edge of a hoard of coins. “They are tell-
ing people I found three hundred coins,”
he said. “Why would I hand in the gold
and keep the coins?”
The homes of Powell and Davies
were searched. Both had display cases
containing finds, but there were no