46 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
valuable objects inside. “They didn’t
have the silver coins, and things like
that, that you’d expect from detector-
ists who went out on a regular basis,”
Reavill told me. There was certainly
no sign of a large cache of Anglo-
Saxon silver.
Davies gave the police an account in
line with Powell’s: the pair had recently
found just the three pieces of Saxon
gold and a couple of stray coins—all of
which they had declared to Lodwick.
When asked about the café meeting
with Paul Wells and Jason Sallam, Da-
vies claimed that he and Powell had
been lying when they’d said that the
coins were from a large hoard: Powell
had actually owned the coins presented
at the café for years, and the hoard story
had been concocted merely to help him
“get rid” of them.
A few weeks later, Gareth Thomas,
an officer with the West Mercia Po-
lice, visited Wells at home and dis-
cussed the encounter at the café. Wells
insisted that he, Sallam, and Davies
had agreed that the coins needed to be
declared, but that Powell had other
ideas. “George Powell was in it for the
money—that was obvious,” Wells said.
He also revealed that, some days after
the café meeting, Davies had asked him
to retain five of the coins for safekeep-
ing. Wells then showed the officer a
leather case for a magnifying glass. On
one side, the stitching had been un-
picked then glued back together: it was
a secret compartment. Wells opened it
up, and all five silver coins slipped out.
The police officer called his supervi-
sor to ask what he should do. Arrest
him, the supervisor replied. “I knew it
would come to this,” Wells said, as he
was taken to the station.
Late that summer, Tim Hoverd, the
archeology-projects manager for the
Herefordshire Council, was dispatched
to Eye to survey the territory. If, asPowell and Davies claimed, the items
had been scattered at different loca-
tions, that might mean the presence of
a significant new site: a Saxon ceme-
tery, religious settlement, or royal pal-
ace. But seasonal changes made clues
hard to come by. “By the time we got
there, most of the area was covered with
maize, which grows damn fast,” Hov-
erd told me recently. “It was way over
my head. And how do you find holes
people have dug two or three months
before when you can’t actually see the
ground?” Hoverd and his colleagues
paced the fields, dug multiple test pits,
and conducted an aerial survey by drone.
“It quickly became apparent that there
were no formal structures—no royal
burials—that this material could have
come from,” he told me.
Powell and Davies hadn’t yet been
charged with crimes, but the case
against them grew considerably stron-
ger in 2016, when a forensic examina-
tion of their mobile phones revealed
deleted photographs of glimmering
objects being extracted from the ground.
In addition to the jewelry, there were
hundreds of coins. In Davies’s original
interview with police, he had asserted
that he hadn’t taken his phone with
him to Herefordshire. After being con-
fronted with the photographs, he de-
clined to comment.
When Hoverd examined the deleted
images, he immediately keyed into two
snapshots of the landscape. “They were
designed to fit together,” Hoverd said.
“I went back to the field with copies of
the photographs and stood where they
must have stood to take them.” The
hoard’s location had been found—and
it was decisively within the borders of
Lord Cawley’s property. Nevertheless,
apart from the two dozen coins recov-
ered during the police inquiry, any larger
hoard had disappeared.I
n October, 2019, Powell and Davies
stood trial in Worcester, a city about
an hour east of Leominster. They had
been charged with theft and with con-
spiracy to conceal and convert criminal
property. Wicks, the shady coin dealer,
was charged with concealing and con-
verting criminal property, and Wells,
the retired builder, was charged with
concealment. All four denied the charges.
“This case, in two words, is about bur-“Let’s have a drink from the toilet, sniff around a little, and then leave.”