THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 47
he hadn’t been happy with the idea
but had gone along with it. When He-
garty asked him what Powell’s moti-
vation for staging such a find might
be, Davies said only that Powell wanted
to “show off.” (Hegarty told me, dryly,
“He was never able to explain why you
would come all the way from Cardiff
to a piece of land in Herefordshire to
dig a hole, and put things in it, and
cover them up, and dig it up again.”)
Simon Wicks and Paul Wells also
denied any wrongdoing. Wells, who
was charged with the lesser offense of
concealing the five coins in his posses-
sion, explained that he hadn’t sought
to hide the coins inside the magnify-
ing-glass case—he’d just wanted to pro-
tect them. Some of his testimony must
have displeased Davies and Powell.
Wells insisted that he had urged both
men to declare the coins. After the café
meeting, Wells said, he had spoken with
Davies, who, indicating that there might
be a problem with the landowner, told
him, “I’m either going to be very rich
or spend a long time in jail.”
A turning point in the trial occurred
after Gareth Williams, the British Mu-
seum numismatist, explained that An-
glo-Saxon coins were struck by hand,
with a hammer on a die, and fashioned
by a named moneyer—Torhtmund, say,
or Hygered. As a result, such coins all
have minute variations that an expert
eye can identify. A photograph recov-
ered from Powell’s phone showed a Two
Emperor coin lying in what a finger-
print expert confirmed was Powell’spalm, taken the day after Powell and
Davies had made the find. Hegarty told
me, “Williams was able to look at the
Two Emperor in the photograph and
say, ‘No, that is not one of the coins that
has been recovered.’ So that proved
beyond any doubt that there were more
coins.” The recovered coins were too
fragile to bring to the courtroom—most
were less than a millimetre thick. Soied treasure,” Kevin Hegarty, the pros-
ecutor, said in his opening remarks.
The trial, which lasted for two
months, offered the jury and others
present in the courtroom an extended
seminar in numismatics and in Viking
history. Gareth Williams, the coin spe-
cialist at the British Museum, declared
on the stand that the hoard had almost
certainly been deposited sometime be-
tween the summer of 878 and the au-
tumn of 879, when the Great Army
fled northward from Wessex after Al-
fred the Great’s victory over Guthrum,
the king of the Vikings, at the Battle
of Edington, in what is now Wiltshire.
This battle, Williams explained, laid
the groundwork for the establishment
of England as a unified country by Al-
fred’s grandson King Athelstan, in 927.
Williams explained to me that while
the Vikings were on the move “they
would seize somewhere, normally ei-
ther a royal estate or monastery, and
stay there for the next few months, eat-
ing the food that someone’s gone to all
the trouble of gathering together.” Al-
though the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
doesn’t mention Leominster, its mon-
astery likely offered sustenance for a
band of Viking fighters during that
winter, before they moved on to settle
in East Anglia. The coins told the story.
The detectorists, however, offered a
different tale: there had never been a
hoard of coins. Davies testified that
their only finds in Eye had been the
gold jewelry and a few coins, and that
the dozen coins they had taken to the
café came from Powell’s own collec-
tion. Powell did not testify, but he ap-
peared surprisingly confident as he ar-
rived in court each day, chatting with
security guards as he passed through
the metal detectors. Hegarty, the pros-
ecutor, told me that Powell was clearly
the ringleader of the four men, and
“saw himself as a bit of a character.”
When Davies was asked to explain
the images recovered from his phone,
he offered a new twist to his story: the
image showing a large cache of coins
in the ground was actually a staged
photo. “George had the coins in his
rucksack, and he said he wanted to get
some provenance on them,” Davies
told the court. “He put some coins in
the ground, to make it look as if they
were found there.” Davies claimed that
Hegarty showed the jury slides of the
coins. “They were really beautiful,” he
recalls. The Anglo-Saxon kings looked
almost Cubist: Alfred the Great with a
large nose and deep-set eyes, Ceolwulf
II long-chinned and grimacing. He-
garty told me, “When you realize that
this is something that was handmade
twelve hundred years ago, you gasp.”T
he jury deliberated for two days.
On November 22, 2019, the four
men were found guilty on all counts.
The judge, Nicholas Cartwright, was
severe in his sentencing. Powell received
ten years in prison, Davies eight and a
half, Wicks five. Wells avoided prison
time but was given a suspended sen-
tence of twelve months. (Hegarty said,
“The jury was quite satisfied that he
had tried to conceal the coins, because,
literally, he had concealed them.”) Cart-
wright scathingly declared that the two
detectorists had been recklessly moti-
vated by greed. If they had only ob-
tained the required permissions and re-
ported the find to the authorities, they
would have been richly rewarded. He
told Powell and Davies, “You could have
expected to have either a half share—
or, at worst, a third share—of over three
million pounds to share between you.
You could not have done worse than
half a million pounds each. But you
wanted more.”
Not only had Powell and Davies sto-
len the hoard—the value of which, in-
tact, might have been anywhere be-
tween four million and fifteen million
dollars—from Lord Cawley, the judge
went on; they had cheated the public
of its heritage, and deprived residents
of Herefordshire of the illumination
the find might have offered about the
Kingdom of Mercia in the ninth cen-
tury. Another constituency damaged by
the plundering was the metal-detect-
ing community, where news of the con-
viction was welcomed on online mes-
sage boards. “I hope the law starts to
come down heavily on these lowlifes,”
one contributor posted. The hobby’s
reputation had been severely tainted,
and landowners would reconsider
granting permissions. “They’ve spoiled
it for the large percentage of genuine
detectorists,” another contributor posted.
“They’ll think we’re all a bunch of
crooks.” At the close of the trial, James