“Damn! We missed the fall-foliage display.”Tucker, the barrister for George Powell,
said, of his client, “It is clear, from his
point of view, he wishes he had never
found the treasure. It became a temp-
tation—and, for him, a curse.”
T
he spot where the Viking buried
the hoard, according to Tim Hov-
erd’s expert analysis, is in the corner of
a field just north of King’s Hall Covert,
the copse where pheasants are hunted.
A spring flows nearby, leaving the soil
often sodden. Aerial photographs and
topographical analysis indicate that this
was once a crossroads: one track con-
nected two local hamlets, Moreton and
Orleton; another, which fell out of use
two hundred years ago, descended from
King’s Hall Hill to the hamlet of Ash-
ton. It’s impossible to know for certain
whether Anglo-Saxons and Vikings
trod these paths, but it’s reasonable to
conclude that they were established
thoroughfares for centuries, and thattheir intersection provided a landmark
for anyone with something to hide.
In an almost unbelievable coinci-
dence, a similar Viking hoard was found
in October, 2015, just four months after
Davies and Powell made their discov-
ery in Leominster. A detectorist named
James Mather was scanning a field in
Watlington, in Oxfordshire, when he
came across what turned out to be hun-
dreds of coins, and also ingots and jew-
elry. Mather followed protocol to the
letter, informing the local Finds Liai-
son Officer as soon as he determined
that there was something unusual in
the ground, so that scholars could ex-
cavate the site. John Naylor, the Na-
tional Finds Adviser for Early Medie-
val and Later Coinage at the Ashmolean
Museum, in Oxford, told me that when
he examined the Oxfordshire coins, a
few days after their extraction, he was
amazed to see several Two Emperor
coins featuring the visages of King Al-
fred and Ceolwulf II. “It really rein-
forces the case that Ceolwulf was ac-
cepted by Wessex as the Mercian king,”
he told me. Press accounts described
the Watlington hoard as having rewrit-
ten British history. The Ashmolean,
which acquired the hoard for $1.75 mil-
lion, now has it on prominent display,
with signs citing James Mather’s con-
tribution to its recovery.
Three years ago, more than a thou-
sand people in the Watlington area at-
tended local events in which Ashmolean
curators talked about the hoard. “That
is the side that the public has really
missed out on in Leominster,” Naylor
said. “The interest and excitement have
been taken away.” Despite the fact that
the Leominster hoard was discovered
first, the Watlington hoard has stolen
its thunder, reducing it to a footnote in
the ongoing reëvaluation of Anglo-Saxon
political history. For the time being, the
Leominster jewelry and several of the
coins have been put on display at the
British Museum, in a gallery featuring
recent archeological finds; visitors have
been able to see up close the chunky
gold ring, the slender armband, and a
handful of coins that look as thin and
delicate as if they had been punched
from sheet metal. The county museum
in Hereford still hopes to acquire the
Leominster hoard, but any display of it
will inevitably be colored by the botched