THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 49
circumstances of its only partial recov-
ery. Its main allure may be as a caution-
ary tale—of a heist gone awry.
The investigation into the missing
coins continues. Last year, the Durham
Constabulary reported that, in raids of
several properties in the North of En-
gland, a silver ingot and a large num-
ber of Anglo-Saxon coins had been
recovered, including some minted by
Alfred the Great and Ceolwulf II. The
objects were collectively valued at
nearly seven hundred thousand dol-
lars. No other details of the raids were
offered, and the Durham Constabu-
lary recently declined to comment on
whether its find is connected to the
Leominster cache. But several people
with knowledge of the case told me
that the coins are, indeed, believed to
be part of the hoard—though likely
just a fraction of it.
In late July, Powell, Davies, and
Wicks successfully appealed the length
of their sentences. Powell’s prison term
was reduced from ten years to six and
a half, Davies’s from eight and a half
years to five, and Wicks’s from five years
to three and a half. (Ordinarily, Brit-
ish prisoners become eligible for pa-
role after serving half their sentence.)
But the detectorists will soon face more
legal troubles. Early next year, Powell
and Davies are scheduled to appear at
a “proceeds of crime” hearing, where
they will be held liable for the value of
the objects they are deemed to have
stolen. At the end of the Worcester
trial, Judge Cartwright said, “There are
hidden assets, by way of unrecovered
treasure, worth a very large sum—prob-
ably millions of pounds.” Should Pow-
ell and Davies be unable to restore the
hoard to Lord Cawley or to repay him
its equivalent value, they face the pros-
pect of even longer prison terms.
Any observer trying to reconstruct
what Powell and Davies did can make
only informed guesses—piecing to-
gether the narrative like an archeolo-
gist deducing the past from scant clues.
(Lawyers for Powell and Davies, citing
the ongoing litigation, declined to com-
ment for this article.) Gareth Williams
told me that he thought the detector-
ists were “determined to be clever, and
get one over on the system, and be
greedy.” Tim Hoverd, the archeologist
from the Herefordshire Council, the-
orized that the defendants may have
already had a habit of selling finds on
the black market, “but the amount that
they found this time was far too large
for them to cope with, and they pan-
icked.” Kevin Hegarty, the prosecutor,
suggested that, once Powell and Da-
vies realized that they had failed to get
Lord Cawley’s permission to scan on
his land, they found it impossible to re-
verse course. Hegarty told me, “I think
they had gone too far, and had dispersed
quite a large number of coins, and had
the money, and couldn’t get it back. It’s
a bit like comedy, in a way, where a
character tells a lie, and then has to tell
another lie in consequence of that, and
then he has to act out all the lies.”T
he Vikings left no written expla-
nation of why they buried hoards,
but historians believe that these depos-
its were generally intended to be stored
for brief periods. “The thinking is, prob-
ably, ‘We are going to be here for sev-
eral months, and I don’t trust all the
people I am with, so I am going to stick
it in the ground for safety, and pick it
up before we leave,’ ” Williams said.
“And then either something happens
to that individual, and he can’t come
back, or he comes back later, and he
can’t find it. Imagine using a tree as
your spot for location, and then a big
storm comes and blows the tree down,
or some other Vikings come along and
chop it up for firewood. It’s easy to
imagine circumstances in which they
couldn’t find what they buried.” This,
too, is an unintentionally comic sce-
nario: the Viking not as a ruthless ma-
rauder but as a hapless, unwis charac-
ter wandering a foreign landscape,
realizing with dawning dismay that his
fortune has slipped through his hands.
Hoverd, who climbed King’s Hall
Hill in the footsteps of whoever bur-
ied the treasure eleven hundred and
forty-odd years ago, told me that he
was attracted to an alternative expla-
nation, which didn’t depend on the
hoard’s owner having died unexpect-
edly, or having been unable to locate
or return to the spot. He cited an Ice-
landic saga that describes the law-giv-
ing of Odin, the powerful Norse god
who rules over Valhalla, the majestic
hall that welcomes Viking warriors
when they die. One of Odin’s laws statesthat whatever you put in the ground
will return to you after death. Were
these warriors actually burying things
with no intention of returning for
them—because, they thought, they
would get them back in the afterlife?
It’s a tempting theory but a prob-
lematic one, as John Naylor, of the
Ashmolean, explained to me. The text
that mentions Odin’s law-giving, the
Ynglinga Saga, wasn’t written until the
thirteenth century, by Snorri Sturlu-
son, an Icelandic poet and chieftain.
Snorri, as he is known, might well have
been committing to paper an oral tra-
dition dating back centuries. But it’s
also possible that Odin’s laws are an
elegant fiction devised by High Me-
dieval Scandinavians as a way to fill
the holes in their understanding of
their ancestors. The desire to arrange
perplexing material evidence into a
shapely story—a desire that motivates
detectives, archeologists, historians,
lawyers, and journalists—surely moti-
vated ancient Norsemen, too.
The most plausible, if unsatisfying,
resolution to the saga of Powell and
Davies is that the hundreds of other
coins in the hoard have been dispersed
on the black market, never to be re-
gathered. But it is possible to conceive
of another narrative—one in which
those hundreds of missing coins have
not been lost after all but have, in effect,
been reburied. In this version of the
story, the coins remain concealed in a
safe hiding place, in anticipation of
Powell and Davies’s eventual release
from prison. They have been stowed
away, awaiting the finders’ return to the
Valhalla of ordinary life.
If the Viking treasure has been re-
hidden, it will be a very long time until
it can be recovered yet again. Tim Hov-
erd, the archeologist, told me, “You can’t
do anything with it at the moment. Ev-
eryone will know where it came from.”
Given the coins’ dramatic discovery
and disappearance, their reëmergence
would immediately attract the atten-
tion of watchful authorities. In mone-
tary terms, at least, the Leominster
hoard has gone from being worth mil-
lions to being worth nothing. To Kevin
Hegarty, the prosecutor, there was one
obvious conclusion: “If you are sitting
on these coins, you may as well put
them back into the ground.”