We were in a book-lined study room in the British Museum, behind one of those mysterious locked doors in the galleries through which curators are occasionally glimpsed emerging or disappearing as they go about their business. Hobbs took the Great Dish out of a drawer, unwrapping it from layers of tissue paper, and placed it on a table. It caught the light from the window behind us, and seemed to illuminate the whole room. It appeared larger, a more hefty physical presence, than when I had seen it in its glass case. Hobbs explained how its intricate decoration had been made by a craftsman pushing the metal into shape with chasing tools. Wearing cotton gloves, we traced the scenes with our fingers.
At the centre was the face of a sea god, with dolphins sprouting from his hair and beard. Around him circled a playful, erotic scene of sea creatures cavorting with naked nymphs, all edged with a row of scallop shells. Here were fishtailed tritons; a hippocamp, a creature that was half fish, half stag; a merman with a snapping lobster claw protruding from his groin instead of a penis. The decoration was exquisitely detailed: the scales on the fishtails were individually rendered, even the hair on the aureoles of the men’s nipples carefully suggested. The largest scene ran around the edge of the dish. Here Bacchus, with his emblematic panther, leaned on his thyrsus, while deep-browed Silenus, the satyr, held out his bowl to the god. Hercules – his lionskin and club lying next to his feet – staggered drunkenly. A naked youth played the double pipes while a maenad threw her head back as she danced, the fine fabric of her dress swirling behind her and catching against the flesh of her thigh. All was movement and clamour and the wild, abandoned worship of the god.
The discovery of the Mildenhall Treasure is one of the most notorious sagas in twentieth-century British archaeological history, trailing unsolved puzzles and igniting conspiracy theories. Hobbs has researched its history, sifting through documents and correspondence and interviewing the protagonists’ surviving relatives. It was Dr Hugh Fawcett, an amateur antiquary from Buckinghamshire, who first alerted the British Museum to the existence of a number of ancient objects that he had seen at Easter 1946 in the home of a fellow enthusiast, Sydney Ford, who ran a small but successful contract ploughing firm in Suffolk. Fawcett, aware of the law of treasure trove, which obliged finders to declare precious-metal finds to the authorities, had urged Ford to report his discovery. This, with enormous reluctance, Ford eventually did – not before claiming that ‘I don’t feel I have committed a crime by picking up something of value off my land.’ This apparently simple statement was not the least of a number of obfuscations perpetuated by Ford. In actual fact, he had not himself discovered the hoard: that had been done by one Gordon Butcher, who had struck the silver with his plough one January afternoon in 1942 and had immediately summoned Ford. Nor was it ‘my land’: the field in question, at least according to the location that Ford finally pinpointed, belonged to one Sophia Aves, whose tenant was one Fred Rolfe, who contracted Ford to do the ploughing, who had employed, on this occasion, Butcher to drive the tractor.
In July, an inquest was held at Mildenhall police station. A photograph from the Bury Free Press & Post shows two local coppers unloading the silverware from the boot of their police van with considerably less ceremony than was apparent in Hobbs’s cotton-gloved handling of the Great Dish. Giving his evidence, Ford told how he and Butcher had dug up the objects and put them in a sack before he, Ford, had taken them home. He said he thought they were pewter. (Had they been, treasure trove legislation would not have applied.) Butcher’s involvement in this process was unelaborated. The objects were ‘all black and very dirty with a thick crust’, Ford told the coroner. Over the years after the discovery, he gradually cleaned them up – the platters, the dishes, the spoons with their chi-rho engravings. It took him nearly two years to complete his work on the Great Dish, and British Museum scientists think that he may have used a blowtorch to help clean off the encrusted grime. The fact that precise records were not taken of how the objects lay in the ground, as well as Ford’s crudely amateur cleaning, means that countless details about the hoard that could have been gathered from a slow, careful excavation have been lost for ever. In the end, Butcher and Gordon were each awarded £1,000 compensation for the hoard – a sum substantially less than the silver’s market value, to reflect its illicit four-year concealment.
After the inquest – at which the hoard was duly declared treasure trove and thus, under normal practice at the time, the property of the British Museum – a report of the discovery appeared in the Times. The young writer Roald Dahl saw the article and, as he recalled thirty years later, ‘leapt up from my chair without finishing my breakfast and shouted goodbye to my mother and rushed out to my car’. He drove his nine-year-old Wolseley the 120 miles to Mildenhall along ‘small twisty roads and country lanes’. There he found Butcher’s cottage, and knocked on the door. Butcher told him he was fed up of reporters; but Dahl explained that he was a short-story writer. ‘I went on to say that if he would tell me exactly how he found the treasure, I would write a truthful story about it,’ recalled Dahl. Butcher agreed to be interviewed, but later that day, when Dahl went to see Ford, the door was closed in his face. ‘But by then I had my story and I set out for home … I wrote the story as truthfully as I possibly could.’
Dahl published his story in a magazine, and thirty years later included it in his collection The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. As may be expected from the nature of his encounters, the narrative strongly favoured Butcher as the hero of the piece – a man whose simple honesty had caused him unthinkingly to hand over the treasure to the crafty Ford, who by contrast had a ‘clever foxy look about his face’ and a ‘mouth that never smiled’. None the less, Hobbs believes there is no particular reason to doubt the details Dahl gives about the discovery itself: the plough set to make especially deep furrows for the planting of sugar beet rather than wheat; the share hitting something in the ground that turned out to be a piece of metal; Butcher’s summoning Ford and then the two men working, as twilight fell, to uncover all thirty-four pieces while a blizzard whirled around them and six inches of snow fell. But Dahl gave particular texture to the two men’s final encounter that night, with Ford grasping the sack of booty like a child ‘closing his fingers over the biggest chocolate éclair on the plate’, and saying, ‘Well, Gordon … I don’t suppose you’ll be wanting any of this old stuff.’ At this distance, it is impossible to tell how much Dahl embroidered this event to suit his own narrative needs. There is clearly a paradox in his insistence that he was ‘not a reporter’ but a writer of fiction who would tell the tale ‘as truthfully as possible’. He uses this phrase twice, in his memoir about writing the story, perhaps protesting too much.
Dahl’s implication was that Ford was a villain. And yet it seems unlikely that this was, in any straightforward sense, true. Ford treasured the Roman silverware – aside from the years he spent cleaning it, there are photographs in existence that show the Great Dish and some of the smaller vessels in pride of place on his dresser. According to his grandson, the Great Dish was used as a fruit bowl at Christmas, piled high with apples, oranges, pears and nuts; and Ford used one of the spoons every day for his breakfast and dinner. He clearly loved the objects: it is just that he wanted very badly to keep them for himself. On the other hand, his concealment of the hoard, his failure to declare it until virtually forced to do so, and his inconsistent, dishonest accounts of its discovery have greatly added to the mystery that surrounds the objects. Some people have doubted, for example, whether he handed over every single piece of the hoard – there was some later talk of coins, which never materialised. As for the precise spot where the treasure was found, it has never been satisfactorily established. When the respected local archaeologists Gordon Fowler and Thomas Lethbridge attempted to excavate according to Ford’s sketched map and instructions, they found nothing, except for three pieces of late Georgian base metal – the handle of a tureen, the lid of a water jug and part of a teapot – all of which had the a
ir of having been planted there with intention to deceive, or mock. They never found any trace of the hole that Ford and Butcher said they had dug.
Had there been foul play? Conspiracy theories abounded. One – to which Lethbridge and Fowler became strongly attached – concerned another local mystery. In the 1920s, a Suffolk solicitor had received a letter from Canada claiming that at some time in the 1860s a hoard of treasure had been buried in a field near Mildenhall by a shadowy figure called ‘Black Jack’ Seaber. The solicitor instigated a search, but found nothing. Fowler and Lethbridge eventually came to the conclusion that Ford had himself secretly worked out the burial place, and waited several decades before digging it up for himself: the Mildenhall Treasure and ‘Black Jack’ Seaber’s hoard were one and the same. Others speculated that the hoard was in fact war loot, flown from Africa or Italy to the air-force base at Mildenhall, and then buried in Rolfe’s field. This was, it seems, a not infrequently expressed suspicion in archaeological circles immediately after the war, partly because the objects seemed to bear no traces of damage from a plough (in fact there is a dent in the footring of the Great Dish, and other damage to the objects, that very likely is the result of having been so struck). This theory was also fuelled by a notion that late Roman Britain was too backward and poor to have contained anything so spectacular as this elaborate silverware. Hobbs rejects these conspiracy theories; but the mysteries that cling to the Mildenhall Treasure – as to so much about the dying days of Roman Britain – may never be quite resolved.
There is a painting by John Everett Millais called The Romans Leaving Britain, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1865. In it, a fierce, pale-faced, bare-footed young woman sits in a landscape that is recognisably the chalk cliffs of the Sussex or Kent coast. She is in profile; she stares fixedly into the middle distance, and her hair is a cloud of auburn. Kneeling at her feet, his face in her lap, and his arms clasped around her waist, is a dark-skinned man dressed in Roman armour. In the distance, other soldiers can be seen heading down to the beach; boats embark from the shore. Millais’s painting is a heartbreak story – lovers wrenched apart. It is also a narrative of two people who are utterly unalike: the Celtic girl, with that ivory skin and rosy blush, kissing goodbye to her foreign lover, the soldier with his southern colouring. The myth that the ‘Romans’ were, after 400 years, a distinct layer of people, probably Italians, who left en masse in AD 408, has been remarkably persistent. In reality, in the fifth century all free men of Britain were citizens of Rome; and though it is conceivable that some officials may have left the province, any idea of some mass exodus should be put aside. In addition, the numbers of actual Italians in British civil or military administration at this point in history will have been tiny. As we have seen, ‘Romans’ were drawn from all parts of the empire, anywhere from Gaul and Germany to Greece and Gaza.
But then the end of Roman Britain is a shadowy, half-understood borderland, the explorers of which are apt to see phantoms and conjure ghosts. If classics-mad authors of the eighteenth century, such as William Stukeley and Sir John Clerk, saw an unbroken line of inheritance between the ‘civility’ of the Romans in Britain and the civic virtues of their own day, then others have regarded the collapse of Roman rule – and the subsequent silence of the sources – as a tabula rasa, preparing the ground for the real start of British history, or more precisely, English history. The ‘departure’ of the Romans, and the loosening of the chains that bound slavish Britannia to the empire, has, in some minds, created the blank page on to which the doughtily Germanic Anglo-Saxons might now burst unencumbered – ready to take up their position as the originators of the English nation, the creators of its earliest institutions, the harbingers of its monarchy, the ancestors of a firmly northern race, and the founders, via Augustine’s mission in 597, of its Church.
In 1841, in his inaugural lecture as professor of modern history at the University of Oxford, Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School, argued that ‘our history clearly begins with the coming over of the Saxons; the Britons and Romans had lived in our country, but they are not our fathers; we are connected with them as men indeed, but, nationally speaking, the history of Caesar’s invasion has no more to do with us, than the natural history of the animals which then inhabited our forests.’ He added: ‘We, this great English nation, whose race and language are now overrunning the earth from one end of it to the other, – we were born when the white horse of the Saxons had established his dominion from the Tweed to the Tamar. So far we can trace our blood, our language, the name and actual divisions of our country, the beginnings of some of our institutions.’ Modern history, he argued, was a biography of the living, and the Saxons, through a direct blood inheritance, were indeed living still. ‘Beyond, it is but the biography of the dead,’ he said. According to this formulation, Roman Britain has nothing to say about our island story. It is a specifically Anglo-Saxon, English polity that has mattered: it has subsumed the identities of the other nations of Britain, and forged their joint destiny: the creation of empire. In the wake of the break-up of that empire, it is no wonder that, lacking this sense of common purpose, Great Britain seems to be fracturing into its constituent nations. But no one talks about where the idea of Britain was first recorded – an island sighted across a grumbling grey ocean by traders and invaders long before the Scots and the English sailed to it across the western and eastern seas.
Seven years before Arnold delivered his lecture, the medieval Palace of Westminster, which had been remodelled in the neoclassical style by Sir John Soane, burned down. The young Gothic architect and designer Augustus Pugin was among the crowd that watched, a little in dread and mostly in wonder. (Turner was among the spectators too, later producing a vivid sequence of watercolours depicting the disaster.) For Pugin, there was ‘nothing much to regret & a great deal to rejoice in’ at the destruction. ‘A vast quantity of Soanes mixtures & Wyatts heresies have been effectually consigned to oblivion, oh it was a glorious sight …. the old walls stood triumphantly amidst this scene of ruin while brick walls & framed sashes slate roofs etc fell faster than a pack of cards.’ In the years of reconstruction, a Fine Arts Commission was set up by Prince Albert to encourage the kind of national history painting that might be commissioned for the new building – which, under Charles Barry and Pugin, was to be rebuilt in the Gothic rather than neoclassical style, emphasising the notion that the origins of English civil institutions were in the nation’s medieval and Anglo-Saxon past and effacing any notion of a classical inheritance. A series of competitions was held: for the first, in 1843, nineteen designs relating to Roman Britain were entered, including George Frederick Watts’s painting of Caratacus led in chains through Rome. Eleven scenes of St Augustine and Ethelbert were received; and thirteen depicting incidents in the reigns of the first three Edwards. The prizewinners included Watts, as well as Edward Armitage for his Caesar’s First Invasion of Britain and H. C. Selous for his Boadicea Haranguing the Iceni.
In the end, however, despite the early enthusiasm among artists for Romano-British subjects, not a single fresco depicting Britain’s Roman period was executed. A scene of Boudica and her troops was commissioned from Daniel Maclise for the Royal Gallery, a great chamber that was to be lined with battle scenes. But Maclise’s contract was cancelled after the completion of the first two works, on the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Another series of scenes that touched on Romano-British history – though almost determinedly not from a Roman point of view – also remained unexecuted. This sequence, intended for the Central Corridor of the palace, was meant to draw attention to a contrast between ancient Britain, ‘sunk in ignorance, heathen superstition and slavery’, and enlightened, Christian Britain, ‘instructing the savage, abolishing barbarous rites, and liberating the slave’. It was to begin with the ‘Phoenicians in Cornwall’ and continue, via ‘A Druidical Sacrifice’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon Captives Exposed for Sale in the Market-place of Rome’, to ‘Cook in Otaheite’, ‘English Authori
ties Stopping the Sacrifice of a Sutee’ and ‘The Emancipation of Negro Slaves’.
One could put it down to chance that no scenes from Caesar or Tacitus decorate the Houses of Parliament. If Maclise had chosen to paint his martial series in chronological order, then perhaps the monarch would process past a scene of Iceni valour, rather than of Nelson’s death, as she opened Parliament. As it is, there is neither brave Briton nor glorious Roman. Instead, Saxon kings are converted to Christianity, Shakespearean heroes play out their stories and Good Queen Bess reigns again. Boudica must drive her chariot towards the Houses of Parliament from Westminster Bridge; she will never storm it. In a building whose fabric was conceived as an expression of national virtues and history, Britain’s four centuries in the orbit of Rome were felt to have nothing to say.
Perhaps the problem is, and has been since antiquity, that Roman Britain is too jagged and unsettling and ambiguous to be pulled into line. It will never settle into telling us one thing: it will just as soon tell us the opposite. Like Edward Nicholson’s lead tablet, plucked from the goddess’s sacred spring at Aquae Sulis, Roman Britain can be read well enough if you stare at the traces. Turn it around, though, and it will offer another story.
One cloudy early summer day I went back to Sussex, this time to Pevensey Castle, one of the Saxon shore forts, built in the late third century. Like Burgh Castle, its vast expanse is circled by thick flint walls still standing to their original Roman height. Not far from here, Puck of Pook’s Hill appeared to the children of Kipling’s story, and brought them tales of a land formed by Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans: a land drenched in old magic, whose ‘windy levels’ and ‘stilly woods’ held the scars of ancient battle, and were marked by the tread of gods.
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