Though nothing securely datable has been identified so far from the Staffordshire Hoard, help with dating has been provided by comparisons with the objects from the Sutton Hoo burial, which can give a rough date range mainly because of the coins found alongside them. Anglo-Saxon specialists believe the items in the Staffordshire collection range in date from the late sixth century AD to the beginning of the eighth century AD, and were originally buried in a wooden or leather container, within a pit. Something that became apparent to scholars of Anglo-Saxon England as soon as the finds from the hoard had been categorized was what was missing from a typical hoard of the period: There are no domestic items, such as vessels or eating utensils in the hoard, and no objects that can be associated with women, such as dress pins, brooches, and pendants; there are also no sword or knife blades, no recognizable harness fittings, no coins, no Anglo-Saxon iron, and the large masculine gold buckles commonly found in male Anglo-Saxon burials such as Sutton Hoo are completely absent.
Furthermore, although the find spot of the hoard is next to the Roman Watling Street (modern A5) and just a couple of miles from the Roman town of Letocetum, not a single find from the Roman period was recovered by Terry Herbert or by archaeologists during the excavations. Another surprising feature of the Staffordshire Hoard is that it is largely made up of military items, primarily high-quality fittings that have been removed from the hilts of swords and daggers. Dr. Kevin Leahy, former curator at North Lincolnshire Museum, has theorized that the gold fittings may have been removed to depersonalize the objects, removing the identity of the previous owners; the iron blades of the weapons may have then been reused. Another point noticed by experts is that some objects in the hoard are unique in terms of Anglo-Saxon artifacts and have no known parallels. The conclusion can only be that the items in this incomparable collection were carefully chosen, but for what purpose remains a mystery, though the possibility remains that the hoard was only part of a larger assemblage of artifacts, the rest of which is yet to be discovered.
11.2. A selection of pieces from the Staffordshire Hoard. Photo by David Rowan, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license on Wikipedia.
What of the origins of the items in the hoard? Were they made on the continent, locally in Mercia, or in another kingdom of Anglo-Saxon England? And where did the raw material come from? The Staffordshire Hoard Conservation Project, an integrated research and conservation program based at BMAG, has been researching the items in the hoard, but it is still early days. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the origins of the gold used to manufacture so many of the objects in the hoard will ever be traced. Gold is such a valuable material that it is constantly being melted down, and afterward is frequently mixed with other gold and fashioned into new objects. Once this has happened it is not possible to say where any of the gold originally came from.
If the gold objects in the Staffordshire Hoard were created from melted-down objects, one intriguing possibility, put forward by Dr. David Symons, curator of antiquities at BMAG, is that the gold may have been sourced from the rich Byzantine Empire; gold Byzantine coins have been suggested as one possibility. In July 2011 Graeme McArthur at BMAG analyzed two gold items from the hoard using X-ray fluorescence and discovered that they contained 94 percent gold (around 22 carats), much higher than the majority of modern gold. In November 2011, a number of items from the hoard were sent to the Louvre in Paris for scientific analysis. The garnets from the collection were subjected to particle-induced X-ray emission, Raman spectroscopy, and X-ray fluorescence at the EU-funded CHARISMA project. The results were interesting, to say the least. The chemical composition of the gemstones indicated that the majority of the small deep red examples came from Bohemia (a historical region occupying the western part of the Czech Republic), whereas others originated in eastern India or Sri Lanka. The fascinating conclusion from these tests is that the garnets would probably have arrived in England through Roman trade networks.
The questions of who deposited the hoard, when, and why are still in the process of investigation. But there are a few theories worth mentioning. One theory, that the objects were deposited as a bullion hoard, can be discounted, as one would expect at least a small amount of gold coins in such a collection, but there is not a single coin in the cache. Furthermore, why would a bullion hoard be restricted to military items?
The Staffordshire Hoard was discovered at the heart of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, by AD 600, one of the seven principal Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England (sometimes referred to as the Heptarchy), the others being Wessex, Northumbria, East Anglia, Kent, Sussex, and Essex. The seventh century in England was a violent and turbulent time, with battles between native Britons and Anglo-Saxons (who had settled in Britain from the mid-fifth century AD), as well as between pagan and Christian armies. Contemporary written sources for the kingdom of Mercia are scant; the main source for early Anglo-Saxon England as a whole is Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), completed around AD 731, and the first work of history in which the AD system of dating was used. Bede was a priest at the Monastery of Saint Paul’s in Jarrow in Northumberland (a kingdom in modern northeast England and southeast Scotland), so naturally his history is written from a Christian perspective and focuses mainly on the church. Bearing in mind his religious bias, Bede may not have had much interest in a kingdom like Mercia, which was essentially pagan until the second half part of the seventh century.
Historian, author, and TV presenter Michael Wood has suggested that the Staffordshire Hoard could have been a ransom paid to the Mercian pagan king Penda (died AD 655). Wood believes that the treasure may have formed part of a payment made to Penda by the Northumbrian king Oswiu (c AD 612–670) after Penda’s Mercian army had besieged Oswiu at the Battle of Winwaed (probably in modern Yorkshire) in AD 655. According to Bede, Oswiu had tried to buy off the Mercian king with “an incalculable quantity of regalia and presents as the price of peace.”1 However, Bede also notes that Penda refused the bribe, which would suggest that these items did not find their way south to Mercia to become the Staffordshire Hoard. Penda was also slain in the battle, which would seem to preclude any chance of the treasure falling into Mercian hands.
According to the ninth-century poem “Marwnad Cynddylan” (“The Death-song of Cynddylan”), around AD 636, Morfael, a British leader from Powys (in modern mid-Wales), attacked a place called “Caer Lwytgoed” (“the fortification in the gray wood”), took all the movable wealth of the city, and killed a bishop and a number of monks. The site of Caer Lwytgoed has been much debated but the previously mentioned Roman settlement of Letocetum has been put forward as a candidate, though there is no evidence that it was inhabited later than the fifth century AD. An alternative is the neighboring cathedral city of Lichfield, a place-name interpreted by some researchers as meaning “the field of corpses” and thus a possible site of the mysterious battle. However, the name “Lichfield” is more correctly understood to mean “common pasture in (or beside) gray wood,” and recorded history does not begin at Lichfield until St. Chad arrived to establish his Bishopric in AD 669, though that does not mean, of course, that it was not inhabited before this date. Perhaps the site of Caer Lwytgoed is yet to be found in this area.
Another important battle involving the Mercians took place in AD 679, when King Ecgfrith (reigned AD 670–685) brought his Northumbrian army into Mercian territory only to be defeated by King Æthelred at the Battle of the Trent. (The River Trent flows north from Biddulph Moor in Staffordshire.) Could the Staffordshire Hoard represent an enormous ritual deposit, dedicated to pagan gods in thanks for this victory? Though the wide date range of the items in the hoard would preclude them originating as the spoils from a single battle, they may have been captured over a long series of military campaigns by a Mercian king, perhaps Penda (reigned AD 626–655), Wulfhere (reigned AD 658–675), or Æthelred (reigned AD 675–704). Another
theory is that the hoard could have been a tribute payment made to Mercia by another Anglo-Saxon kingdom; if a certain weight in silver and gold was demanded, then this might explain the selection of items in the collection. Alternatively, the hoard may represent a royal treasury, such as that possessed by Northumbrian King Edwin (died AD 632/633), which, according to Bede, included a large gold cross, and a golden chalice. Perhaps the Mercian royal treasury was secreted in a field beside Watling Street in a period when Mercia was threatened from outside—after King Penda was defeated at Winwaed in AD 655, for instance. But although the extremely high quality of the craftsmanship and the material of the hoard may support this theory, the absence of whole weapons and the inclusion of almost-exclusively military items would suggest otherwise.
Beyond the fact that the hoard was deposited hurriedly in an isolated spot in an area without known Anglo-Saxon buildings, suggesting someone on the run who, for whatever reason, was never able to come back and retrieve the treasure, little else can be said at the moment with any degree of certainty. In the end, because the hoard was only discovered in 2009 and there is such a huge amount of material, a lot more work needs to be done before we are even sure of the dating of the items, never mind their origins and meaning.
The discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard was publicly announced on September 24, 2009, and attracted worldwide attention. The hoard was declared to be treasure at a coroner’s inquest held on September 24, 2009, and under the 1996 Treasure Act the finder and landowner were eligible to be rewarded for the full market value of the find, to be shared equally between them. On November 25, 2009, the hoard was valued by the Treasure Valuation Committee at £3.285 million ($5.306 million), and shortly afterward it was announced that the BMAG and the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, were to jointly purchase the complete hoard. The Art Fund then launched a public appeal to raise the necessary funds with a deadline of April 17, 2010. If the money was not raised by this time the hoard could have been sold on the open market, and the unparalleled collection permanently broken up and scattered throughout the world. Thankfully, the necessary funds were raised ahead of time and the Staffordshire Hoard remained in the English Midlands, where it was originally discovered.
As the finds were still being processed, some pieces from the hoard were put on display at the BMAG until October 13, 2009, and a further selection of items from the hoard was displayed at the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery. Further displays of artifacts from the hoard took place at the British Museum (from November 3, 2009, until April 17, 2010) and at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, DC (from October 29, 2011, to March 4, 2012). A number of items from the Staffordshire Hoard are currently on display in Gallery 16 of the BMAG, and many are still in the process of being examined and conserved. Already the Staffordshire Hoard has opened an astonishing window onto the world of the Anglo-Saxons, further cleaning and examination of the exquisite and sometimes mysterious objects can only shed more light on trade, religious practices, crafts, technology, and warfare in what for too long have been known as England’s Dark Ages.
CHAPTER 12
Viking Hoards
The Vikings are renowned for their violent raids and invasions, from the Caspian Sea in the east to North America in the west, but they were also voyagers, colonizers, and traders. They left behind a fascinating legacy of these activities in the form of a number of treasure hoards, buried in the ground for religious or political reasons, or often simply for safekeeping. Some of the richest and best known of these Viking hoard come from England, including the Cuerdale Hoard of 8,600 items, including silver coins, jewelry, and silver ingots; and the Harrogate/Vale of York Hoard of 617 silver coins and 65 ornaments, ingots, and pieces of precious metal, found hidden in a gilt silver vessel lined with gold. There are also rich Viking hoards from the island of Gotland in the Viking homeland of Sweden, and from Russia. Viking warriors, merchants, and rulers seem to have buried a substantial part of their wealth in these hoards and the fascinating objects found within can tell us a significant amount about the Viking economy, their trade routes and practices, and the spread of Christianity in Viking areas.
12.1. Silver pennies from the Vale of York hoard. Image by JMaill. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license on Wikipedia.
During the Viking Age (late eighth to 11th centuries) there was an extremely high rate of deposition of metal and metal objects in the ground throughout Britain, Ireland, Northern and Eastern Europe, and Russia. These hoards have been discovered in practically every area the Vikings occupied and contain mostly silver objects such as coins, ingots, personal ornaments, and fragments of metal known as hack-silver. Hack-silver was made when large ornaments or pieces of jewelry were chopped up into small fragments in order to make bullion of certain weights, thus facilitating exchange using these exact weights. Small, portable scales capable of accurate weighing have been found in excavations of Viking sites, showing that a controlled system of trade and exchange was in operation even without the use of regular coinage. Coins and coin fragments, which the Vikings obtained through trade and trading contacts in Europe and the Islamic world, were valued for their weight in silver or gold and the purity of the metal, rather than having any intrinsic monetary value. Metallurgical studies have shown that a high proportion of the Islamic coins that found their way to Scandinavia at this time were cut up for use as hack-silver or sometimes melted down for reuse as jewelry or silver ingots. Indeed, the vast majority of Viking silver objects found in southern Sweden were made from melted-down dirhams (silver coins) of the Samanid Dynasty (AD 819–999) of Central Asia and Greater Iran. Silver was by far the most common metal used in the Viking economy and was circulated in the form of bars, ingots, jewelry, and hack-silver. With no local sources of the precious metal, the Vikings were forced to engage in trade or plunder to obtain it.
The coins from Viking hoards can give us valuable information in terms of the areas where they were minted. Mints identified from Viking hoards include Dublin (Ireland), Quentovic (possibly modern Étaples in northern France), Aquitaine (France), Touraine (France), Ribe or Hedeby (Denmark), Lund (Denmark), London (UK), and York (UK), as well as various Byzantine and Islamic mints. Such a wide variety of coin mints illustrate the extent of Viking trade contacts.
The treasures contained in Viking hoards could be amassed from plunder, trade, tributes, fines, or bride wealth (payment made by a groom or his family to the kin of the bride upon her marriage to the groom). There must have been a wide variety of reasons why the Vikings deposited these hoards in the ground, depending on the person and the circumstances involved. The most basic reason would be that a person secreted away family or individual wealth during periods of turmoil and was never able to recover it because he or she was killed, captured, or forced to leave his or her property. This scenario may be linked to a display of wealth by political leaders, who would have kept caches of silver to dole out to their followers in order to reinforce their political influence. Another possibility is that the wealth was deposited in peaceful times as a primitive form of banking, insuring the person against future financial difficulties, and for whatever reason was never recovered. A further suggestion is that wealth would be deposited underground just before a person embarked on a potentially dangerous voyage.
Religious reasons are another possibility, when the buried cache perhaps formed part of a pagan ritual offering—possibly the grave goods of a warrior on his way to Valhalla. Any artifacts buried with the warrior were believed to accompany the dead man to the afterlife. There is some suggestion of this ritual connection in the Old English heroic epic Beowulf, dated between the eighth and the early-11th centuries. In the final act of the poem, set in the early sixth century AD in Scandinavia, Beowulf and his companion, Wiglaf, slay a dragon and take its treasure hoard. But the hero is fatally wounded by the dragon in the fight and dies soon afterward. Beowulf is cremated and entombed in a burial mound along
with funeral goods and the Dragon’s hoard. The treasure is buried with the hero in order to ritually return it to the earth where it belongs or perhaps because it is cursed.
Another version of ritual hoarding has been suggested where the act of burying wealth removes items from circulation that are usually expected to be distributed in Viking society. This act could also be related to the display of wealth and power mentioned earlier, where a grandiose destruction of wealth graphically illustrates the power and affluence of the individual. In the Icelandic epic Egils saga, the oldest transcript of which dates back to AD 1240, the hero, Egil Skallagrimsson, sinks his silver treasure in a bog with a stone slab the day before he dies. To ensure the location of the cache is kept secret, Egil then kills the two servants who helped him put it there.
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