What people have said about the discovery

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Concerning interpretation: I find useful background in the practice (which survived into the 10th and 11th centuries) whereby Anglo-Saxon nobles arranged that at death a payment would be made to their lord of ‘heriot’ (OE heregeatu, ‘war-gear’) of weapons (sometimes said to be ‘gold-adorned’) and of bullion usually reckoned in mancuses of gold (though it may have been normally paid in silver pence, on the ratio of 1 mancus = 30d).

Payment of the heriot, which varied according to status, obliged the lord to oversee his man’s wishes for the disposal of his property.
Some 30 years ago in the BAR volume on Ethelred the Unready, ed. David Hill (1978), I showed that this practice, found widely in Europe, only makes sense if it was balanced by a practice, evidenced in Beowulf and other early OE poetry, whereby lords gave weapons and gold to their men when taking them into their service.

I suggested that the heriot was likely to have become increasingly important as the practice of burying the dead with their best war-gear declined when Christian understanding of death and the afterlife took hold in 7th-8th C.

That brings us into the period of the Staffordshire hoard; and Leslie Alcock’s paper on the Anglian graves of Bernicia in the Festschrift for JNL Myres, ed V. Evison, 1981, took the subject a little further. Recycling of very ancient weapons is shown e.g. by the death-bed will of the aetheling Aethelstan, who in 1015 bequeathed a sword that had belonged to King Offa.

It follows that kings, especially those of the expanding frontier kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex are likely in the 7th and 8th Cs to have had a supply of heirloom weapons, some very ornate, from which they could select the best to equip and adorn the noblest young warriors who were entering the kings’ following.

The Staffordshire hoard would suggest that the Mercian kings had such a hoard of weapons - enhanced by the spoils of their victorious warfare - but that their practice was to give to their court armourer the best adornments from captured (or Mercian heirloom) weapons and to expect him to recycle the gold and bejewelled and filigree pommels, studs, hilt-plates etc onto the latest blades, which he (or a colleague smith) was making. In other words I think that the hoard is that of the Mercian court armourer. Whether the resulting weapons were primarily for court ceremonial or were actually to be used in battle can only be conjectured; that depends on how real one thinks the world of the Beowulf poet to be.

I would interpret the virtual absence from the hoard of strap-ends, strap attachments and buckles as indicating that such items might rather have been given to (and stored in) a different office, i.e. the court leather-worker, who would have been responsible for providing those entering Mercian kings’ service with the adorned belts and harness that they needed. We begin to get a picture of specialist offices in the Mercian household, responsible for different aspects of the clothing and equipping of the royal retinue.

We will clearly have to await the cleaning of the finds and the recovery of all the items that are still within lumps of soil before we can obtain a secure terminus post quem for the hoard. Meantime my initial impression, however, is that currently (in the materials that I have seen on the website) too much weight for dating is being placed on the inscribed gold strip with its quotation either from Numbers 10.35 (or from the passage’s recycling in the Psalms).

I interpret that strip as the arm of a cross which had a terminal at one end with a round cabochon jewel; the other end (with its sharp but slightly curved edge) would have fitted into the central circular (jewelled) fitting of the cross.

It will be important to read the inscription on the reverse, which seems to be upside down in relation to the inscription on the face and to be either more worn (? because next to the wearer’s clothing) or not to have been nielloed.

Comparisons with the dating of the handwriting of extant manuscripts is a hazardous typological dating exercise, as the learnedly different conclusions of Elizabeth Okasha and Michelle Brown show. Early medieval calligraphers constantly went back to early examples as models for their scripts. Even Brown may be giving much too late a range of dates for the strip, however. since we have no English mss before the 670s and none in majescules before c.700, even though there were books and mss being written in England long before then. The survival of mss in majescule script is an accident of survival, and is unlikely to tell us anything about when and how the script originated.

There are good reasons (in the light of the development of Roman scripts on the continent and Ireland from 4th and 5th Cs) for supposing that some version of majescule script must have been known to the clergy on Lindisfarne from 635 and to have spread rapidly to other kingdoms thereafter; they are very unlikely to have been initially limited to uncials and half-uncials. So I would conclude that the inscribed strip does not need to be any later than best of the ‘Style 2’ gold and garnet pommels and other sword jewels.

My judgment of the date of the hoard’s deposit would currently be c.650x720; the majority of the objects would seem been made in the period 600-650.

At present I regard a deposit in 655-8, when Mercia was under Northumbrian rule, as very possible – but the reigns of Wulfhere and of Aethelred I are also possible.

Nicholas Brooks - emeritus Professor of Medieval History from Birmingham University

My first reaction on seeing the scale and nature of the beast is very much as yours - this is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England in the seventh and early eighth century as radically, if not moreso, as the 1939 Sutton Hoo discoveries did; it will make historians and literary scholars review what their sources tell us, and archaeologists and art-historians rethink the chronology of metalwork and manuscripts; and it will make us all think again about rising (and failing) kingdoms and the expression of regional identities in this period, the complicated transition from paganism to Christianity, the conduct of battle and the nature of fine metalwork production - to name only a few of the many huge issues it raises. Absolutely the metalwork equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells.

Mrs Leslie Webster
Hon. President, Society for Medieval Archaeology,Hon. Professor, UCL Institute of Archaeology & Former Keeper, Department of Prehistory and Europe, British Museum