Someone Stripped 4,600 Pieces of Gold Off Their Swords. Then Buried Them.

On July 5, 2009, Terry Herbert was sweeping a recently plowed farm field near Hammerwich, Staffordshire with a metal detector when he started pulling up pieces of gold.

He came back the next day, and the day after that. Over the following weeks, archaeologists joined the excavation and eventually removed close to 4,600 items from an area of roughly 155 square meters.

It was the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever found. But what made it strange was not just the quantity — it was what had been done to the objects before they were buried.

The hoard contained 5.1 kilograms of gold and 1.4 kilograms of silver, much of it decorated with intricate garnet cloisonne work — tiny pieces of cut garnet set into gold cells to create geometric patterns.

The craftsmanship on many pieces is considered among the finest surviving examples of early medieval metalwork from anywhere in Europe.

The objects dated to the 6th and 7th centuries CE, placing them in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, which controlled much of central England at the time. Researchers estimate the hoard was deposited sometime between 650 and 675 CE.