Anglo-Saxon Gold
How did this pass me by!
A sample of the hoard.
In my very own county of Staffordshire a mammoth hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure was discovered late last year. David Starkey tritely puts it as “Gangland bling” in a more recent article. Astonishingly, it’s the largest ever find of gold and silver in the British Isles with some 1,800 objects excavated by the end of the dig. There’s an excellent interactive description of the find provided by The Guardian. To give you some idea of the value of the hoard, around three years back a piece of a hilt of an Anglo-Saxon sword was bought by the British Museum for £125,000 – this hoard contains 31 such pieces. Even with my basic maths skills, I can work that out to be nearly £4 million. That’s just for the bits of poxy sword, never mind the gold and silver!
