The Staffordshire Hoard

I was fortunate enough, this morning, to be among the first visitors at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery to view a sample of pieces from the extraordinary treasure trove of Anglo-Saxon gold, news of which broke yesterday.

The national media has been full of this story today. On the 5th of July this year, a local man (Mr Herbert), using a £2.50 metal detector bought at a car-boot sale, struck gold on a friend's farm (Johnson's Farm near Burntwood). He'd been an amateur treasurer hunter for years, teased by his friends for chasing pennies. The find will turn him and the landowner into millionaires.

If, as is being reported today, their friendship has run into difficulties as a result, it will be no great surprise. Huge wealth, suddenly acquired, has a way of souring relationships. And yet, huge wealth, unexpectedly discovered, also remains a powerful metaphor for spiritual enlightenment. Mr Herbert's story calls to mind one of Jesus' parables. It's in Matthew's Gospel, chapter 13: 'The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field'.

After a few days, Mr Herbert reported the find to the proper authorities, who have now concluded a professional excavation of the site. They have been able to record the find and have conducted the kind of investigations which will enable scholars to interpret it -- the results of which are expected to transform our understanding of Anglo-Saxon England, and especially of the kingdom of Mercia (as this part of the world was known in the 7th-8th centuries). There's plenty which remains a mystery: who assembled the hoard and buried it and why?

In all, the hoard comprises more than 1500 pieces. Almost all are gold (about 5kg in all) or silver (about 2.5kg), and most appear to be parts of military equipment (sword-hilts and scabbards, and helmet clasps and checkplates etc), suggesting that this was war booty, probably taken from a battle involving royalty. Up close, the pieces (all of them small, some of them tiny) are spectacular: intricately decorated with celtic patterns and superbly crafted.

There are some Christian items: a few crosses (were they carried into battle as standards?), and a strip of gold (pictured) inscribed with some words from Psalm 68: 'Rise up O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face'. Presumably, some 7th century warrior carried that biblical text into battle, as a symbol of the support of the Christian God which he imagined himself to have.

For most Christians, it is acutely troubling that the God revealed by Jesus Christ to be a God of love has been pressed into service in this way, as a tribal-god in warfare. In the light of Jesus, there are many other verses in the Psalms which seem to speak much more fully of the nature of God: 'The Lord is gracious and merciful', for example, 'slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love'. That's Psalm 145.

For those of us in Lichfield, and perhaps especially for those of us associated with the Cathedral, the find is tremendously exciting. For one thing, Johnson's Farm is only 5 miles away. For another, the find seems to date from exactly the period which gave rise to our Cathedral. The indications are that the trove was buried in about 700. That's just the time the first Cathedral on this site was dedicated, as a place of hospitality to pilgrims visiting the shrine of St Chad -- who had died just a generation earlier in 672. The Cathedral has two great artefacts already, which date from about that time: the Chad Gospels (an illuminated manuscript only a little younger than the Lindisfarne Gospels and considerably older than the Book of Kells), and the Lichfield Angel (a limestone carving thought to be part of the original tombchest for the bones of St Chad, at his first shrine).

There must be some association between the Staffordshire Hoard and Lichfield Cathedral: the trove was buried within sight of the three spires. At the very least, we can expect some renewed interest in the decoration of our Gospel book and some further consolidation of the emerging consensus that Mercia was a centre of considerable wealth and culture during the 8th-9th centuries.