[MR] Who owned the buried gold treasure found in Staffordshire?

[David Chessler]

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Who owned the buried gold treasure found in Staffordshire?

ITN  -  September 24, 2009

As the UK's largest ever hoard of Anglo Saxon 
treaure is discovered in Staffordshire, it is 
being compared with some other significant finds 
from years gone by. Made famous by a Roald Dahl's 
children's story, the Mildenhall Treaure haul is 
one of the most important collections of silver 
tableware of the late Roman Empire. It was 
disovered in 1942 during ploughing near 
Mildenhall in Suffolk, but the coins and 
tableware were not declared an offical treasure 
trove until 1946. It is thought to date from the 
fourth century AD. In June 1912, workmen entered 
some 17th-century timber framed buildings in 
London's Cheapside to tear them down. As they 
broke up the cellar floor, they discovered a 
wooden casket which turned out to contain the 
greatest cache of Elizabethan and Jacobean 
jewellery in the world. It included an agate 
cameo of Elizabeth I, a gold watch set in a 
massive emerald from the Muzzo mines of Colombia, 
sapphires, diamonds and rubies from the India, as 
well as glyptics of classical and Byzantine 
antiquity already 16 centuries old when the hoard 
was buried, in the early 17th century. The 
Staffordshire Hoard is already being compared to 
the Sutton Hoo ship burial, discovered in 1938 by 
archaeologist Basil Brown. He was asked to 
investigate 18 low mounds by a local landowner 
near Ipswich. Buried beneath them lay a 30m long 
oak ship, with a ruined burial chamber inside 
containing weapons, armour, gold coins, silver 
vessels and clothes piled in heaps. In 2007, the 
most important Viking treasure find in Britain 
for 150 years was unearthed by a father and son 
while metal detecting near Harrogate in 
Yorkshire. The pair, from Leeds, said the hoard 
was worth about £750,000 as a conservative estimate.

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