Anglo-Saxon Hoard

[Mark]

Sorry to get this out to you folks late, but I came down with
the ****dest stomach flu last...

Anyway, big discovery in the UK of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver:

http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/artefacts/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/e...re/8272058.stm

Best, MEH

[Michael]

I read about this with interest and curiosity. Every time one of these hoards comes to light, I wonder what it must have been like living in a society that did not depend on street corner banking.

Banking and insurance are two very old business practices that really evolved out of the chaotic state of northern Europe during the medieval period. People wanted stability and it seems like they were unable to recover the economic stability of classical antiquity until they solved the problem of "what do we do with all this money?".

Insurance helped maintain the stability that banking encouraged. Insurance developed in the shipping industry, where captains and merchants shared the expenses of replacing lost ships and cargoes.

[Mark]

Mud and gold in Staffordshire
The richest hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure ever discovered
Alex Burghart

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In “The Mildenhall Treasure” (1947), Roald Dahl dramatized the story of the gruff Suffolk ploughman, Gordon Butcher, who caught his blade on an exquisite hoard of late Roman silver in 1942. Butcher, Dahl wrote, was a man whose “wealth was in his small brick house, his two cows, his tractor, his skill as a ploughman”. This summer’s discovery, in south Staffordshire, was raised by a man of even more modest means – an unemployed metal-detectorist, Terry Herbert, who one is tempted to imagine roaming the countryside like a latter-day Anglo-Saxon Wanderer in a jumper. But, unlike the subject of that poem, who laments the loss of the past (“Alas for the splendour of the prince! / How that time has passed away, / dark under the cover of night, / as if it had never been!”), Mr Herbert has redeemed it.

The 1,500-piece collection unearthed from the Staffordshire mud is the richest collection of gold from Anglo-Saxon England ever found. It consists of a mash of swords’ decoration, helmets and other warlike artefacts that the British Museum’s professional jigsaw-piecers may gradually assemble into order. Inevitably the hoard has been likened to that most iconic of Anglo-Saxon discoveries, disinterred from the Sutton Hoo land buff in 1939, and there are direct stylistic parallels in the tight, precise cloisonné work of the sword-belt studs, and playful autocannibalistic creatures that adorn the pommels. But the Staffordshire material is far more ambiguous than even that eccentric site. The Sutton Hoo treasure was laid coherently in the ground, its symbolism almost as careful as the images inscribed on the Voyager satellites sent beyond the solar system in 1977. The goods not only spoke for the incumbent’s life, they showed us how his followers imagined his afterlife. The deceased was equipped with everything he might need for the afterlife, exactly as he had been on Earth. The war gear, the feasting equipment, the boat and ceremonial garb all spoke for what he was or aspired to be (a hall- and warlord), and the forty gold pieces left in his purse correspond to the number of ghostly oarsmen needed to power his vessel towards the sunset. The Staffordshire hoard has its symbolism but it is both more subtle, and more workaday.

rest at

http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle6874497.ece

[Michael]

Sounds like the hoard may already have sparked some debate within the historical community, or so the article seems to imply.