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.

I joined the thousands of others visiting the Birmingham Museum earlier this month to fog the glass of the display cases housing the choicest items. “Wow!” came the exclamation to my left. “What is it?” said a second. “I don’t know.” That exchange just about summarizes current knowledge. The artefacts are undoubtedly (as Howard Carter said on first leaving Tutankhamen's tomb) “wonderful things”, but the facts behind their wondrousness are not immediately obvious. Even speculating about the hoard before the earth is removed from all of its components is a dangerous business. Yet the early suppositions of those lucky enough to have handled and examined the material already seem to carry weight. Kevin Leahy, of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, has suggested that this is the spoil of battle – goods taken from the dead after a fight – and from what I have seen, the analysis fits. Were the hoard merely plunder we would expect to find everyday riches (coins, hairpins, ingots, etc) in amongst it. Instead we have as many as eighty-four sword and dagger pommel caps, seventy-one hilt collars, two or three gold crosses, a number of twisted-metal rings, what is probably a shield decoration, and at least one cheek-piece from a helmet. Tellingly, several of the items have bent pins still sticking out of them, which means they were ripped from their original mounts. Perhaps most wonderful of all is the resonance with a passage in Beowulf describing the gathering of sword hilts from the dead after battle. “One warrior stripped the other, / looted Ongentheow’s iron mail coat, / his hard sword-hilt, / his helmet too, / and carried the graith to King Hygelac”.

Seeing the finds with Leahy’s interpretation in mind is slightly chilling. The rows of unperished pommels become personal possessions, each one unique, as though fashioned for its owner’s particular fancy, each one a life. The seeming immortality of the gold, which the Anglo-Saxons so loved, somehow drives home the mortality of those who briefly wore it. Sutton Hoo is, above all, a testament to loyalty and love – whoever hauled that boat up that hill and filled it with precious gifts did so out of a profound sense of duty. The Staffordshire Hoard is almost the opposite.

Placing the goods in time and space is no easy task, not least because the location of the actual discovery remains a closely guarded secret, and because there is no accurate means of dating the material. The coins in the Sutton Hoo grave gave a fairly reliable terminus post quem for that site; here the absence of coins greatly expands the boundaries of possibility. Some stylistic similarities might be noted with early seventh-century goods from elsewhere, but this is high-status stuff and might have been used by more than one generation before it was put in the earth.

There is always a temptation to link any rich Anglo-Saxon archaeology with a king. Sutton Hoo has often been called the grave of Raedwald of East Anglia (d.616–627), and the burial chamber from Prittlewell, Essex, has been linked with early kings of Essex, though the associations are far from provable. Some authorities, no doubt, will look at the bent crosses of the Staffordshire Hoard and claim it as the booty Penda of Mercia (d.655), the last great pagan King of Anglo-Saxon England. Such guesswork is good fun, but it is also slightly disingenuous. Those crosses, and the strip of gold that carries a mangled passage from the Book of Numbers (“Rise up, O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face”) could indeed hail from the muscular Christianity of the mid-seventh century, but they need not have done, nor need they have been the result of a battle between kings. Kings certainly made war, but so did their followers and so too did exiles. To pin the hoard on the career of one man is to assume our knowledge of this period to be much more comprehensive than it actually is.

If these things are in doubt, the wealth of the find is not. The hoard’s financial worth will soon be calculated and will give Terry Herbert, and the anonymous farmer who recently bought the land for his sheep, an idea of what their rainbow’s end has brought them. Objects like this simply do not appear on the open market. The closest recent correlate is the single gold coin of King Cenwulf of Mercia (796–821) weighing 4.33g, which the British Museum bought for the nation in June 2006 at a cost of £357,832. Coins attract avid and rich collectors, but the 5kg of gold and 1.3kg of silver from Staffordshire are still likely to far outstrip that sum.

The real treasure is perhaps to be found in the phenomenon represented by the snake-like queues which have curled around the Birmingham Museum since the free exhibition opened only three weeks ago. In the first three days more than 10,000 people joined those lines, many of them waiting for more than an hour to pore over three glass cases. Anglo-Saxon history, now almost exclusively the preserve of university students, rarely excites the British public. That it has now is ammunition for the system and institutions which have allowed these finds to be brought to light. Culture and heritage funding is currently being circled by Olympic and recessional dragons who have already bitten off much of its fortune. It is to be hoped that the splendour and excitement of the Staffordshire Hoard will do something to erect a shield wall around some of the more vulnerable areas.

The sound of John Humphrys telling you that a new archaeological find is about to rewrite the history of Mercia elicits a range of emotions in anyone writing a history of Mercia. Yet the hoard, like the kingdom in which it was buried, sits on the border of historic and prehistoric, on the edge of what is known and what not. Whether the find ever actually illuminates a great deal about the history of Mercia and mid-Saxon England, future historians and archaeologists will decide. In basic terms there are two types of archaeological find – those that further our historical knowledge and those that rely on historical knowledge for their interpretation. This collection falls squarely into the latter camp. At present it seems unlikely that we will ever know who buried it, why they did, when they did, or where they got it. Not much certainty is likely to come of this, but when faced with this collection of strange, undiminished beauty, certainty is hardly the point.

Alex Burghart is writing a history of Mercia.

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