 Thank you very much indeed, Tania, and I'm quite sure that I will be able to speak for everybody here in sending our very best wishes to Karen Hohlen-Wheelson as indeed an absent friend. You will be relieved to know that although physically dealing with really quite serious ill health and problems for some time mentally should remain as robust and as determined as ever. It's certainly been a great privilege for me personally not only to have been able to contribute to the volume that you're going to be able to see at some stage during today but also now to read this paper for Karen so I now move into Karen's voice if only that were possible. First of all I would like to thank the organisers for inviting me to contribute to this seminar. Unfortunately my recent visit to hospital to get a hip replacement prevents me from participating in person. I shall however present my thoughts in this paper. When spectacular and important finds have come to light in Britain and not least the Staffordshire Horde I always wish they had been found in Denmark. Not because I'm unhappy with the archaeological record in Denmark. We do certainly have spectacular finds too but no it's our legislation that makes a difference. The law about the Danifate goes back to the 13th century where it's actually found in regional laws of that date. The law states that what nobody owns belongs to the king. If any man should find gold or silver in mounds or after plowing or in any other way the king shall have it. This law was confirmed in the law code of Christian the 5th from 1683. In the centuries following the law was extended so that also objects besides those of precious metal were included. In 1737 and 1752 it was once again stipulated that gold, silver, metal and other treasures which are found hidden in the soil or in the field or in a house or elsewhere and which no one recognises are named Danifate and belong to the king alone and to no one else. Of special interest is the fact that there is provision to compensate the finder. The finder shall enjoy full compensation for the value of what is found. Since 1807 what later became the Danish National Museum has administered this law. If it had been found in Denmark then the Staffordge Award would have automatically belonged to the Danish state and the finder would have been compensated according to the value of the precious metals plus an additional reward the size of which would depend on how the finder had handled the treasure. Today for instance it would be expected that all of the objects were planned with coordinates for where precisely they were found and in the case of a larger assemblage that the responsible museum that is the local museum in the Danish system had been called in at a very early stage indeed. The cost to the Danish state of acquiring the find would be far below the market value but it is a criminal offence not to hand in the finds. Anyway the Staffordge Award fascinates even the most hard core non-object fixated archaeologist. It is so rare that we see an assemblage with so many objects of the same type that the internal variation amongst them can be analysed and so rare to see religious paraphernalia not altered by the changing tastes and ideas of later periods. It was therefore exciting to contribute to the seminar of 2010 and now to have the opportunity of reading the results of all of the analyses carried out during the past decade. Last winter I read a number of the chapters in order to come up with a title for my contribution. Those were mainly the chapters on the objects and on the zoomorphic ornamentation. When I started reading the finished report late this summer I was curious to read about how the board had come to light and the excavations had followed. From Denmark I am familiar with a number of boards dominated by weaponry and know about the research into the concepts of these weapon deposits. Only by a very thorough excavation of, for example, the deposit from Ile Oden has it been possible to understand both the chronology and the ritual involved in the deposits. With weapon deposits found long ago that was not done and research into these had therefore come up with a wide range of interpretations of what lay behind the assemblage of finds that were made hardly any of which your interpretations were close to the results produced by the analysis of the deposit at Ile Oden. It was therefore rather disappointing to read that only 13% of the hoard was provided with coordinates through excavation. I was therefore stuck with my preliminary questions. The authors have of course done what they can to extract as much information from the little that was available to them. For example that the various items were most likely deposited in a number of bags which were sorted according to the type of the object and the metal. But any final details regrettably are lost forever. For the second time therefore I wish the hoard had been found in Denmark. Danish metal detectorists are almost all very thorough and do provide coordinates for every object they find. And in cases when it turns out that a context may still be uncovered or the amount of objects increases they do get in contact with the responsible museum. Founded Denmark we would have had coordinates for all of the objects and the professional excavation would have recorded not 13% but more likely 87% of the finds. For a scholar to see so much information which could have been gained just disappear into thin air is truly tragic. This however does not mean that we cannot gain a lot of information from the Staffordshire Board. Scholars in archaeology are at least born optimists. Of course we can gain this information but the starting point will yet again be a black box of which we have only a vague idea. We can nonetheless be quite sure that almost all of what was deposited has been found at least within the limits of the area examined. Object groups not represented, which we've already heard about some, were simply not there. And this poses an interesting question. Why are certain object types not included? Why for instance was only the hilt of the sword stripped of precious metals and not the scabbard and the sword belt? Especially curious is the fact that shapes and other fittings from the scabbard are absent and likewise buckles as we heard just now and mounts from the sword belts. The scabbard and the mount from Sutton Hoo show that this would have been worthwhile in the collection of precious metals. We will probably never know what the answer is but have to be free to guess. Were these objects buried in a separate, in a different place but close by? Did they remain in the Lord's treasury? Were they lost under transportation? Were they simply never meant to be there? Understanding this will depend on who was responsible for the deposition of the horde. Did the horde belong to a king's treasury? Was it even perhaps a king's ransom that was under transport? In that case it is meaningful to hand over the precious metals of the sword fittings but not certainly their iron bodies because those could be refurbished or reforged. The intriguing bit is the presence of the crosses and the bishop's hat piece. Who would damage Christian ritual objects? Would a thief do that? Would a lord or a cleric who wanted them turned into ritual objects of even greater grandeur? In the case of a ransom you would just put your hands on what you could get but why then is there no female jewellery represented? Have we got any written sources which mention what can happen to ritual objects except those examples we have when the Vikings ran off with all that they could get their hands upon? As mentioned my ideas of formation processes have their background in the Danish weapon deposits and other types of horde. A way to extract more information from the horde and to give maybe some additional perspectives would be to work with a number of models of formation processes, that is different models for the accumulation of the assemblage we have within the horde. The analyses have shown that more than one smith took part in stripping the precious metals from the swords. This also means that some of these objects could have been dismantled on earlier occasions and at different places. I shall show a few examples here. The simplest model is the single occasion model where a number of warlords or kings hand over their swords to the winning king who passes them on to his master smith for dismantling. The iron swords end up in his armory or under the forge, the precious metals are collected and deposited in whatever way that came to take place. In the next example the same happens but on two separate occasions with two different groups of warlords or kings. Thus the age of the objects of deposition will widen. My example is divided into two occasions with two groups of warlords or kings of whom one has been through the same step at one stage earlier. This could widen the age range of the objects in the horde even further. The final example that I give is a situation where one sword will be very worn because it had been used while others which were simply kept in an armory were not used and worn in that way even though they were actually at the same date. After presenting a number of models then and there can be more that do not even resemble those that have just been presented here, it's necessary to test the models against the finds. Even though attempts have been made to analyse the type of the ornamentation of the objects as Chris has just explained very thoroughly, I do think that a more radical approach can still fruitfully be applied. Typologically, by far the majority of the pommels, the sword pommels in the horde, belong to Mengine's type Beckham, whilst in our room. Already when published by Delfried Mengine in 1983, this group comprised far too many pommels to be really useful and it ended up therefore with a very wide date range. A detailed typological analysis of the pommels belonging to this single type would be a good place to start and it would be better still if Scandinavian and continental specimens were also included in that reassessment. The hope would be that a chronological classification and or a regional one would result and if we do not try that we will never know. Ornamentation is also a topic that is worth pursuing further still. From the published presentation it is really quite clear that a number of stylistic subgroups are still hiding amongst the pommels. The six examples presented here show aspects of the variation and at the same time it can be seen that the shape of the pommels that they are on varies significantly too. The analysis therefore has to focus on classifying the ornamentation that we have here. I shall present one relatively simple example on the basis of a pommel that has a Kentish touch. There is a technical difference between the Kentish buckles and the pommels that are of possible Kentish origin. Namely that the filigree that is on these buckles is placed upon a puse sheet background whereas on the pommels it is placed on a flat background. Stylistically the buckles all have the same type of animal heads which are shown here in red on the slides. Now these buckles are dated to the second half of the sixth century and the very early seventh century. Slightly later are these classed and tacked but we have also had mentioned in a question already. These are indeed similar to those buckles that we have just seen but the heads in these cases are actually turning slowly into part of the interlace. While those other buckles that we have just seen actually have true rivets for attaching the objects onto the items that they belong to, these clasps have false rivet heads on the face and they have lugs for attachment on the back. They relate in fact to a slightly later buckle type which is dated to the very late sixth and the first half of the seventh century. Now the buckles are relatively early in comparison with the horde but there are various small finds, that is small finds in the sense of smaller objects that we have which show that this elite style had not disappeared from Kent during the seventh century. There are at least four pommels from the horde together with that from Market Raising in Lincolnshire which have animal heads of the same type as those buckles from Kent and the interlace on these is also relatively regular in the way that is seen on the Kentish buckles. These are objects which display medium and even quite heavy levels of wear. Placed in one of the previous models that I presented, the explanation could be that one sword was left there until all of the swords ended up in the horde or into some other horde or some other lord or king's armory or treasury and only later to end up within this Staffordshire assemblage. So far so good, however it would not be a paper written by Karen Hull and Nielsen if she did not have a rabbit up her sleeves. The examples that are presented as models here actually do reflect historical knowledge that we have of Anglo-Saxon England. The king was responsible for the weapons and their ornamentation or at least so we understand. But what if he was not exclusively so? And the weaponry of a warrior reflected what he won by successive service to a whole range of lords resulting in his armour being a mix of many warlord styles. This is the impression one occasionally gets when studying the continental ffines. So there may be yet another model to test against the ffines. This final slide shows late 6th century swords from Gottland and from Langobard, Italy from very far apart and yet very like and very different in various respects. Thank you very much.