 So, I'm going to call myself the Horde, and what an extraordinary discovery it is. It's an unparallel discovery. It is the largest collection of treasure from the early Anglo-Saxon period. It involves a unique combination of objects, to a very large number of objects, mostly military, but some of them are Christian function. Mae'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r 550 a 650 AD yn ystod o'r gold o'r sylwgr, ac mae'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Mae'n ddweud o'r cyffredin cyffredinol yn ystod o'r cyffredinol ac o'r ddweud. The collection, however, was very fragmented as it was found, the find, are fitting. because they are dysfunctional from larger objects. Mostly swords, the apex weapon of the age. These characteristics have been apparent ever since the fine was made in July 2019 mewn gwirioneddol Llyfrgell ddechrau yn ymddangos iawn. Mae'r bwrdd yn gweithio i'r lleol ac mae'r Llyfrgell yn ymddangos iawn. Ond rwy'n gweithio i'r gweithio i'w yw ddweud a'r hynny'n gweithio i'w gweithio. Mae hyn yn gweld, a'r bwysig yna, yn y cwestiynau cerdd yn y blyg. I will present some of the answers that have emerged from the extensive programme of research and conservation that has been carried out under the auspices of Historic England, as well as the joint owners of the Horde, Birmingham and Stoke-Hall trains City Councils. It will give you a foretaste of the final publication that, as Danielle said, is out later this year, which is a book under the Society of Antiquaries in print, and which will also be accompanied by a digital component which will be publicly available online. Please note what I'm presenting today, and enormously on the work of multiple specialists, over 25 contributors, not least my fellow editors for the book, Tandy Dickinson and Leslie Webster. Now today I shall first set out the essential character of the Horde and its chronology. Then I will present the case for what we think the Horde is, viewing its historic lanes, archaeological setting, and then finally the arguments for why it might have been collected together and audited. The Horde was found on a ridge of land close to the A5 and the modern N6 toll roads north of Birmingham. The metal detectorist Terry Herbert spent over a week recovering finds before he reported his incredible discovery to the port of an antiquity scheme and thereby professional archaeologists became involved in its recovery. Initially, it stuck to county council staff over one meter by one meter test hit. This is the black dot right at the centre of that red square over the fine site. This was expanded into a full recovery excavation and geophysical survey by Birmingham Archaeology. We conducted further fieldwork in 2010 and then there was a final phase of fieldwork in 2012 by Archaeology Warwickshire, which again recovered a small number of further finds by a metal detector survey. This shows you the 30-metre contour, which is the ridge of land. This ridge runs above the A5 here, which is the old road in what they were streets. The red square is the full limit of the recovery excavation. The grey area is the area, roughly speaking, which is protected by the metal detector. What does the Horde contain? Knowledge of what the Horde contained has changed significantly following the years of cleaning and conserving and reassembling of the objects. From a total of almost 4,600 fragments, nearly 700 objects have been identified, and this was no mean. Thetas from the very outset, the owners undertook to display the objects and keep the objects on permanent display in various places in the west midlands. At times, we would find that there were fragments with single objects in more than one place. Whilst the majority of the fragment relationships were identified by 2014, some objects did not fully emerge until later in the research project, such as this socketed stand for our great gold cross in the collection. This was bought together from around 70 small fragments of silver heat sheet, and was totally unrecognisable at the outset. This example also underlines how the fragility of the silver sheet has caused an inverse relationship between weights and fragment counts in the Horde. In total, there are four kilograms of gold objects compared to 1.7 kilograms of silver objects. The silver accounts for far more than three quarters of the fragment count. Whilst many of the objects retain garments or more rarely other inlays, there is very little copper alloy and virtually no iron, and only very small vestigial traces of organic materials, including haul, wood and the remains of wax and pastes. Though, of course, these would have been essential components of the original objects in which the fittings were removed. The contents of the Horde thus appears highly selective, favouring the precious metal. The objects, as we've already said, were drawn almost entirely from the possessions of men and the apparatus of war, even arguably the Christian objects. The majority for fittings, 80% by object count, are through weapons. Most come from swords, with only a small number from fighting knives or sacks. Their array of forms and ornament, some quite new, are transforming our understanding of the weapon, its makers and its elite warrior users. On the basis of the minimum number of pommels, 74, and potential combinations of other hilt fittings present, we estimate that something like 100 swords must be represented by a real metal weapon. With one exception, they appear to be Anglo-Saxon in manufacture, and that exception is pommel 68 here, which we believe, based on its art, is an import from Scandinavia. Most of the pommels are of cocked-hat form, as you can see up here. This is an example. The cocked-hat form is neatly illustrated for us by society's own cocked-hat at the front here. Mainly, they're fixed with Megin's type of beckham voestanarum, which is a type of pommel that's in use from 570 to 650. A few, a smaller number of the pommels are in round-back form, which is a form of the 7th century in England. From all of the gold and silver hilt collars and hilt rings combined, and the hilt, these fittings, these collars and rings fitted at the top and the bottom of the grip. From all of these fittings combined, we have a remarkable 50 pairs, showing that swords in the period were clearly manufactured from the outset with matching sets. The twisted ring type, which we have here, is interesting as it's identical to the form that we find on the sword from the famous Sutton-Hood Mount 1 ship burial, which is a grave to which I will return throughout this lecture for its many parallels with objects in the port. Another type of fitting that we have are hilt plates, and we have over 170 hilt plates in the collection. These reinforce the twin sword guards that we find on the typical sword of the period, a larger guard at the junction of the blade, and then a smaller guard capped by a pommel. Pommel held the town, was fixed over the town of the blade, which ran through the grip. From the form of the plates and from marks left on them, it has been possible to say where they were fitted on the hilt, so that we know that many of the swords in the collection must originally have had sets of four plates. However, there are suggestions that some swords may only have had a pair of plates, one on the lower guard here and one on the lower part of this guard here, and some swords may only have had a single plate. Unlike the forms discussed so far, the over 100 small mounts from our collection are decidedly less familiar. Many have decorated with a fine filigree scrollwork ornament, which I think you can probably just about make out on my exemplar here, which I shall come to. It was only, in fact, after a trip to the British Museum to see this object, which is known as Cumberland Hilt and is a sword hilt of preserved horn with gold fittings. It was only after a trip to see this object that we were able to find a parallel for our many fittings to see that we had another style of sword hilt represented. Now, these small fittings were designed to be inserted into small recesses that were cut into the horn of the grip and the guards, and they would have been held in place with nails, as you can see on the x-ray of the Cumberland Hilt here. It's also important that their association with this sword hilt, this Cumberland Hilt in the British Museum, shows us that the number of weapons represented by the board is very, as we've already said, likely to be larger than the minimum 74 surviving honw, hence our proposal of at least 100 swords. Then there are other small mounts from hilts that are new forms or which have a small number of parallels from Europe. They include pairs and sets of animal form, like these bird-headed mounts and also these little birds. You can see the sharp beak of a bird of prey, and then its claw foot and leg, and then its tail there. So we have these animal fittings that are fitted at the top and bottom of the grip again, and as well as those we have other fittings that we haven't really seen before, the view-shaped fittings, like the bird with garlic claws on a ornament, and these fitted at the ends of the sword guard like that. Besides these fittings, we have a small number of fittings that come from Scarrot, but only a very small number, and interestingly, a much lower proportion compared to the other fittings. We have these pyramid fittings here. We have five pairs of pyramid fittings, and you can see this is how they would have been worn on the Scarrot, and then we also have one pair of little button fittings, again with inlay garlic ornaments and the filigree collar. This button fitting fits into this stone bead, which was also recovered from the excavation. There are, in addition, three small gold buckles, or other, sorry, three small buckles, two in gold, one in silver, which may be from sword harvest, but that's a much lower number of buckles than we would have expected from sword harvest, given the number of swords represented. Now, in some, the sword fittings reveal an array of styles, which are summarised here, and they're best appreciated from the fittings that form sets, and we've been able to identify sets of pommels and collars from their matching ornaments in the collection, and these indicate unquestionably that sword helps with being manufactured with batching suites of fittings. The different styles, I've argued, could reflect the outputs of different regions, or kingdoms. Fittings in gold with filigree wire walnut, as represented here, many of which have analogue designs in a style known as Sarlene style 2, to which you'll come to later, but the style of the design has been drawn out for this pommel, and you may go to make out that it's actually a quartet of serpents that are interlaced together, and in the centre they actually form a little cross, and that gives you an idea of the level of the sophistication of the ornament within the filigree, that there are very sophisticated hidden patterns on many of the objects that very probably relate to the pre-Christian beliefs of the Anglo-Saxons. Then, as well as this distinctive filigree style, we have examples in garnet clozzone, such as illustrated by this pommel and this pair of collars, which also becomes in a different region to this filigree style. And then, the sides, these two, we have a third style, we have what we'd be calling our cumberland hilt style, based on our small fittings from bricks of the gardens. The clozzone style cobbles are very interesting to note, because their closest parallel for manoeuvre saxonymon, their best parallel for manoeuvre saxonymon, is the sword from Mount One at Sutton Hood, the ship barrel, which I referred to earlier. And it's also the case that many of the other pieces of garnet clozzone in the collection have their best parallels within the same royal burial assemblage from Suffolk in the East, down there. Castwork is rarer in the collection than objects manufactured from gold sheep, which is the case with the filigree and the clozzone objects. And completely new is the style of sword fittings in silver with gold mounts, which is illustrated here by Pommel 76, a pair of unique silver guards, and rather than just the enclates, these were little hold guards, made us cast in silver with gold mounts. You can see the gold mount on this side of the pommel. And then there's also a pair of, the remains of a pair of hilt cobbles. And this style, another fourth style, is neatly reconstructed here to show just how extraordinary and spectacular the original sword hilt of this sword would have appealed. The other thing to note is that this is a unique pommel form. Nowhere in Europe has a power level of this because of these strange knobs on the shoulders. And these we call ring knobs. They're related to a custom, a sword ring custom that existed in Europe in the period, but our sword pommels have a pair of these knobs, and they're unique in that respect of Europe. Now, coming up, the horde contains the remains of at least one crested helmet besides a weapon, which is similar to examples from Scandinavia and England. Most notedly again from Suttonville, Marraith 1, what we've mentioned several times. It was originally largely golden in appearance, however nothing remains of the helmet's original iron cap, which has made reconstruction a challenge. The surviving structural parts illustrated here include a two-section helmet crest, as well as a pair of silver gilt cast cheek pieces, both of which are decorated again with complex animal art of Salim style 2, little animals just about to be made out, as well as parts of serfans. And then around the cap, the bottom of the helmet cap, we had a silver band that held a silver gilt sheet showing a procession of running or needing warriors. Besides those solid structural parts, there are many other designs from the helmet that were formed again in silver sheet and that we've reconstructed from well over a thousand fragments. They include again designs of animals, animal art, but most striking are these figure warrior designs, which we have. We have a figure on horseback wielding a spear over arm, which can be paralleled by the example on the Suttonville helmet. Then we have fragments of a dancing warrior design, which again has a parallel on the Suttonville helmet. And then we also have panels of warrior aristocrats, some face right and some face left. They wear bird crested helmets. They have armour and clothing. On both sides of the helmet, they marched from the front to the back, hence the reason they marched in different directions and laid like this, so that they neatly marched from the rear of the helmet to the front. Arguably ours is now the grandest of the known so-called crested helmets. And ours is also unique in actually having had a real crest reconstructed near a horsehair, a dyed red. And all the other crested helmets from the period just had a solid metal crust. We concluded that ours helmet was truly fit for a king, in the same way that the Suttonville helmet is for the Royal Barrier. There are also over 20 large mounts in the collection forming set. Many heavily inlaid with garnets. And many of them probably come from a single workshop. They are so close in their manufacture and high quality production. Some could come from ostentatious military parade here, like the set here, that we reconstructed as fittings for a saddle. As well as having garnet crozzone decoration, these mounts also had little panels. In gold filamory, and they hold little designs of servants. So quite literally had these little nested vipers ready to struck for the protection of the saddle. We also have a strange set of silver fittings, two of which are shown here, and these we've reconstructed as fittings for a horse of private. The eye shaped mount 567 is interesting to note, because it resembles another pair of eye shaped mounts in garnet crozzone, but for which we have a quite different interpretation, to which I can turn on this slide. Most unexpectedly, some of the large mounts reveal Christian treasures created for and by the first or second generation of the early Anglo-Saxon church. And it's important to understand that this is a period in Anglo-Saxon England, the 7th century, when the pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were gradually converted to Christianity. An inscribed strip, seen here, has been the subject of much debate. The Latin text on it, inlayed with Black Lielo, is from the book of Numbers in the Old Testament. It is Moses' invocation of God's protection for the Israelites in the wilderness. Spoken when the Ark of the Covenant was raised up. Arise, O Lord, at may your enemies be tall apart and those who hate you flee from your face. Its ferocity endorses the hypothesis that the folded gold strip was possibly in the arm of a golden cross that may have been set possibly on a relicry shrine designed to be carried into battle by a Christian army. Provocatively, one feasible reconstruction for the set of garnet claws on a mouse, to which I've just referred, with the eye-shaped fittings, as well as fittings of strip form, is as fittings for the side of an Ark or a half-shaped shrine. Collectively, we have also argued within our forthcoming book that there is nothing to oppose the century date for the inscription. Technically, the strip's flattened and empty gem setting, at one end, is a closely-related manufacture to the settings of the hord's great golden cross, to which I shall now turn. The great cross, folded, but reconstructed here to its original 30 centimetre height, could have been both carried in procession or placed in a stand on an altar, and remember our gold-socketed stand that we showed at the beginning of the talk. Based on the late Roman and early Christian tradition of the crook's gamata, the jeweled cross, its gold and blood-red garnets would have recalled the cross of victory of the Emperor Constantine. The Anglo-Saxon poem, The Dream of the Rude, also describes just such a vision, illustrating how, for the Anglo-Saxons too, the cross was foremost a talisman of conquest. And I quote from the poet, the portent was all covered with gold, beautiful gems appeared at the corners of the earth, and they were also fired upon the cross beam. The poet of The Dream of the Rude almost certainly had in mind a cross very like ours. On the cross, the red garlic bosses symbolised the five wounds of Christ with the mount of Golgotha at the base. But this Christian iconography was combined too with Germanic animal art, as on many other objects in the world as we've seen, the art of the pre-Christian age. It shows fluent interlace animal ornament known as we've already seen, and it is in his Sarlene's style too. Here is the drawn-out design of that with the animals head at this end, its long body with one leg and another leg at the front which interlaces with its own body and with another creature with whom it wrestles. Significantly, this animal art moathe, which is on this side here, is actually a copy of a ring decoration seen on the cups again in the Suttonhub mount Ron Shipbury. The famous grave dated to 626-40, and therefore the cross and our related inscribed strip, which we've just shown, may be dated to around the mid-seventh century. Now the other object shown here is an unparalleled subconical mount that is topped with this column and then another apical disc. It has animal art that is related to the animal arms on the cross, as well as garnet cross on the ornament, and within its scheme are multiple cross patterns. Professor Leslie Webster has drawn attention to this drawing, this illumination rather, in the Colette's amiotinus of the Prophet Ezra, the Prophet wearing a very, very similar head ornament. It's been suggested that what this is is an early Christian priest or bishop's head ornament based on the head ornament of the Jewish priests. Now, a typological analysis in the study of style has taken us some way to establishing the character of the horn, and to explain how it came to being and why it was buried, we must first establish when and where its contents were made. Now, the concept of object biography or object life history has been current in archaeology for some time, and it is particularly commended for looking at how hordes form from the production of the objects through their doods and rews to their deposition and eventual discovery. Hord has produced an enormous range of information about its production and early Anglo-Saxon manufacturing in general. Most significant for this lecture is the evidence from the filigree panoclosone work. Gold filigran, as we've seen, the decoration of fine wires and granules, dominates on 60% of the objects. Much at first glance compares to objects from southern England, including this buckle from Kent. However, any typical details of the filigree in the Horde, as well as the forms of the objects, suggests that we may be looking at objects that were manufactured elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon England. Beyond that, it is the case that in the 6th century, Scandinavia already had a tradition of filigree-decorated sawthog of furniture like this set here. So it's likely that the influence of the Anglo-Saxon and sawthog fittings of the 7th century was fittings of the 6th century in Scandinavia. The clausone was formed by the inlaying stones, mainly garnets into a preconstructed delicate gold cell work. Most is geometric in pattern, but there is also animal mark patterns like these here. The best parallels for many of the designs and the techniques are found in East Anglia. Again, notably amongst, as we've said, the Royal Assembly from southern Hwy. In terms of distribution of parallels for our gold pommels, outside of the Horde, just 15 instances of gold pommels are known, mainly for metal detector finds, which compares with the over 50 examples from the Horde. The distribution of these, the triangles, suggests that the style emanated from Angliaid regions, or a region north of the Thames. Notice the absence from Kent. Possibly we're looking at a style that was focused on the Kingdom of Lindsay, or maybe perhaps the powerful Kingdom of Northumbria. This here is the rough location of where the Cumberland hill must have come from. So again, perhaps with the Cumberland hill style we may be looking at a northern style. Study of the where repair and modification of objects reveals how they were used and something of their generation use. For example, where patterns on the pommels and the tips of fittings from the hill guards represented here on this schematic show that where was heaviest at the ends of the guards on the tops and the ends of the pommels. What we've suggested from this is that the majority of the where that occurs on our sword fittings is the result of the sword being worn and scabeted at the waist and that it's rubbing against clothing. If it was the case that these swords were constantly drawn and used in warfare we would have expected more where on the creek. It looked like the majority of the time that the swords were being worn peaceably with and at threat of violence. On the whole, it's been found that the amount of where on the fittings correlates with their age of the objects. That's suggested by their typology and style. It hasn't proved straightforward to provide a chronology of the objects in the horde because of the rarity of the forms and the extraordinary character of the collection generally. We also have an absence of coins in the collection and we don't have any radiocarbon scientific data either. We've turned therefore to looking at the animal art with decoration on the objects since animal art has long been studied by archaeologists for its development and chronology. We have, as well as the style 2 which I've already mentioned, the style 2 animal art we have a pair of hill collars which had the earlier animal art known as style 1. This was in use in Anglo-Saxon England from the late 5th century up until about 550 AD. These collars may therefore be the oldest objects in our collection and are very possibly there for an antique sword or what we might consider an heirloom sword that was already very old when it came into the collection. Sarlene style 2, the later animal art occurs on about 140 objects in the collection. My research proposes that we have two forms of animal style 2 in England and in the ball summarised here we have an early style 2 which comprises of these highly abstract zoo and wharf creatures the little black heads around and grey jaws with certain light bodies and then we have a later style 2 which is based on the quadruped shown in profile so we only have two legs shown but we're actually dealing with a four-legged creature and you can see the dates here ones earlier late 6th to early 7th and one is early to mid 7th century. So based on the study of the forms of the objects and this animal style we've suggested four phases of chronology to the metalwork in the collection which are summarised here. We have the earliest is this as a small number of silver fittings from the swords that were made in the 6th century and that we may consider as heirloom swords then the bulk of our collection is gold fittings the earliest fittings ticker-thied by early style 2 and infilligory and then we have a subsequent third phase with golden garnet fittings and then we have a final phase of silver fittings with gold mounts and our final phase is surface 630 to 660 and it's this final phase of objects these latest objects which help us to come to conclusion about the mighty dated burial or deposition for the horn itself and we've suggested a dated deposition from surface 650 to surface 675. So what does it mean I'm aware that I'm running out of time so I'm going to have to go through this fairly promptly. Horns tended to be interpreted in two ways either as economically valuable materials that were hidden for safekeeping and for some reason were never uncovered or as objects that were committed forever, permanently for ritual reasons to engage with the supernatural as gifts to gods or as accompanents for the dead. Studies informed by modern archaeological theories suggest however that hoarding practices were more complex. The structure and motifs behind hordes are hauled by biography so to speak and may be best revealed by combining detailed analysis of the finds which we've just done with the examination of the context that is the structure of the deposit in the ground and the surrounding historical and archaeological landscape. Much has been inferred already from the material character of the hoard and to summarise. In its material art and symbolism it belongs to the pinnacle of 7th century masculine warrior society. We're dealing with the warrior elite here and arguably a small contingent of church work. It represents the form of powers secular and spiritual on which kings depended. Yet it was infragment, deliberately dismantled and selective in its context. While the horrible artefacts can be compared generally to our status finds from elsewhere from cemeteries and from non-funery contexts there is nothing that matches the combination of mass weapon fittings, precious material and fragmentation. We can compare very generally with the war booty weapon sacrifices of Scandinavia such as the example here from Nudum that there are important differences. These sacrifices occur in southern Scandinavia in north Germany. They typically comprise whole weapons, not fittings stripped from high status elite weaponry. We can also make very general comparisons with treasure hoards of the late Roman period and the sub Roman period both in Britain and elsewhere across the rest of Europe. But it's very important to note that as a whole hoards are very rare in contemporary early Anglo-Saxon England. We have just a handful. I've suggested that the Staffordshire Hall was buried some point in the third quarter of the 7th century. At this date it's fine spot lay within Mercia a border territory. The last of the major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to emerge into history. And it was not yet the power it would become in the 8th century. According to the ecclesiastical history and the later Historia of the Ptollum Mercia was born a protracted warfare waged by a pagan king Pender often in alliance with Welsh kings and mainly against Anglian neighbours to the east in particular the Kingdom of Northumbria and the Kingdom of East Anglia. This blue line here shows the limit of Anglo-Saxon culture in Britain at the time. On the west side we have the Britons and the Welsh. And there's our fine spot there. The 650s was a particularly turbulent time for the Kingdom of Mercia. It saw the death of Pender in battle in 655 of Windward. His son Pender was murdered a year later. Another son, warfare, was eventually restored to the throne. And he and his brother Eiffelred enjoyed long reigns continuing the expansion of the Kingdom. We have of course suggested that the objects in the board were derived primarily from areas controlled by Anglian kings. And we've made notable parallels with East Anglia as well as Northumbria. The very regions with which Mercia was a war in the 7th century. It is however important to note the very liminal location of the board right at the limit of Anglo-Saxon England here. The incidence of chance finds. Anglo-Saxon chance finds backs up our limited Anglo-Saxon culture and again the board here. We have some evidence of Anglo-Saxon settlement in the Mercia region by the late 5th century and by the 7th century we have evidence of rich barobarials to the north of where the board was found. However, there was very little to suggest that Mercia was manufacturing prestige equipment in the way other kingdoms were in the earlier 7th century, the datamile metalwork. The objects in the board were brought together brought into Mercia in some way. I'll skip over that one. It's likely therefore as we've already argued that most of the weaponry in the board was probably made in kingdom workshops for circulation amongst leading warrior members of royal retinues. Some of the items as well like this possible saddle mount could have been gifts to kings and the church equipment could have been made in royal workshop for the first generation of the early Anglo-Saxon church. Given the big range of the objects the objects could have joined the board cumulatively and episodically so not all the collections coming together in one time but as a result of various episodes. But we cannot specify exactly when or how each came to form part of the treasure nor how they entered Mercia Nevertheless the multiple recorded conflicts leading up to and beyond the painful battle of Wingward and the death of Emmer in 655 provide us with provocative models for how such material could have entered the kingdom of Mercia and the west midlands. Toward the end the assemblage underwent extensive damage with fitting systematically and crudely strict away from the swords and other objects. Much of this was done with knives used to cut or leave but smithing tongs were also used to pull off some pommels and this points to the likelihood that smiths were involved The experts who would also have had the ability to differentiate the golden silver from the base skilled materials but would also have been in circulation and used as sword fittings. Possibly the collected bullion was to be recycled into new objects but if so the job was left incomplete as the many garnet inlaid objects show. However this explanation overlooks the extremely selected character of the objects They are the supreme symbols as we have said of the power of kings They are not simply a random sample from a royal treasury The alternative is that the Horde was an ideological act a way of deactivating the symbolic power of objects Perhaps the objects are defeated and humiliated right at arm In addition there is evidence for the deliberate damage to some objects illustrated here by by our pen and cross its arms were deliberately broken this is not an accidental break the arms are a box construction and very strong someone deliberately broke the arms across in what we might consider an icon plastic act Finally we turn to the context of the burial itself but sadly this is where we have the least evidence only 13% of the fragments have no locations and then only to the 1m grid square to which they were recorded Nevertheless, within the centre here we have a 3x4m area which suggests the focus In addition we have 21 soil blocks that were recovered by the metal detectors These comprise mainly small silver fragments but with some gold objects mixed in that may well represent a sort of a filtrate from the bottom of a pit We believe that it is likely that the board was buried in probably a single pit with all of the objects together and that its dispersal was the result of the plaring that happened just beforehand and which revealed it As we can see some of the objects are now just at the very surface There was in addition a single fragment recovered during conservation of a textile and it's possible that this fragment of flax and linen represents all that remains of a bag that was used to contain our collection This shows here this is the edge of our ridge of land and this shows what has ultimately transpired to be a natural feature There was talk of a mound having been at the end here and it's possible that this was a natural mound resulting from glaciation but it may well have been a low mound at the time and it may well have had a distinctive vegetation and our board was found just there just at the edge of it There was however evidence of other Anglo-Saxon activity except for a disc mound from horse harness in the art style of the latest objects in the collection It was found at some distance from the horde this is the two fragments here and because it's copper alloy we don't believe it's actually part of the original deposit but what it represents is either another single deposit of an object or possibly the presence of a horseman at the site with around the date of the deposition which is tantalising in terms of whether or not that horseman was involved in the deposit of our horde The last clues to the horde's meaning lie in its topographic location On the one hand as we've said it seems peripheral environmentally the area was part of Cannock Chase and it remained unimproved land up until the 18th to 19th century enclosures Culturally as we've seen the horde in its wider context is also liminal it's at the very fringe of early Anglo-Saxon England Nevertheless politically the fine spot is between several small folk territories that became incorporated into the kingdom of Mercia The first was that as the Pensa set then we have a royal state of Wethnersfield Wethners preserving the name Woden if possible but this also had some pre-Christian religious significance and then there is the territory of the Tom set and the horde seems to have been buried between the two folk territories but perhaps more within the landscape of the Tom set This is that the area is also significant as Tamworth becomes the royal centre of Mercia and Lichfield is where the bishopryg is established following the merger So it seems very likely that we're dealing with the royal heartland of Mercia here where the horde was buried Most significantly perhaps the site is beside Roman Watling Street and then we have another Roman road Rytnill Street coming along here Now although these are Roman roads they remained in use into the early Anglo-Saxon period and these would have provided the main routeways into the territory of Mercia from the north, from Northumbria and Rytnill Street down to the southeast Thus the site was evidently accessible and perhaps if it had been marked by a low natural mound or distinctive vegetation it was also quite identifiable perhaps if some would have wished to return to it Yet it was also liminal it was out in the landscape exactly the sort of place that we see in prehistory was used for ritual deposits and in the early medieval period in the middle ages for assemblies To conclude therefore there are multiple possibilities for exploring and explaining at Staffordshire Hall as well as many uncertainties I've been able to give you a glimpse today of the arguments although I'm fully aware there are many other scenarios that can be conjured and there is plenty of room for further debate In the end it is impossible to say exactly why the hall was treated as it was exactly who might have owned it and why it might have been buried Our leading suggestions are that it was a royal mercy and treasure possibly derived from captured battle loot that was in transition between decommissioning and recycling but the completion of this act was arrested for some unknown reason leading to a final burial or that it was the deliberate and permanent removal of royal treasure from circulation for political, superstitious or religious reasons Thank you