The next day, Powell returned to the Leominster area and visited the home of Mark Conod, the tenant farmer, excitedly recounting to him and his wife, Amanda, that on a recent scan of their property he had found some jewelry, which was now at a museum. He showed them photographs and said, “There might be money in this.” They all went outside, and, from a distance, Powell pointed to indicate that he’d discovered the items at the top of the field belonging to Conod’s mother, Yvonne.
That July, Reavill alerted the West Mercia Police to the possibility of a heritage crime, and, because of the potential multimillion-dollar value of the alleged find, an investigation was launched. Around this time, Simon Wicks, the coin dealer, returned to Dix Noonan Webb with nine equally remarkable coins, which the auction house also took into its custodianship. All the coins were soon turned over to the police.
The next month, the British Numismatic Trade Association issued an unusual warning to its members, stating that coins believed to be from an undeclared hoard were sneaking onto the market, and that buying any of them would violate the Treasure Act. On August 18, 2015, a little more than two months after their trip to Leominster, Powell and Davies were arrested. Powell warned the police, “I ain’t gonna make it easy.”
It’s impossible to measure how much of a role the black market plays in archeological finds made by detectorists, but it isn’t hard to turn up dealers who promise discretion. Nor is there any shortage of collectors who, in their eagerness to create a set of coins, may be willing to overlook a sketchy provenance or two. Coins are simple to move around, including overseas, and the fact that the Treasure Act permits the retention of single-coin finds means that a cunning detectorist, over a period of time, might sell a number of valuable coins one by one, without drawing undue attention. But such an approach is not foolproof. In 2017, a detectorist from Norfolk, David Cockle, was sentenced to a sixteen-month prison term for theft, after selling off a hoard of ten extremely rare Anglo-Saxon gold coins, having previously declared them as individual finds from various sites around the U.K. Cockle happened to be a police officer, a circumstance that likely added to the vigor with which his case was pursued. Prosecutions of rogue detectorists are uncommon, as criminal-investigation departments contending with cases of rape, murder, and armed robbery are disinclined to dedicate their limited resources to the disappearance of objects whose original owner might have been dead for more than a millennium.
Powell told the police that he was a longtime hobbyist, having started metal detecting with his father. He insisted that the gold he had handed in to Mark Lodwick at the Museum of Wales came from lands occupied by the Conods, from whom he had permission to detect, although he acknowledged that he had not sought permission from the Cawleys—“Lord and Lady of the Manor,” as he characterized them. Powell denied all knowledge of a hoard of coins. “They are telling people I found three hundred coins,” he said. “Why would I hand in the gold and keep the coins?”
The homes of Powell and Davies were searched. Both had display cases containing finds, but there were no valuable objects inside. “They didn’t have the silver coins, and things like that, that you’d expect from detectorists who went out on a regular basis,” Reavill told me. There was certainly no sign of a large cache of Anglo-Saxon silver.
Davies gave the police an account in line with Powell’s: the pair had recently found just the three pieces of Saxon gold and a couple of stray coins—all of which they had declared to Lodwick. When asked about the café meeting with Paul Wells and Jason Sallam, Davies claimed that he and Powell had been lying when they’d said that the coins were from a large hoard: Powell had actually owned the coins presented at the café for years, and the hoard story had been concocted merely to help him “get rid” of them.
A few weeks later, Gareth Thomas, an officer with the West Mercia Police, visited Wells at home and discussed the encounter at the café. Wells insisted that he, Sallam, and Davies had agreed that the coins needed to be declared, but that Powell had other ideas. “George Powell was in it for the money—that was obvious,” Wells said. He also revealed that, some days after the café meeting, Davies had asked him to retain five of the coins for safekeeping. Wells then showed the officer a leather case for a magnifying glass. On one side, the stitching had been unpicked then glued back together: it was a secret compartment. Wells opened it up, and all five silver coins slipped out. The police officer called his supervisor to ask what he should do. Arrest him, the supervisor replied. “I knew it would come to this,” Wells said, as he was taken to the station.
Late that summer, Tim Hoverd, the archeology-projects manager for the Herefordshire Council, was dispatched to Eye to survey the territory. If, as Powell and Davies claimed, the items had been scattered at different locations, that might mean the presence of a significant new site: a Saxon cemetery, religious settlement, or royal palace. But seasonal changes made clues hard to come by. “By the time we got there, most of the area was covered with maize, which grows damn fast,” Hoverd told me recently. “It was way over my head. And how do you find holes people have dug two or three months before when you can’t actually see the ground?” Hoverd and his colleagues paced the fields, dug multiple test pits, and conducted an aerial survey by drone. “It quickly became apparent that there were no formal structures—no royal burials—that this material could have come from,” he told me.
Powell and Davies hadn’t yet been charged with crimes, but the case against them grew considerably stronger in 2016, when a forensic examination of their mobile phones revealed deleted photographs of glimmering objects being extracted from the ground. In addition to the jewelry, there were hundreds of coins. In Davies’s original interview with police, he had asserted that he hadn’t taken his phone with him to Herefordshire. After being confronted with the photographs, he declined to comment.
When Hoverd examined the deleted images, he immediately keyed into two snapshots of the landscape. “They were designed to fit together,” Hoverd said. “I went back to the field with copies of the photographs and stood where they must have stood to take them.” The hoard’s location had been found—and it was decisively within the borders of Lord Cawley’s property. Nevertheless, apart from the two dozen coins recovered during the police inquiry, any larger hoard had disappeared.
In October, 2019, Powell and Davies stood trial in Worcester, a city about an hour east of Leominster. They had been charged with theft and with conspiracy to conceal and convert criminal property. Wicks, the shady coin dealer, was charged with concealing and converting criminal property, and Wells, the retired builder, was charged with concealment. All four denied the charges. “This case, in two words, is about buried treasure,” Kevin Hegarty, the prosecutor, said in his opening remarks.
The trial, which lasted for two months, offered the jury and others present in the courtroom an extended seminar in numismatics and in Viking history. Gareth Williams, the coin specialist at the British Museum, declared on the stand that the hoard had almost certainly been deposited sometime between the summer of 878 and the autumn of 879, when the Great Army fled northward from Wessex after Alfred the Great’s victory over Guthrum, the king of the Vikings, at the Battle of Edington, in what is now Wiltshire. This battle, Williams explained, laid the groundwork for the establishment of England as a unified country by Alfred’s grandson King Athelstan, in 927. Williams explained to me that while the Vikings were on the move “they would seize somewhere, normally either a royal estate or monastery, and stay there for the next few months, eating the food that someone’s gone to all the trouble of gathering together.” Although the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle doesn’t mention Leominster, its monastery likely offered sustenance for a band of Viking fighters during that winter, before they moved on to settle in East Anglia. The coins told the story.
The detectorists, however, offered a different tale: there had never been a hoard of coins. Davies testified that their only finds in Eye had been the gold jewelry and a few coins, and that the dozen coins they had taken to the café came from Powell’s own collection. Powell did not testify, but he appeared surprisingly confident as he arrived in court each day, chatting with security guards as he passed through the metal detectors. Hegarty, the prosecutor, told me that Powell was clearly the ringleader of the four men, and “saw himself as a bit of a character.”
When Davies was asked to explain the images recovered from his phone, he offered a new twist to his story: the image showing a large cache of coins in the ground was actually a staged photo. “George had the coins in his rucksack, and he said he wanted to get some provenance on them,” Davies told the court. “He put some coins in the ground, to make it look as if they were found there.” Davies claimed that he hadn’t been happy with the idea but had gone along with it. When Hegarty asked him what Powell’s motivation for staging such a find might be, Davies said only that Powell wanted to “show off.” (Hegarty told me, dryly, “He was never able to explain why you would come all the way from Cardiff to a piece of land in Herefordshire to dig a hole, and put things in it, and cover them up, and dig it up again.”)
Simon Wicks and Paul Wells also denied any wrongdoing. Wells, who was charged with the lesser offense of concealing the five coins in his possession, explained that he hadn’t sought to hide the coins inside the magnifying-glass case—he’d just wanted to protect them. Some of his testimony must have displeased Davies and Powell. Wells insisted that he had urged both men to declare the coins. After the café meeting, Wells said, he had spoken with Davies, who, indicating that there might be a problem with the landowner, told him, “I’m either going to be very rich or spend a long time in jail.”
A turning point in the trial occurred after Gareth Williams, the British Museum numismatist, explained that Anglo-Saxon coins were struck by hand, with a hammer on a die, and fashioned by a named moneyer—Torhtmund, say, or Hygered. As a result, such coins all have minute variations that an expert eye can identify. A photograph recovered from Powell’s phone showed a Two Emperor coin lying in what a fingerprint expert confirmed was Powell’s palm, taken the day after Powell and Davies had made the find. Hegarty told me, “Williams was able to look at the Two Emperor in the photograph and say, ‘No, that is not one of the coins that has been recovered.’ So that proved beyond any doubt that there were more coins.” The recovered coins were too fragile to bring to the courtroom—most were less than a millimetre thick. So Hegarty showed the jury slides of the coins. “They were really beautiful,” he recalls. The Anglo-Saxon kings looked almost Cubist: Alfred the Great with a large nose and deep-set eyes, Ceolwulf II long-chinned and grimacing. Hegarty told me, “When you realize that this is something that was handmade twelve hundred years ago, you gasp.”
The jury deliberated for two days. On November 22, 2019, the four men were found guilty on all counts. The judge, Nicholas Cartwright, was severe in his sentencing. Powell received ten years in prison, Davies eight and a half, Wicks five. Wells avoided prison time but was given a suspended sentence of twelve months. (Hegarty said, “The jury was quite satisfied that he had tried to conceal the coins, because, literally, he had concealed them.”) Cartwright scathingly declared that the two detectorists had been recklessly motivated by greed. If they had only obtained the required permissions and reported the find to the authorities, they would have been richly rewarded. He told Powell and Davies, “You could have expected to have either a half share—or, at worst, a third share—of over three million pounds to share between you. You could not have done worse than half a million pounds each. But you wanted more.”
Not only had Powell and Davies stolen the hoard—the value of which, intact, might have been anywhere between four million and fifteen million dollars—from Lord Cawley, the judge went on; they had cheated the public of its heritage, and deprived residents of Herefordshire of the illumination the find might have offered about the Kingdom of Mercia in the ninth century. Another constituency damaged by the plundering was the metal-detecting community, where news of the conviction was welcomed on online message boards. “I hope the law starts to come down heavily on these lowlifes,” one contributor posted. The hobby’s reputation had been severely tainted, and landowners would reconsider granting permissions. “They’ve spoiled it for the large percentage of genuine detectorists,” another contributor posted. “They’ll think we’re all a bunch of crooks.” At the close of the trial, James Tucker, the barrister for George Powell, said, of his client, “It is clear, from his point of view, he wishes he had never found the treasure. It became a temptation—and, for him, a curse.”
The spot where the Viking buried the hoard, according to Tim Hoverd’s expert analysis, is in the corner of a field just north of King’s Hall Covert, the copse where pheasants are hunted. A spring flows nearby, leaving the soil often sodden. Aerial photographs and topographical analysis indicate that this was once a crossroads: one track connected two local hamlets, Moreton and Orleton; another, which fell out of use two hundred years ago, descended from King’s Hall Hill to the hamlet of Ashton. It’s impossible to know for certain whether Anglo-Saxons and Vikings trod these paths, but it’s reasonable to conclude that they were established thoroughfares for centuries, and that their intersection provided a landmark for anyone with something to hide.
In an almost unbelievable coincidence, a similar Viking hoard was found in October, 2015, just four months after Davies and Powell made their discovery in Leominster. A detectorist named James Mather was scanning a field in Watlington, in Oxfordshire, when he came across what turned out to be hundreds of coins, and also ingots and jewelry. Mather followed protocol to the letter, informing the local Finds Liaison Officer as soon as he determined that there was something unusual in the ground, so that scholars could excavate the site. John Naylor, the National Finds Adviser for Early Medieval and Later Coinage at the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, told me that when he examined the Oxfordshire coins, a few days after their extraction, he was amazed to see several Two Emperor coins featuring the visages of King Alfred and Ceolwulf II. “It really reinforces the case that Ceolwulf was accepted by Wessex as the Mercian king,” he told me. Press accounts described the Watlington hoard as having rewritten British history. The Ashmolean, which acquired the hoard for $1.75 million, now has it on prominent display, with signs citing James Mather’s contribution to its recovery.
Three years ago, more than a thousand people in the Watlington area attended local events in which Ashmolean curators talked about the hoard. “That is the side that the public has really missed out on in Leominster,” Naylor said. “The interest and excitement have been taken away.” Despite the fact that the Leominster hoard was discovered first, the Watlington hoard has stolen its thunder, reducing it to a footnote in the ongoing reëvaluation of Anglo-Saxon political history. For the time being, the Leominster jewelry and several of the coins have been put on display at the British Museum, in a gallery featuring recent archeological finds; visitors have been able to see up close the chunky gold ring, the slender armband, and a handful of coins that look as thin and delicate as if they had been punched from sheet metal. The county museum in Hereford still hopes to acquire the Leominster hoard, but any display of it will inevitably be colored by the botched circumstances of its only partial recovery. Its main allure may be as a cautionary tale—of a heist gone awry.
The investigation into the missing coins continues. Last year, the Durham Constabulary reported that, in raids of several properties in the North of England, a silver ingot and a large number of Anglo-Saxon coins had been recovered, including some minted by Alfred the Great and Ceolwulf II. The objects were collectively valued at nearly seven hundred thousand dollars. No other details of the raids were offered, and the Durham Constabulary recently declined to comment on whether its find is connected to the Leominster cache. But several people with knowledge of the case told me that the coins are, indeed, believed to be part of the hoard—though likely just a fraction of it.
