33 published discoveries from England — coins, hoards, jewellery and artefacts recovered by detectorists and archaeologists.
In 1975 a ploughed field at Water Newton, on the site of a Roman town near Peterborough, gave up 28 silver and gold objects marked with Christian symbols, the earliest known Christian church silver from anywhere in the Roman Empire.
In 1979 a detectorist dug up a late Roman hoard of gold jewellery and silver spoons on a Thetford building site, and didn't report it. By the time archaeologists heard, the findspot had been built over.
In 1966 a mechanical digger on a building site at Ravenshead in Nottinghamshire turned up 1,237 gold coins and pieces of jewellery, hidden during the Wars of the Roses. It is the largest hoard of medieval coins ever found in Britain.
In 1837 workmen taking stone from a burial cairn on Bodmin Moor found a gold cup beaten from a single sheet. It went to the Crown, spent a century in royal palaces, and now stands in the British Museum beside the Ringlemere Cup.
In November 2013 a detectorist in east Devon found a hoard of 22,888 Roman coins, reported it at once and helped archaeologists dig it out. Its first coin became the one-millionth find recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme.
In 2015 a detectorist near Watlington in Oxfordshire found a Viking hoard of about 200 silver coins, ingots and jewellery. Its rare Two Emperors pennies show Alfred the Great sharing power with a Mercian king history almost forgot.
In 1939 a self-taught archaeologist uncovered the outline of a 27-metre ship under a Suffolk burial mound, and inside it the richest Anglo-Saxon burial ever found: a helmet, gold and garnet fittings and silver from Byzantium.
In 1942 a ploughman at West Row in Suffolk struck a hoard of 34 pieces of late Roman silver tableware. His employer took it home and kept quiet about it for four years before the world found out.
