38 published discoveries from England — coins, hoards, jewellery and artefacts recovered by detectorists and archaeologists.
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.
In 1840 workmen repairing a riverbank near Preston dug into a lead chest packed with about 40 kilograms of Viking silver: thousands of coins and more than a thousand ingots, arm-rings and pieces of hacksilver.
Over more than 40 years, ploughing and metal detecting at Ken Hill near Snettisham in Norfolk turned up at least 14 hoards of Iron Age gold and silver, among them the Great Torc, a masterpiece of Celtic art.
On 6 January 2007 a father and son detecting near Harrogate found a Viking hoard of 617 silver coins and gold and silver jewellery, packed into a gilded cup made in the Frankish empire. It was valued at £1,082,000.
