A Metal Detectorist Stumbled Upon a Silver Coin. It Turned Out to Be Part of a Stash Buried During the Viking Invasion of Britain
Archaeologists say that the 63 coins, most of which bear the name of King Burgred of Mercia, might have been hidden in the ninth century to keep them safe at a time of unrest
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On a summer morning in 2022, dozens of people gathered in a field in the English village of Bickmarsh, many with metal detectors in hand. Around 9 a.m., one of the attendees discovered a silver coin buried in the dirt. Soon after, another individual stumbled onto a cache of five or six more.
“We cordoned off an area of the field, and slowly but surely, the coins kept popping up,” dig coordinator Simon Hall told the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald’s Lise Evens in August 2022. “The guys were literally shaking every time a new coin was found. They were spellbound. It’s not something that happens every day.”
Nearly four years later, researchers are revealing new insights on the coin hoard, which was probably buried between 871 and 874 C.E., perhaps to protect it from Viking raiders. Over the span of just one weekend, members of Go Detecting Ltd. (Midlands) found a total of 25 coins. In subsequent excavations, archaeologists unearthed another 38 at the site. The stash is only the second of its kind ever discovered in Worcestershire, a county in the West Midlands.
“Hoard deposits are often linked to periods of uncertainty or instability,” notes the Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service in a blog post. “Someone might hide their wealth in the ground intending to return once the danger had passed. In many cases, however, the owner never came back. The shallow burial of the Bickmarsh hoard suggests exactly this kind of hurried decision.”
According to a second blog post by the organization, most of the 63 coins are silver pennies bearing the name of Burgred, a king who ruled over Mercia, one of the most powerful kingdoms in early medieval England, between roughly 852 and 874. His domain included modern-day Bickmarsh, which was then a small rural settlement next to a road that had been in use since the Roman era.
Did you know? The many myths of the term “Anglo-Saxon”
- The period spanning 410 to 1066 is often referred to as England’s Anglo-Saxon era. At the time, the region was divided into multiple kingdoms, including Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex.
- In a 2021 essay for Smithsonian magazine, scholars Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade pointed out that the people who lived in England during the early Middle Ages didn’t refer to themselves as “Anglo-Saxons.” The term only came into use after the Norman Conquest in 1066; in the centuries since, it’s been appropriated to promote the myth of white supremacy.
- “‘Anglo-Saxon’ subsumes all other tribes and peoples in an oversimplified way,” Rambaran-Olm and Wade argued. “It says nothing of Britons and others who migrated or settled in the region.”
Two of the newly discovered coins are Frankish pennies from Northern Europe. Another is an imitation of a gold solidus minted under Louis the Pious, son of the Frankish king Charlemagne. Archaeologists in Britain have previously unearthed more than 20 such specimens, including a gold coin that was turned into a pendant by a Viking soldier. It was “of a style that was made in workshops in Frisia, now part of the Netherlands, as a type of portable wealth,” numismatist Simon Coupland told BBC News’ Katy Prickett this year.
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The presence of coins from continental Europe supports the researchers’ theory that the cache was buried amid Viking activity in the region. The late ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes an 874 incursion by a Viking army, which “drove the king [Burgred] over sea, when he had reigned about two and twenty winters, and subdued all that land.” According to the annals, Burgred fled to Rome, where he remained until his death. Three years later, King Alfred the Great of Wessex agreed to relinquish a portion of what is now England to a Viking invader who’d appointed himself king of East Anglia.
Worcestershire wasn’t part of the lands placed under Viking rule, and documents preserved in the Worcester Cathedral archives don’t directly mention Viking attacks in the area. But the coin hoard could offer evidence of events otherwise absent from the historical record. Alternatively, the cache’s burial might have been “a precaution taken during uncertain times,” per the blog post.
“For now, the Bickmarsh hoard leaves us with more questions than answers,” the archaeologists add. “Yet it offers a rare glimpse into a moment when even the quiet rural landscapes of Worcestershire may have felt the ripple effects of events reshaping Anglo-Saxon England.”
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