CHAPTER FIVE
“rummage the hoard … be as quick as you can so that I may see/the age-old store of gold, and examine/all the priceless shimmering stones”
—BEOWULF
Coins, pottery, burials, buried treasure, hoards: England’s soil is dense with history. In A.D. 418, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , even after the Roman army had officially left England, “the Romans collected all the hoards of gold that were in Britain; and some they hid in the earth, so that no man afterwards might find them, and some they carried with them into Gaul.” A hoard can take many forms; hoards of late Roman coin and plate in Scotland and Ireland have been found hacked up—the loot, as it seems, of Pictish or Scottish or other barbarian raids. The Hoxne Treasure, found in Suffolk and dating from the late fourth century, with its 16,000 coins of gold and silver, plate, and jewelry, is one of the largest such finds from anywhere in the Roman Empire. The Mildenhall Treasure, also from Suffolk and the late fourth century, is a 27-piece silver dinner service of the highest workmanship. The Thetford Hoard, found in Norfolk, consists of late Roman plate and jewelry. The fifth-century Patching Hoard holds gold and silver coinage and jewelry from East Sussex.
Hoards are found in all eras. The Langton Matravers Hoard and Ambleside Hoard date from the Bronze Age. The Westerham Hoard is Iron Age, the Frome Hoard Roman. The Vale of York Hoard, found as recently as 2007 in North Yorkshire, was a ninth-century Viking hoard of broken jewelry, coins, and silver ingots. On the upper floor of the British Museum, one can look down a line of display cases spanning over a thousand years of hoards found in Britain.
Treasure hoards haunt the literature as well as fill the ground. Within the epic Beowulf, Sigemund kills a dragon guarding a treasure hoard “with dazzling spoils.” At the conclusion of the epic, the aged Beowulf himself battles a dragon guarding another hoard of treasure that was laid in the earth in a bygone age. Mortally wounded by the dragon, Beowulf urges his loyal young companion, Wiglaf, to “rummage the hoard … be as quick as you can so that I may see/the age-old store of gold, and examine/all the priceless shimmering stones.”
And treasure hoards tantalize the imagination. Today, droves of treasure seekers equipped with sophisticated metal-detecting equipment tramp the fields every year, seeking and sometimes finding relics of Britain’s many bygone ages—Iron Age, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Norman, medieval. And on the morning of July 5, 2009, veteran metal detector operator Terry Herbert came upon a trove of Anglo-Saxon objects buried near the village of Hammerwich, Staffordshire, in farmer Fred Johnson’s field.
This field, which the farmer most recently had used to grow turnips and brussels sprouts as well as to graze horses and cattle, was in Anglo-Saxon times an unpopulated area of woodlands and coarse heath—the kind of remote area in which wary travelers kept a lookout for highwaymen as late as the mid-17th century. Two folk groups, or tribes, shared the region—the Pencersaete and Tomsaete, from the valleys of the Rivers Penk and Tame respectively. Tame, like the Thames, reflects an old Celtic name meaning the “dark” or “slow-flowing” water. It is thought the land was used not for habitation, but for seasonal grazing by people from outlying estates, which later records indicate included estates at Wednesbury and Wolverhampton—good Germanic names.
Cutting through this region was Watling Street, one of the major arteries of transportation built and left by the Romans, and still in use in Anglo-Saxon times (and, in many parts of England, still in use today). The road ran through the former Roman town of Letocetum (later Wall), whose ruins would also probably have been visible, some two and half miles to the east of where the hoard was buried. Letocetum derives from Old Welsh/Celtic Lwytgoed, “the gray wood or forest,” as similarly the nearby town Lichfield is “the feld—open country, or common pasture—beside the gray wood.” The preponderance of nearby place-names (some surviving today, some preserved in old charters) with the Old English leah—“open woodland”—such as Wyrley and Oggeleye also evokes the vanished landscape. In the mid-to-late seventh century, the Roman road and ruins were most likely the only human-made elements in this somewhat forbidding heath fringed by gray-green forest when, one day or night, some unknown party stepped off the road onto the rise of a small hill and buried a stash of garnet-studded treasure in the ground.
In the wider landscape, the site of the hoard sat squarely in the heart of Mercia, one of the most important of the seven kingdoms into which Anglo-Saxon–era England was, in a rough-and-tumble way, divided. Only some seven miles to the northeast, Tamworth, a royal estate in the seventh century, was to become the capital of Mercia; Lichfield, about three miles to the north, was made the episcopal see of Mercia in 669. The region was Anglian, as opposed to Saxon or Frisian or another Germanic tribe’s, and the name Mercia refers to a “march” or “boundary”—in other words, a border country, although whether the border in question was among geographically dispersed Angles, or between Angles and the Welsh to the west, is unclear.
Frustratingly little is known about this powerful and strategic kingdom in the formative seventh century, and the little that is known mostly comes from the Northumbrian Bede. Among other reasons, the discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard was exciting for being, in the words of one historian, “something tangible from … mid- to late-seventh-century Mercia.” The kingdom emerged in the region of the Upper Trent on the frontier between Welsh and Anglo-Saxon territory. Some scholars believe the origins of the kingdom lie with a group of Angles who moved inland up the Humber Estuary in the fifth century and established themselves in the Trent Valley, in the region of the hoard. Here, with their Viking-like prowess as raiders and warriors as well as settlers, they gained ascendency over small groups. By the seventh century they were no longer a mixed collection of different peoples, but Mercians, inhabiting an identifiable kingdom, albeit one whose borders changed with each battle. According to Bede, the kingdom contained some 12,000 hides—a hide being the amount of land necessary to sustain a household—and was divided into northern and southern regions by the River Trent.
It is clear that the central forces behind Mercia’s expansion were the movements and character of King Penda, who, according to Bede, was “a most energetic member of the royal house of Mercia.” Penda was made king in 632 but seems to have won a name for himself as a battle lord of the old Germanic school well before this time. In genealogy Penda and his dynastic line claimed to be descended from the god Woden and, perhaps more politically relevant, the rulerswho held sway over the continental Anglians before the migration to England. The most formidable king of his generation, Penda battled fellow Anglians to the north and east, Saxons to the south, and the British in Wales to the west, and his victories on these many fronts made Mercia powerful. Mercia’s nur of good fortune had a setback with Penda’s defeat and death in 655, in a landmark battle against the king of Bernicia to the north. We shall return later to this campaign and its possible implications for the Staffordshire Hoard.
“Gold in the ground—the epic Beowulf is shot through with descriptions of gold. The hero Scyld is reverently buried with “a gold standard up/high above his head”; King Finn must honor the Danes with “the wrought-gold rings … to keep morale in the beer-hall high”; a funeral pyre is heaped “with boar-shaped helmets forged in gold”; Finn’s halls are sacked, and his “gold collars and gemstones—swept off to the ship”; and Beowulf is presented with “a gold-chased heirloom … the best example/of a gem-studded sword in the Geat treasury.” In Beowulf a king is goldwine gumena, the gold friend of warriors, or a gold-gyfa, a beag-gyfa—a giver of gold, a giver of rings.
Gold is associated with divinity as well as nobility. Germanic myths tell of the gods’ great hall of gold, and as Christian churches and monasteries gained wealth they acquired golden sacral objects; one of the Staffordshire Hoard’s two golden crosses, it will be recalled, is thought to have been an altar or a processional cross. From at least Roman times, gold was held to have magic properties and was used in protective amulets; and ancient magical recipes specify that love charms and curses alike be written on tablets of gold. Gold appears in ritual deposits made in lakes and bogs and the earth, including deposits of objects that have been deliberately broken and rendered useless, like those of the Staffordshire Hoard.
And gold accounts for nearly 75 percent of the metal composition of the Staffordshire Hoard itself, whose delicate individual golden pieces cumulatively amount to over 11 pounds. For the most part, the gold used by Anglo-Saxons had been recycled. Local gold and silver mines, situated in the British Celtic-controlled north and west, were off-limits, and available gold mostly came from Rome, whose imperial currency had been based on the solidus, or solid gold coin. Imperial gold had come to the Germanic tribes first as military pay, then, following the sack of Rome, as plunder, while the surviving eastern empire, Byzantium, paid the barbarians gold to keep away. Additional gold entered England in the form of diplomatic gifts, a key component of the Germanic nobility’s gift-giving culture.
By the time of the Staffordshire Hoard, however, the availability of gold in England was dwindling. Pure gold had become scarcer and alloys of silver more prevalent, along with silver jewelry and coinage. International trade in garnets had also shifted. Germanic jewelers and craftsmen had introduced a cloisonné technique to Europe, using slices of polished garnets and other gemstones, that were either imported raw, or possibly already cut into sheets as fine as 1 millimeter (0.04 inch) thick. Historically, garnets mostly originated in India and were brought to Europe via the Silk Road. In the late sixth century, however, this source dried up, possibly due to disruption in the east caused by the Persian invasion of southern Arabia. From this time, Bohemia and Portugal became the most common suppliers, although of inferior stones. The preciousness, and possible scarceness, of garnets is suggested by an interesting feature discovered in the process of cleaning objects of the hoard; two of the duller garnets of item K674, a striking gold and garnet pommel cap of a sword, turned out on close inspection to be in fact red glass.
Details of materials and technique are of particular interest to the archaeologists and historians interpreting the Staffordshire Hoard, for these are the tools they must work with in the all-important task of establishing the hoard’s date. The land in which the hoard had lain for 13 centuries became a working field—a field, in other words, that was not only grazed, but also plowed and generally disturbed. Plowing and erosion churned the hoard into the upper layers of the earth, and so when Terry Herbert discovered the objects, they were lying near the surface. The archaeological context for the hoard, then, had long been destroyed, and in order to date the finds archaeologists must rely on features of the objects themselves—the materials used, the techniques of composition, and the artistic style.
“There is nothing that looks in any way Celtic,” according to Kevin Leahy, a leading Anglo-Saxon authority and the first person to catalog the hoard. “It is wholly Germanic.” Art historians classify Germanic art of this early “conversion” period on the basis of its iconography, or the kind of pictures and images the craftsman has chosen to use, whether decorating stone, manuscripts, or metalwork like the hoard. These styles in turn are roughly representative of certain broad dates, although different regions adapted new trends and styles at somewhat different times. The Staffordshire Hoard is representative of Style II zoomorphic art; in filigree as well as in cloisonné, serpentine animal-like creatures adorn the objects with patterns of figure-eight loops and intricate swirls. “Approximate calendar dates … would most probably be post-600, and pre-700,” according to Karen Høiland Nielsen, an authority on Germanic art at the University of Southern Denmark. Like objects from the Sutton Hoo burial finds, with which they share striking similarities, individual pieces of the hoard reflect a strong Scandinavian influence.
The conspicuous material value of the objects—the gold and garnets—combined with the extraordinary quality of the craftsmanship suggests that the weapons of the hoard constituted elite military equipment. As it happens, the number of swords in the hoard—92 pommels—accords with the number of armed men that it is thought may have made up a nobleman’s troop of retainers. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives our only citation of such a figure, relating how in 784 “Cyneard slew King Cynewulf, and was slain himself, and eighty-four men with him,” the men presumably being Cyneard’s companions. Other documentary evidence makes clear that a lord gave and loaned equipment to his followers; one possible explanation of the hoard, then, is that it represents the glittering military gear that once distinguished—and perhaps identified—the retinue of a particular lord.
But why would such elite equipment be broken and buried in the ground?
We have now surveyed some of the ritual beliefs associated with particular features of the multifaceted hoard—beliefs concerning weapons, Christian symbols, the written word, and types of ritual deposits that were characteristic of Germanic, as well as Celtic, practice. We have also seen how prevalent hoards of one kind or another are in England, and how they were deposited throughout many different eras. Such a general survey, however, does not tell us why the specific objects of the Staffordshire Hoard might have been buried in the mid- to late seventh century A.D. in farmer Fred Johnson’s field.
Now another brief survey of historical events concerning Mercia around the time of the hoard yields some suggestive incidents. The first is described by Bede, our principal source for this period, and it relates, as so much in Mercia’s history does, to the wily King Penda.
Penda, as will be recalled, appears to have spent much of his mortal energy on waging battles with his neighbors near and far. His final, fatal campaign was fought in 655, with Oswiu, the king of Bernicia, a region that today straddles northeast England and southern Scotland. Over the years, Oswiu had been “exposed to the savage and insupportable attacks of Penda, so often mentioned before,” according to Bede, who notes that Penda had previously killed Oswiu’s brother. At last Oswiu was forced to promise Penda “an incalculable and incredible store of royal treasures and gifts as the price of peace.” Penda, however, refused the offer, and Oswiu, who was Christian,
turned to God’s mercy for help seeing that nothing else would save them from this barbarous and evil enemy. Oswiu therefore bound himself with an oath, saying, “If the heathen foe will not accept our gifts, let us offer them to Him who will, even the Lord our God.” So he vowed that if he gained the victory he would dedicate his daughter to the Lord as a holy virgin and give twelve small estates to build monasteries. In this spirit he entered the fight with his tiny army.
According to Bede, the ensuing battle was “fought near the river Winwæd which, owing to heavy rains, had overflowed its channels and its banks to such an extent that many more were drowned in flight than were destroyed by the sword in battle.” Here, on November 15, 655, King Penda fell, and Oswiu, with his tiny army, found himself the improbable victor. Presumably, in the face of so staggering an outcome, Oswiu honored his vow—one hopes his daughter, destined as she now was for a monastery (where, it has to be said, she became a teacher), shared her father’s sense of gratitude. Oswiu’s vow to dedicate valuable gifts to the god of victory is noteworthy; here it is the Christian God he supplicates, but the practice itself, reminiscent of those described centuries before by the Romans, was also traditionally Germanic. The offer itself of a “king’s ransom” in treasure, as established practice, is also noteworthy. Bede’s account, then, furnishes us with a historic reason for an assemblage of treasure worthy of a king. That Oswiu dedicated the treasure to God in the event of victory is additionally tantalizing.
A second event concerns a battle fought between Welsh and Mercian forces outside of Lichfield—in other words, in the near vicinity of the Staffordshire Hoard. Event and place are commemorated in a poem, the Welsh Marwnad Cynddylan, or “The Death Song of Cynddylan.” Cynddylan and his brother Morial were former allies of the ubiquitous Penda in one of his many campaigns, and some scholars believe Cynddylan died with Penda at Winwaed. The poem celebrates Cynddylan’s earlier battle, which had ended in a Welsh victory outside of Anglo-Saxon Lichfield:
Grandeur in battle! Extensive spoils
Morial bore off from in front of Lichfield.
Fifteen hundred cattle from the front of battle;
four twenties of stallions and equal harness.
The chief bishop wretched in his four-cornered house,
the book-keeping monks did not protect.
Those who fell in the blood before the splendid warrior
No brother escaped from the entrenchment to his sister.
They escaped from the uproar with grievous wounds.
I shall lament until I would be in my lowly grave plot
for the slaying of Cynndylan, famous to every generous man.
Here, then, in the region of Lichfield, in the mid-seventh century, men had fought a battle from which much plunder was carried away—possibly, for convenience, carried down the old Roman road that led past the find spot of the Staffordshire Hoard. The plunder included, it would seem, loot of some kind from a “wretched” bishop, a detail that inevitably conjures the presence of the two gold crosses in the Staffordshire Hoard.
Historic literature thus suggests several reasons why a miscellany of expensive military equipment might have been assembled: It was ransom of sorts, blood money to buy off a predatory battle-lord. Or it was war spoil, collected from a broken army. One historian has interpreted the hoard as the actual ransom offered by Oswiu to Penda and brought back with him after his unexpected victory in the north to be buried in the Mercian heartland, which he now possessed, perhaps for safekeeping, perhaps as a dedicatory offering for the victory. When in the same year Welsh forces defeated the Mercians outside of Lichfield (or maybe, as allies of the Mercians, defeated a Northumbrian army), the owners of the buried treasure may have died in battle, and the hoard languished unclaimed. There are other, less attractive and tidy explanations too. The hoard may have been expensive scrap metal, for example, a royal goldsmith’s assembly of material that was never retrieved.
It is the gold that dazzles. But in practical terms the most valuable part of the most valuable weapon—the sword—is not in fact represented in the hoard. As desirable as the ornate pommels and pommel guards may have been, the part of the sword any warrior would have coveted, as one historian has remarked acidly, was “the long sharp pointy bit you killed people with.” Presumably the iron and steel of the double-edged swords and single-bladed seaxes from which the pommels were stripped remained with the party that deposited the treasure.
How was the value of the hoard assessed in its own time? In terms of its solidi value? Its symbolism? The rank of its former owner, or how the treasure was lost or won? And if we had the hard facts, could we “understand” them? The hoard and its perplexing burial belong to a world in which even mundane events were suffused with magic and spiritual meaning. Gold had magic properties; and garnets too, those stones the color of blood, may also have been “charged.” Art historians believe that the enigmatic animal figures that writhe and coil decoratively over so much Anglo-Saxon art could also have been magic; used on weapons, these designs may have been apotropaic and, like the armor and weapons themselves, intended to turn away or ward off harm. Not only individual elements—the goldsmith’s raw materials and his chosen iconography—but the very art of metallurgy was informed by magic. Odin’s spear and gold ring, Thor’s hammer, Frija’s necklace—in Nordic sagas these attributes of the gods were the handiwork of magic, created by dwarfish blacksmiths who toiled underground. Here, as in many cultures, the blacksmith is associated with taboo and magic, and is himself a mystical figure.
It is unlikely that we will ever know the story of the Staffordshire Hoard; and if the hoard did serve some mystical purpose, it is perhaps appropriate that we will not. The potent magic of treasure laid with deliberate carefulness in the ground is conjured best by the great Anglo-Saxon epicBeowulf, which so wonderfully straddles two ages and two worlds-Nordic pagan and Anglo-Saxon Christian, Scandinavian and English, the way the world was and the way it was becoming. The epic, we recall, culminates in the death of the now aged hero Beowulf. Fighting a dragon, the old warrior is mortally wounded, and both dragon and warrior die. The treasure the dragon loyally guarded—the hoard—is exposed to gawking eyes:
That huge cache, gold inherited
from an ancient race, was under a spell—
which meant no one was ever permitted
to enter the ring-hall unless God Himself,
Mankind’s Keeper, True King of Triumph,
allowed some person pleasing to Him—
and in his eyes worthy—to open the hoard.
The exposure of the treasure signals that the old order is drawing to a close. With this realization, the dragon itself is recalled with sudden, unexpected nostalgia: “He had shimmered forth/on the night air once, then winged back/down to his den; but death owned him now, he would never enter his earth-gallery again.”
THE KINGDOM OF MERCIA
The English Midlands, where the Staffordshire Hoard was discovered, sit squarely in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. Some three miles north of the find is Lichfield, the Mercians’ ecclesiastic center, and just seven miles to the east lies Tamworth, a major royal site. Mercia’s name comes from the Old English word mierce, which means “boundary,” but it is unclear who inhabited the other side. Though we assume it was the Welsh, it could also have referred to the Anglo-Saxons to the north, with whom the Mercians fought bitterly. Or perhaps the term described people who lived to the west of the main area of Anglian settlement in eastern England. Some believe it was the Mercians who inspired the Riders of the Mark, the mounted soldiers of the land of Rohan (also called Riddermark or the Mark), in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
The hoard must have been gathered during the seventh century, when Mercia was a rising power under Kings Penda (ca 632–655) and Wulfhere (658–674). In the eighth century Mercian domination extended over much of England, under Kings Æthelbald (716–757) and Offa (757–796), whose power reached as far south as London, east to the kingdoms of East Anglia and Essex, and as far north as the Humber. A stupendous monument—the massive, 64-mile long earthwork known as Offa’s Dyke—marked the boundary with the Welsh. Greater Mercia came apart during the ninth century, which saw the rise of the Kingdom of Wessex. In A.D. 879 the Vikings took over large areas of Mercia, and it became part of the Danelaw, where Danish law prevailed. The last ruler of Mercia, King Alfred’s daughter, Aethelflaed, the Lady of the Mercians, took control after the death of her husband, Aethelred. Following Aethelflaed’s own death in A.D. 918, King Edward of Wessex removed Aethelflaed’s daughter, Aelfwynn, and ruled Mercia. The kingdom was amalgamated with Wessex and disappeared as England came into existence. 
THE ALTAR CROSS
Of the three crosses in the Staffordshire Hoard, the altar cross bears the highest level of artistry. The cross was made up of two sheets of gold fixed together at their edges. One of the sheets bears what looks like deeply cut decoration, but this is deceptive; the metalworker hammered down the surface to give the appearance of deep cutting. The design consists of pairs of interlaced animals, the hind leg of one lying over the face of the other. This motif is similar to one used on metal mounts on wooden bowls in the Sutton Hoo grave, which probably dates to A.D. 625. When found, the arms and shaft of the cross were folded over, and contained between them were five settings that once contained stones, but only one setting survives. Interestingly, this garnet had been repaired in Anglo-Saxon times. Through the sheet metal are a number of nail holes showing that the cross originally had been nailed to a wooden base.
THE POWER OF GOLD
Gold is found in Britain but only in the Celtic north and west, areas that lay outside of Anglo-Saxon control during the seventh century. The gold in the Staffordshire Hoard is likely to have come from the east, perhaps from the sack of Rome or from Byzantium. Gold was, in the seventh century, much more valuable than it is now. Before the discovery of the rich mines in the New World, the amount of gold in Europe was very limited.
Gold has always been a mystical metal; incorruptible, it is one of the few metals that occurs in a “native” state—that is, as metal rather than an ore that had to be smelted.
Throughout the ages, gold has held powerful sway over the imagination. The ancient Greeks revered Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith whose skill at transforming base metals into gold earned him great renown. Over the centuries people strove to replicate the feat of Hephaestus and transform copper and other base metals into gold through alchemy, a pursuit that generated 4,000 books from the 16th to 18th century that although never finding the fabled magical elixir did lay the foundations of chemistry and pharmacology.
Gold was one of the first metals to be used by humans. Small trinkets made from native metal have been produced since prehistoric times. Gold’s luster, heft, rarity and workability further contributed to its powerful place in our imagination. Gold can be worked like no other material; sheets of it can be beaten so thin that you can see through them. If two pieces of gold are laid together and beaten, they will fuse and become one.
The Staffordshire Hoard shows us what craftsmen can achieve with gold using what must have been the simplest of tools. Saxon craftsmen achieved miracles with filigree, fine gold wires soldered to a surface to form designs, as are shown here. The ease with which pieces of gold can be joined together meant that most objects could be hollow, a great saving of precious metal. A piece of patterned gold foil was placed under each garnet to scatter the light so that the stones glitter. The craftsmen who worked the gold in the hoard were using the metal’s amazing workability to maximum effect.
THE DEATH SONG OF CYNDDYLAN
The Anglo-Saxons wrote outstanding poetry like Beowulf, but the Welsh too had a tradition of celebrating their heroes in verse. One of these poems, “The Death Song of Cynddylan,” refers to Lichfield, Mercia’s ecclesiastical center and home to Lichfield Cathedral. Dating to the middle of the seventh century, the poem was written around the time and place of the burial of the Staffordshire Hoard. Cynddylan ap Cyndrwyn (“cun-thulan,” son of Cyndrwyn) was possibly king of Powys in Wales. One of these poems tells us that Cynddylan was present at the Battle of Maserfelth (August 6, 642), at which King Penda defeated and killed Oswald of Northumbria, and this gives us a date for Cynddylan’s activities. A haunting poem, “The Death Song of Cynddylan” contains some tantalizing lines:
Before Lichfield they fought,
There was gore under ravens and keen attack.
Limed shields broke before the sons
of the Cyndrwynyn [Cyndrwyn]
The original Welsh text refers to Caer Lwytgoed, the old Roman town of Letocetum—the Grey Wood, or Wall as it is now known, just three miles down Watling Street from where the hoard was found. Further details of the battle are given:
Grandeur in battle! Extensive spoils
Morial bore off from in front of Lichfield.
Fifteen hundred cattle from the front of battle;
four twenties of stallions and equal harness.
The chief bishop wretched in his four-cornered house (?),
the book-keeping monks did not protect.
Those who fell in the blood before the splendid warrior
While the passage describes the kind of circumstances that may have led to the deposit of the Staffordshire Hoard, with its references to “stallions and equal harness” and “the book-keeping monks,” it would be naive to suggest any link between the verse and the hoard. However, the hoard was found in the frontier zone between the Anglo-Saxons and the Welsh, and the latter are likely to have played a part in the foundation of Mercia. At the Battle of Hatfield Chase in 633 Penda fought as an ally of Cadwallon. Given the shifting political alliances of seventh-century Mercia, it is not surprising that a hoard may have been buried for reasons of secrecy, safety, or simply storage, and then abandoned.