The slave shackle sat on the table, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was just a pair of corroded iron rings, but I knew exactly what it meant to wear something like that. In 1986, I was working as a journalist in Beirut when I was kidnapped by a militant group. They held me for five years, and for most of that time, I was chained up like an animal.
The weight of the iron around my ankle was a constant reminder that my life was in their hands. This 2,000-year-old Roman shackle was found by a landscape gardener near the old Roman road between Winchester and Silchester. It was rare evidence that slavery happened in Britain. I drove along that road, wondering if a slave had been marched along it, chained like me, heading toward an unknown fate.
Silchester still has the remains of a Roman amphitheater. It was the O2 arena of its time, where thousands gathered for spectacles. I met Dr. John Pearce there.
“If what happens here is like what happens in Italy,” he told me, “then the gladiators are the culminating part of the day. Public execution was often part of the lead-up. People would be beheaded, or quite often mauled to death by wild animals let loose. ”
The shackle could have been worn by a slave brought here to die.
I stood in the arena, surrounded by the ghosts of thousands screaming for blood, hearing the roar of wolves or bears, with nowhere to run. It was utterly horrific. I think it’s very important that this shackle is on the list of Britain’s greatest treasures. It’s a chilling reminder of how precious our freedom is, and how easily it can be taken away.
Five-year-old James Hyatt was playing with his father’s metal detector in a field in Essex when it started beeping. He dug down and found something that made his eyes go wide. “Gold. Real gold,” he said.
It was a pendant from the time of Henry VIII, made as a reliquary where a holy relic would be stored. The back panel opened up, and inside, there was just a bit of earth. A mystery. I met James Robinson, an expert on relics.
He showed me other strange examples—the breast milk of the Virgin Mary, a relic of Mary Magdalene. “What about my little pendant? ” I asked. “It’s difficult to be certain,” he said, “but from what’s represented on the outside, it was made to contain a relic of the true cross.
”
So this little boy had found something that might hold a chip of Christ’s cross. It had lain forgotten in the earth for centuries. Now, the South End Museum wants to raise the money to buy it, and the money will be split between the landowner and the finder. Our next item was all about partying.
In 1662, a king’s horse lost the decorative brass from its harness. It was found nearly 350 years later in Epsom by journalist Mark Davidson. It bore the crest of Charles II, who visited Epsom on September 1st, 1662, for a party. Charles’s father, Charles I, had been beheaded in London in 1649.
Oliver Cromwell took over, a man who tried to ban Christmas. When he died in 1658, the public had had enough. They wanted fun back. So a group of aristocrats invited Charles back from Europe, and within a year, he was crowned king.
He went to the Earl of Berkeley’s party to publicly favor him, and while he was there, he lost a horse brass. That brass is now on loan to Bourne Hall Museum—a portal to the day the man who brought fun back to Britain partied. I remember playing with toy soldiers as a boy, spending hours defeating the baddies. It’s probably why I ended up as a military historian.
Back in the 1700s, Britain was constantly fighting wars, and children copied the grown-ups—most using sticks for guns. But if you were very rich, you could have a miniature cannon. This tiny cannon, found by a police officer in a Somerset field, is old and delicate, but it could actually fire real miniature cannonballs. I asked a military friend to make me a replica.
He poured molten bronze into a mold just like the original makers did. When we broke it open, there it was—a tiny bronze cannon. We loaded it with a little gunpowder and a tiny cannonball, and fired it at a water-filled balloon. Fantastic.
I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that. What were our ancestors thinking? The Snettisham necklace, known as the Great Torc, was made by the Iceni tribe, whose leader back in 60 AD was none other than Boudicca. The main part was unearthed by a farmer in 1965, but the end section wasn’t discovered until 40 years later by an archaeologist in the same field.
Now both parts are reunited and on show in the British Museum. In 2009, a data processor from Slough found a Distinguished Conduct Medal in a Surrey field. On it was engraved the name George Humber. “When I found out it was a very important medal,” he said, “I just wanted to give it to the rightful owner.
”
I had my own reason for investigating this medal. My grandfather fought in World War II, but I never got to meet him. I met the hero’s grandson, Mark Humber. It turned out George had dropped the medal while courting his fiancée.
He never told his grandson about his wartime bravery. I took Mark to Belgium, to the exact spot where his grandfather set up his gun in April 1918. The British were outnumbered five to one. As the Germans pushed toward the railway line, they penned George’s battery into a place called Crucifix Corner.
Twenty men were wounded, eleven were killed, including a commanding officer. “Your grandfather’s mates,” I said. “The guys he would have played cards with. That’s very close to home.
”
With his officer dead, Sergeant George Humber took charge, commanding his men to stand their ground. They held the defense for days and prevented the Germans from reaching Hazebrouck. “To think of a little old man when I was a kid,” Mark said, his voice breaking. “To think he was here doing that all that time ago.
It’s amazing. Do you feel proud of him? ” I asked. “Yeah.
Incredibly proud. ”
In 2001, a glint in the soil caught the eye of metal detectorist Brian Wood in Rochester, Kent. It turned out to be a silver cufflink. Deep in the vaults of the British Museum, Michael Lewis showed me the design: two hearts and a crown above.
“These cufflinks were made to celebrate the marriage of Charles II to Katherine of Braganza,” he said. Just as with Kate and William, souvenirs flooded the land. Sadly, Katherine and Charles could produce no living children, but Charles had at least twelve illegitimate children by seven mistresses. One of those mistresses was Louise de Kérouaille, the Duchess of Portsmouth.
If you follow their line down through the generations, you reach John Spencer, the eighth Earl of Spencer—the father of Diana, Princess of Wales. And she, of course, is the mother of Prince William. “If Prince William is one day crowned king,” Michael said, “he will be the first direct descendant of Charles II to occupy the throne. ”
And there, 350 years after the first royal wedding cufflinks, was a lovely pair with Kate and William and the date of their marriage.
Landscape surveyor Russell Peach discovered a small comb in a field in Tamworth. It was thought to be 2,000 years old. The original sold for £26,000. I met Miranda Aldhouse-Green, an expert in Iron Age hair.
“This is a very beautiful piece of jewelry,” she said. In the late Iron Age, there was an explosion of interest in personal grooming. Men dressed their hair just as elaborately as women. Apparently, Iron Age warriors stiffened their hair with a kind of lime wash to make it stand up straight, like a Jeddah.
I tried to use a replica comb on hair dressed in the old style, with animal fat. It didn’t go through easily. Miranda thought it might have been used for decoration. I reckoned she was right.
Chris Hall found an amazingly well-preserved figurine in a field in Yorkshire. His name is Countes, a servant of the Roman sun god Mithras. He was probably brought here 2,000 years ago by a Roman soldier as a lucky charm. Gary Bankhead likes rescuing stuff.
Buttons, medallions, coins, lots of pistols. He’s a scuba diving treasure enthusiast. Of all the treasure he scooped from the bottom of Durham’s rivers, it’s his collection of cloth seals that made it into the top 50. Cloth seals were the kite marks of their day, clipped onto cloth bales to show origin and quality.
“You’re discovering artifacts that nobody has seen for five, six, seven hundred years,” he said. “And you were the very first person to pull that piece out of the river. ”
Regis Kersant, a head pastry chef at an exclusive London restaurant, is a mudlark. He loves messing around in the muddy Thames foreshore.
He found a Roman token with an erotic image on one side and a number on the other. “I thought it was a Roman coin,” he said, “and I saw a couple who seem to have a little bit of fun there. I searched on the internet for Roman coin and sex. ”
Kath Creed at the Museum of London confirmed it was a brothel token.
Customers might have used these tokens to choose from a menu of services. A more recent suggestion is that they were gaming pieces. Regis donated the token to the museum. Ray Wilson found a tiny false nose in East Sussex.
He believed a smuggler dropped it while being chased by customs officers. But I went to the Hunterian Museum to investigate further. The nose was likely a prosthesis made for someone who had lost their nose to syphilis, a disease that ravaged Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. Whoever wore it remains a mystery.
In 1928, farm workers unearthed eighteen gold coins in a Lincolnshire field. They went to the pub to celebrate, and their drunken boasting got out. The coins were declared treasure trove and went to the British Museum. The treasure became the stuff of legend, with rumors there was more, but none was found.
Eighty years later, care home manager Sue Green found the remaining gold coins in the very same spot. She liked to think they were pirate gold. The British Museum’s finds liaison officer, Adam Daubney, had another theory. The Spanish-American doubloons were the first global currency.
Around the time of the Napoleonic Wars, people were afraid, didn’t trust the banks, and buried their money. Why the owner never came back? The land belonged to Sir Robert Hobart, who fell off his horse and died shortly after the coins went in the ground. Maybe he took the secret to his grave.
In Kent, an amateur archaeologist found a gold coin with two kings on it—one on each side. One was Epillus, a known Iron Age king. The other was Anarevito, a name historians had never heard of. Coins were powerful propaganda.
Anarevito was saying he was sophisticated, but not strong enough to rule without Epillus. And Epillus was saying he was stronger, but not strong enough to rule without his help. The widow of the finder said it was his dearest wish that the coin come to the British Museum. In 2007, security guard Craig Mills recovered an ancient beer tankard from a marsh near Newport.
It held four pints of beer. This guy must have been a serious drinker. At the National Museum Wales, I found out these tankards were passed around groups at feasting events, full of boasting, storytelling, and politics. It was a ritual to get in touch with the gods.
But why throw it in a bog? It wasn’t thrown—it was carefully placed. When people are in crisis, Miranda explained, they give the most precious things they own to the gods. A place like this, half land, half water, wild and remote, is where you’re as close to the gods as you can get.
I got a local brewery to make me Iron Age ale. It had strange ingredients, mugwort and henbane. I took a sip. It was not good.
A severe, sour aftertaste. Bob Middlemass and Rolf Mitchen are treasure hunters who have spent 25 years diving in a river in County Durham. They’ve discovered over 5,000 objects, without a single bit of digging. At the British Museum, Philippa Walton has the task of cataloging them all.
There are makeup applicators, gold jewelry, a beautiful gold ring with a glass bead, a Cupid figurine. I particularly liked Cupid’s buttocks. “They are very pert,” Philippa agreed. I joined them diving at the site of an old Roman bridge.
Almost immediately, I found a piece of beautiful Roman Samian pottery. Then a spoon. Then a pretty beefy Roman nail. Then, amongst the mud and the crud, a little silver Roman coin.
It was beautiful—you could see the writing, the emperor Antoninus. It was a moment of a lifetime. Our next object was filled with something really rather revolting—a mixture of hair, toenail clippings, and human urine. It was found in a garden in Navenby, Lincolnshire, by Michael and his wife.
When he took it to the local museum, they told him it was a witch’s bottle. “That caused some consternation,” he said. “My wife thought, witches, bad spells. Why was a witch living 130 yards away from St.
Peter’s Church? ”
The bottle wasn’t a spell—it was an antidote. If you became ill, it was believed someone was casting an evil spell on you. The contents were a recipe to throw it back at the person who sent it.
Radiologist Heather Masters was working her shift at Sandringham Hospital when a strange man turned up with a piece of bone covered in mud. She X-rayed it and found twenty coins inside. They found another nineteen nearby. They were 2,000 years old, Iron Age.
People actually used bones to hide their treasure. In a field in Yorkshire, Frank Wells discovered a hoard of gold rings and a gold ingot. He thought a Viking with a bad attitude buried them. The rings might have been cut off a man’s hand.
“I’m very proud,” he said. “People are going to debate who lost them for hundreds of years. I hope they never find out. ”
A pig farm in East Yorkshire yielded a beautifully carved cross, one of the earliest known Christian objects ever found in Britain.
It was made just before the Anglo-Saxons converted from paganism. Within 100 years, pagan worship had disappeared. The church at Goodmanham was the site of a pagan temple, where oxen were sacrificed to Woden. The head priest, Coifi, one day decided the pagan gods weren’t working for him.
He rode up to the temple, threw his spear at the idols, and had the place burnt down. He was baptized in a small wooden building where York Minster now stands. This started a spiritual revolution across the north. The cross now resides at the Ashmolean Museum.
In 2010, an anonymous finder in Hampshire pried open his floorboards to find a leak, and discovered a vast hoard of coins. They were French, from the 1700s. But they weren’t official coins—they were forgeries, or at least unofficial. They were called musketeers, made for the colonies.
In America, there was a desperate shortage of coins for everyday transactions, so these were perfectly acceptable. “If they were used as coins, they’re coins,” the coin dealer said. “They’re not fake. ”
Antiques dealer Ian Smith found dozens of medieval pilgrim badges in the River Stour in Canterbury.
Most had the face of St. Thomas Becket. Becket was made Archbishop of Canterbury by his best mate, King Henry II, but he delighted in putting the king’s back up. In frustration, Henry shouted, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?
” Four knights took him at his word and killed Becket in his own cathedral. Three years later, he was made a saint, and Canterbury became Europe’s hottest pilgrimage site. Pilgrims bought these badges as souvenirs. When their pilgrimage was over, many threw the badges into the river for extra luck.
I bought a replica badge and threw it into the river myself. Retired chef Dave Crisp found the largest collection of Roman coins in a single container ever found—more than 52,000 coins. “I sat back on my heels and looked around,” he said. “I’ve done it.
I’ve found a hoard. ” The Museum of Somerset acquired the coins for £320,000. In 1976, John Lewis plowed up a stunning Roman bust in a field near Brackley. He put it under the stairs.
His wife called it “old blue eyes. ” It sat there for years until they took it to a British Museum finds day. It was Marcus Aurelius. “They used animal fat to get those twisted tufts,” a hairdresser told me as she styled my beard to match.
“I’m using wax. ” I asked her, honestly, did I look like a Roman emperor? Not bad. In 2009, pensioner Arthur Hag was helping a young girl look for a bracelet in her garden when he found a hoard of solid silver—a goblet, spoons, and a bell salt.
It was dated to the English Civil War, a time of mob rule and looting. The owner buried it to keep it safe, but never returned. Two electrical engineers, Michael Rutland and Gordon Heritage, found a pot of gold in a field in Milton Keynes. It was a hoard of gold neck ornaments and bracelets, over 3,000 years old, one of the biggest collections of gold ever found from Bronze Age Britain.
“How could anybody wear that as a bracelet? ” I asked. “Your arm would fall off at the end of the day. ” But the owner was determined to display their wealth.
A spindle whorl found by Denise Moncaster had runes on it. An expert read the names of three Viking gods: Óðinn, Ullr, and a third. The bottom read, “They help you. ” The woman who owned it was trying to protect her family, casting a spell, making a magic item.
It shows an instinct we can all relate to—love and protection for your children. In 2011, an anonymous metal detectorist unearthed a Bronze Age spearhead in Tisbury. Archaeologists dug down and found over 100 axe heads, chisels, knives, and other weapons, spanning a thousand years of human history. It was some kind of religious site.
Gary Map found the Leopard Cup in a field in Wales. It’s made from leaded bronze, with the leopard’s spots inlaid with silver and eyes made from amber. It was made by a skilled artisan, probably in Italy, and came to Britain with a Roman general. It was buried with its owner, who loved it so much they took it to the afterlife.
In 2011, Darren Webster dug up the third largest Viking hoard ever found in Britain, at Silverdale. It contained arm rings and coins dating from around 900–910. The hoard reveals the origins of the north-south divide. Alfred the Great and the Viking king Guthrum drew a line along the old Roman road of Watling Street—now the A5.
Everything south and west was Alfred’s, everything north and east was Viking territory, the Danelaw. But the treaty wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. By 954, there were no independent Viking rulers left. Still, the Vikings left their mark.
Towns ending in “thorp” are old Norse for village. And at the University of Leicester, experts studied DNA. My Y chromosome turned out to be the Neolithic farmer type. I was here long before the Vikings.
Tony, a retired civil servant, found a large lump of bronze in a Surrey field. It was a seal, once used to make wax imprints that marked important documents. The inscription revealed it came from Stone in Staffordshire. Tony returned it to the church there, where a director made the first cast in nearly 500 years.
The people of Stone are raising the £8,000 to buy it. The Carlton Knight is a 12th-century figure found in a Nottinghamshire back garden. It looks like a chess piece, like the Lewis chessmen. But Dr.
Michael Lewis believes it’s not a chess piece—it has a fitting on the bottom showing it was attached to something else. It’s a wonderful portrait of a medieval knight, and that’s why it’s on the list. The Winchester Hoard, found by a local florist, is a gift of Iron Age gold jewelry, almost certainly from Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, or the Emperor Augustus. In 2002, a former Fleet Street photographer found a unique figurine of a goddess no one had ever known about.
Her name is Senuna. She’s faceless, which is very appropriate because we know very little about her. The discovery rewrote history. The Northwest Essex ring is a 7th-century gold ring with a human figure holding a cross.
The figure may be Woden, the most powerful Anglo-Saxon pagan god, accompanied by two ravens. If it’s Woden carrying a cross, that’s a mix of pagan and Christian iconography—mind-blowing. It could be King Raedwald’s ring. He’s the only king we know who actively worshipped both gods.
He’s buried at Sutton Hoo, in a ship with a helmet decorated with pagan symbols. The Blair Drummond Hoard was found in Scotland by David Booth on his first outing with a metal detector. He walked seven steps from his car, and there it was—a wonderful collection of gold neck ornaments. It opens a new chapter in our understanding of Iron Age Scotland, showing links to the Mediterranean.
The Near Lewes Hoard was unearthed in East Sussex by David Lang. It’s an astounding collection of Bronze Age jewelry and axe heads. The tin came from Cornwall. Three and a half thousand years ago, our ancestors were heavily into the import-export business.
Archaeologists discovered a Bronze Age seagoing boat, older than the pyramids, that traveled to and from Cornwall with tin and bronze. At number ten was the Vale of York Hoard, found by engineer David Whelan and his son. They found a silver pot filled with treasure—617 silver coins, brooches, necklaces, and bars of silver. It’s the biggest and most important Viking hoard found in this country for over 150 years.
It contains coins from as far away as the Middle East and Central Asia. One coin depicts King Athelstan, the man who united England for the first time into one kingdom. He’s buried at Malmesbury, where the people still swear in new freemen with a ceremony dating back to his gift of land. Number nine was the Crosby Garrett helmet, found by a young man in Cumbria.
It was a unique Roman parade helmet in 68 fragments. Christies reconstructed it and sold it at auction. A local museum raised £1. 7 million in just three weeks, but the helmet sold for £2 million.
It went to an unknown private collector. No one knows where it is today, and its disappearance has left a hole in history. Number eight was a tiny gold seal ring found outside Norwich. It shows a bearded man and a long-haired woman in a naked embrace, and on the flip side, the name Balthild.
She was a 7th-century queen. Born an Anglo-Saxon slave, she became queen of the Franks. She gave orders that no one was to sell captive Christians within the Frankish realm—a thousand years ahead of her time. She spent her last years in a monastery.
Number seven was a Roman pan found by two metal detectorists. It had the names of forts at the western end of Hadrian’s Wall. It belonged to Draco, probably a Greek, possibly a conscript. After 25 years of service, he would have been given citizenship and freedom.
Number six was the Hallaton Hoard, found by a retired teacher who scrubbed the top of the soil with his boot. It contained 5,000 Iron Age coins, but just as bizarrely, the bones of over 300 slaughtered pigs, each with the right front leg cut off. All the tribal chiefs likely came together on that hilltop to bury their wealth and pray to their gods for help against the Romans. Number five was a silver boar badge found near Market Bosworth.
It would have been worn by a noble supporter of Richard III. It was found two miles away from the official location of the Battle of Bosworth, suggesting everyone has been looking in the wrong field. It could be one of the most significant clues to where a royal dynasty fell. Number four was a coin in the Chalgrove Hoard that showed a Roman emperor no one had ever heard of—Domitianus.
A similar coin found in France in 1907 had been dismissed as a forgery. When the two coins were brought together and compared side by side, they were clearly cast from the same die. A previously unknown Roman emperor had been discovered. Number three was the Staffordshire Hoard, over 1,500 gold and jeweled objects discovered by Terry Herbert.
When it was displayed, it broke attendance records. The general public raised over £900,000 to help buy it. Number two was the Ringlemere Cup, a golden Bronze Age cup found in a farmer’s field in Kent. It led archaeologists to discover an ancient religious site, a wooden henge, a distant cousin of Stonehenge.
The cup had been deliberately buried. It was a chalice-like object that forced you to share and pass it around, building community—the same sense of communion we still have today. And number one was found on the Norfolk shoreline by Mike Chambers while walking his dog. He spotted a black slither buried in the clay.
It was a prehistoric hand axe, made between 500 and 700,000 years ago. It showed that Britain had been inhabited 100,000 years longer than we ever imagined. The simple tool crafted from flint made its owner stand out from every other animal.
It’s the beginning of us.
