The Hoxne Hoard

In November 1992, Eric Lawes was metal-detecting in a field at Hoxne in Suffolk when he struck the edge of something far larger than a stray coin. What he had found was a late-Roman hoard still largely in the order in which it had been buried: gold and silver packed into an oak chest, with smaller boxes, bags and fabric wrappings sorting the contents by type. Professional archaeologists excavated the find while it was still largely undisturbed. That circumstance is one reason the hoard matters beyond its bullion value. The arrangement of the deposit could be recorded, not merely the inventory of objects once they had been lifted and mixed.

The numbers alone place it among the great finds of Roman Britain. There are 14,865 gold, silver and bronze coins, and roughly two hundred further items of silver tableware and gold jewellery. It is the largest hoard of late Roman silver and gold discovered in Britain, and the largest collection of gold and silver coins of the fourth and fifth centuries found anywhere within the former Roman Empire. In 1993 the Treasure Valuation Committee put its worth at £1.75 million. The principal pieces, and a selection of the rest, are now on permanent display at the British Museum.

The coins give the burial a terminus. None can have gone into the ground before AD 407; the latest issues push the closing of the chest into the early fifth century. That date sits at the end of Britain as a Roman province, when imperial administration withdrew and the systems that had underwritten large rural estates began to fray. The owners of the hoard are unknown, and so are their reasons for burying it. The packing itself, however, is not chaotic. Iron fittings from the chest — hinges, locks — survived. Objects were grouped. The profile of the contents suits a single very wealthy household more readily than a temple treasury or a military pay chest, though that reading remains an inference from what is present and what is not.

Among the stand-out objects are a gold body-chain and a group of silver-gilt pepper pots, one of them known as the Empress pepper pot. These are not anonymous scrap. They are finished goods from a high-status domestic world: jewellery worn on the body, vessels made to serve an imported spice at table. Their presence beside thousands of coins is a reminder that the hoard is both savings and household kit — wealth measured in currency and in the equipment of daily display.

Equally important is what the chest does not hold. Large silver serving vessels are absent, as are some of the jewellery types most often found in the period. The deposit therefore looks like a portion of a fortune rather than its entirety. Someone chose what to pack. Someone expected, or at least hoped, to return. Nobody did. The oak and the fabric rotted; the metal remained. Sixteen centuries later a detector signal brought the chest back into the light, and the care with which it had been buried became legible again.