The most spectacular pieces of Anglo Saxon gold, dubbed Britain’s Tutankhamun, are to be housed in specially created gallery
The museum in Birmingham where thousands queued for hours to see the Staffordshire hoard of Anglo Saxon gold is to create a gallery to display some of the most spectacular pieces, helped by a £705,000 grant from the heritage lottery fund.
“The Staffordshire hoard is our Tutankhamun,” Simon Cane, director of the Birmingham Museums Trust said.
In 2009 a nondescript field near Lichfield, of no known historical interest, yielded one of the most spectacular hoards of Anglo Saxon gold ever found.
Archaeologists and historians have been studying more than 3,500 pieces, which include twisted crosses with Latin inscriptions apparently wrenched as booty from gospels or torn from the shafts of processional crosses, helmet and sword mounts and shield bosses, belt ends and buckles, studded with gems and intricately interlaced ornament.
They add up to 5kg (11lbs) of gold and 1.5kg of silver, and many lay so close to the surface of the field that grass was growing through the filigree of some pieces.
The original hoard was bought by Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent museums for £3.3m, which was divided between the amateur metal detector who found the pieces and the farmer who owned the land.
However the land had more secrets: although archaeologists believed they had collected every scrap of historical evidence, late last year a further 90 pieces, mainly plough-damaged fragments but including an almost intact golden cheek piece from a princely helmet, turned up in the field.
When the first pieces were found one museum curator was reduced to tears by their beauty. They have been seen by hundreds of thousands of people since – at the British Museum, across the Midlands, and in the US.
The gallery is scheduled to open in autumn 2014 at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and will tell the history of the belligerent kingdom of 7th-century Mercia, and of the discovery of the hoard.
