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How Metal Detecting Can Help us to Uncover the Past 

In July 2022, metal detectorist James Mather was in a field in south Oxfordshire when he came face-to-face with medieval history. It was a warm summer’s day, the sun high in the sky. Mather knew the landowner well; it was not the first time he had detected here. Having recently recovered from a bout of COVID, Mather was enjoying being back out for what, so far, had been a normal day’s detecting.

James Mather, finder of an Anglo-Saxon brooch using metal detector, 2022.


A red kite landed in the stubble field, some distance away. As Mather himself says, ‘many detectorists are superstitious.’ He took the kite as an omen and began searching the area. He has training in landscape archaeology, and his reading of the site also told him that it was a logical place to look for metal artefacts.

He got a good signal. It was shallow, about four inches deep. He carefully began to dig away the topsoil. Before long, he uncovered the source: it was circular, crooked. It looked like it might be silver, and ancient. Whatever it was, Mather knew to follow protocol. He alerted the Finds Liaison Officer (FLO), Dr. Ed Caswell, and sent over a picture on his phone. Caswell thought it might be early medieval, perhaps a decorative dress pin, but said he would need some time to confirm the object. In the meantime, Mather notified the landowner that he may have found treasure, and set up a grid pattern search extending thirty feet around the find spot to look for more.

Image of the Anglo-Saxon brooch found by metal detectorist, James Mather, 2022.

What Mather had found was a unique piece of Anglo-Saxon history. He reached out to Dr. Gabor Thomas at Reading University, who forwarded the photographs to Professor Elizabeth Okasha. The experts agreed that it probably dated to the 9th century, and was most likely a gilded silver brooch. Far from a plain metal disc, the brooch bears an intricate cross pattern with a raised centre, and an inscription around the edge. Sadly, the years have not been kind to the object, and several letters have been lost. However, it seems that the text is announcing the object’s owner: ‘Ælfgeo… owns me…’ Who is this mysterious Ælfgeo? The gendered end of the name is missing, so we may never know this crucial detail about them. Indeed, there is a lot we don’t know yet. This may be one of the earliest personally inscribed brooches found in the UK, however far more research is needed on the topic. But one thing is clear: this significant find in a field in sunny southern Oxfordshire is a tantalising contribution to our understanding of this early period.

Metal Detecting

Metal detecting is an increasingly popular hobby in the UK. As of 2021, there were around 20,000 detectorists in the nation, and the number continues to rise. Of the over 1,300 pieces of treasure found in 2019, 96% were discovered through metal detecting. Mather attributes this popularity to a number of things: the popularity of TV shows like The Detectorists (created by and starring Mackenzie Crook, who you might recognise from Pirates of the Carribean), the publicity surrounding major finds, and a general improvement in the public’s attitude towards detectorists. As Mather says, ‘people didn’t fully understand the responsibilities that go with the craft, and thought that detectorists were finding things and not declaring them.’ The perceived lack of regulation and stories about ‘Night Hawkers’ (the name given to those who metal detect illegally, without landowner’s permission or announcing their finds) fuelled public distrust.

The 9th-century Watlington Hoard, found by metal detectorist, James Mather, 2015. The Trustees of the British Museum ©.

In 2017 an enhanced Code of Practice was devised, which set out clear guidance for metal detectorists. Permission from the landowner must be obtained, and the landowner informed of any significant archaeological finds. Generally, objects found on the land belong to the landowner, so it is advised that detectorists create a formal, written agreement with the landowner deciding on future ownership of finds. Detectorists should report finds to their local FLO, to be added to the Portable Antiquities Scheme database. Guidelines should be given for detecting in different environments, like pasture, ploughed land, or coastlines. This all supplemented the very comprehensive 1996 Treasure Act, which covers the law relating to detecting and defines exactly what counts as ‘treasure,’ and how to report it.

Thanks to these regulations and the dedication of detectorists across the UK, the last few decades have seen significant contributions to our historical knowledge of medieval Britain. For example, the Marlow Warlord, an Anglo-Saxon warrior, was found by detectorists Sue and Mick Washington in 2018. In 2021 in Cookham, detectorists from Maidenhead Search Society assisted archaeologists from the University of Reading to uncover the lost monastery of Queen Cynethryth of Mercia, of which she became abbess after the death of her husband, King Offa.

 Image of the reverse of the 9th century ‘Two Emperors’ coin from the Watlington Viking Hoard, found by metal detectorist James Mather, 2015.

Mather himself made a major discovery in 2015, when he uncovered the Watlington Viking Hoard. The hoard of about 200 Anglo-Saxon coins and Viking elements, including seven jewellery items, and fifteen silver ingots was found near Watlington, Oxfordshire. Thirteen of the coins were rare: ‘Two Emperors’ pennies, representing Kings Alfred of Wessex and Ceolwulf II of Mercia sitting side-by-side beneath a winged figure. This suggests that the two kingdoms were allies and successfully challenged the belief, long held by historians, that Ceowulf was merely a Viking puppet, dismissed in the A version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles as a ‘foolish King’s thegn’. Thanks to the presence of a ‘Two-Line’ penny, the hoard can be dated to after the Battle of Edington in 878. Such a discovery has seriously shifted our understanding of the politics of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the period.

Becoming a Detectorist

What drives detectorists out into the fields in all weathers, scanning the ground and hoping for a signal? For Mather, though it is a very practical process. There is something magical about it: ‘to find something interesting and significant that no one has held for thousands of years is pretty remarkable.’ The value to the individual is immense. It has plenty of physical and mental benefits: ‘green exercise is especially beneficial, you get close to nature, and it’s great psychologically.’ This may be why several veterans groups have picked up the craft, Mather suggests. You can do it in solitude, or with like-minded buddies. Then there’s the value to landowners and to national heritage. ‘Some finds really can rewrite history,’ like the Watlington Hoard.

Of course, it takes both financial and time commitments. To buy a mid-range detector would set a UK detectorist back £500 (about $600 USD) not to mention the spade and other tools you need. It takes resilience, and you need to be comfortable spending hours on unforgiving terrain. Success is a function of how long you spend doing it. You need a decent site, suitable kit, good technique and a big slice of luck! Plus, you need to be able to at least roughly identify the materials you find. After all, you don’t want to throw away scraps of metal that may be significant.

 A curious button with a sun design on the face, found by metal detectorist, James Mather.

In a place like south-eastern England, with its accreted centuries of history, you can find plenty of archaeological artefacts. Mather has found a curious 18th century button with a sunburst face—‘when light strikes it, the eyes follow you around’—a Palaeolithic stone hand axe (found ‘eyes only,’ without using a detector), several religious pendants, a 13th century seal, and plenty of shotgun shells and bottle caps to boot. For 28 years he searched for an Anglo-Saxon sceatta, a tiny silver coin. He finally found one on the excavation for Queen Cynethryth’s monastery. ‘I finally did it. You never know when you’ll find something.’

For Mather, there are still many more finds on his bucket list. Top of the list is Bronze Age ring money. ‘They were worn decoratively and may have been used as a form of currency. But they’re very difficult to find.’ A complete Bronze Age axe head is another one. By those standards, his last bucket-list item is practically cutting-edge modern. ‘A cartwheel tuppence,’ he says. ‘They were only made in one year, 1797, under George III.’ These huge coins can sometimes be found in antique shops, repurposed as small containers. But to find one in the wild would be a significant moment.

Responsible metal detectorists like Mather have contributed significantly to our knowledge of history. Without their expertise, and their dedication, finds like the Watlington Hoard, the Marlow Warlord, and countless others would still be sitting below ground, gradually corroding or sinking beyond reach. History is a living thing, always taking on new shapes as more information about the past is discovered. Mather, and other detectorists like him, remind us that we can help shape that history, and we can all become part of it.

Will Beattie
Ph.D. Candidate in Medieval Studies
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

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Jacques de Vitry’s Defense of the Beguines

We want to like the prologue to Jacques de Vitry’s hagiography (c. 1216) of thirteenth-century holy woman Marie d’Oignies. It serves as a defense of the beguines: a grassroots movement of pious women inventing new ways of living a religious life alone or in community outside a formal monastic environment. But some of Jacques’ thoughts do not sit well with modern sensibilities:

It is sufficiently demonstrated that [the beguines] clung to the Lord during the destruction of the city of Liege. Those who could not flee to the churches threw themselves into the river and chose to die rather than to incur harm to their chastity. Some jumped into dung-filled sewers and preferred to be snuffed out in stink than to be despoiled of their virginity. Despite all this, the merciful Bridegroom so deigned to look after His brides that not a single one in such a great multitude was found who suffered either death to her body or harm to her chastity. [1]

Exactly what the modern reader wants to hear: it is better for a woman to kill herself than be raped. To the vita’s target audience, however, the beguines’ actions function as proof of their commitment to a religious life outside the formal claustration and celibacy vow of a convent. Their survival is evidence for God’s approval of their way of life.

The vita of Marie, moreover, is not the only time multi-continental bishop, preacher, and very prolific author Jacques talks about a literal leap of faith in service of religious order justification. In one of his Sermones Vulgares, Jacques seeks to exhort crusaders, and especially Templar knights, to spiritual greatness:

I have heard from a certain Templar that at the very beginning of the order, while they were still poor and very fervent in religion, that he himself was coming from the city of Tyre, bringing money and alms which they had received to the city of Acre. He came to a certain place, which has been called ‘Templar’s Leap,’ ever since. For the Saracens had placed an ambush for that noble knight, in a place where on one side there was a sheer cliff and on the other the deepest sea lay below, while the Saracens besieged him from in front and behind on the narrow path. As he had no where to turn, he urged his horse with the spurs, and leapt from the lofty cliff with the horse into the depths of the sea. But the horse – as it pleased the Lord – carried him unharmed to the shore. (trans. Helen Nicholson) [2]

Medaglia celebrativa di Jacques de Vitry del 1518

At first, the story appears to be a near-direct parallel to that of the Liege beguines. A Templar, facing violation of his life and mission (delivery of the money, a nice nod to the Templars’ fabled role as “the world’s first international bank”), chooses to jump from high ground into water, a plunge likely to end in his death. In this case, too, God intervenes, and the Templar’s life is preserved.

But on second glance, the Templar’s leap does not mirror the beguines’ actions so much as cast them into stark relief. In his crusade sermon, Jacques relates the knight’s mental process as he leapt off the cliff: he hoped and prayed that God would deliver him safely. The beguines, according to the bishop, hoped only that they would die.

Dyan Elliott has suggested that the story of the Liege beguines, propagated during the Albigensian Crusade against presumed Cathars in France, functions as anti-Cathar polemic. Orthodox martyrs do not die, so lay people who die in service to claimed religion are heretics, not martyrs. [3] Elliott skips over the underlying contention in her discussion of martyrdom, but it is worth drawing out in a discussion of beguines and sanctity. Jacques’ argument only works as anti-heretic polemic if the audience already stipulates the orthodoxy of the beguines. In other words, the vita prologue is a collective hagiography preaching (literally) to the choir, not an argument for an inquisitive audience. I’m more interested, though, in modern revulsion and the theological position Jacques implicitly stakes on a different topic: suicide.

Print of a Beguine in Des dodes dantz of Matthäus Brandis, Lübeck 1489.

Setting aside the views and experiences of women themselves, the rape of religious women was a theologically painful problem for medieval theologians—a problem bound up with suicide from the earliest centuries of Christian theology, thanks to the interplay with the classical tradition and the story of Lucretia. And Jacques and his hagiographical beguines were not necessarily on the right side. Augustine discusses the dilemma at some length in City of God I.16-19, arguing that the virtue of virginity is ultimately a matter of the will; the integrity of the body only reflects the sanctity of the will insofar as the person has control over it. [4] “We maintain that when a woman is violated while her soul admits no consent to the iniquity, but remains inviolably chaste, the sin is not hers, but his who violates her.” (I.19) He continues on to drive home his point that suicide is a mortal sin, period:

Therefore a woman who has been violated by the sin of another, and without any consent of her own, has no cause to put herself to death; much less has she cause to commit suicide in order to avoid such violation, for in that case she commits certain homicide to prevent a crime which is uncertain as yet, and not her own. (I.18)

The apparent universal survival of the Liege beguines, furthermore, is no magic arrow for Jacques to avoid the problem of actions with a desired outcome of suicide. Medieval doctrine–in point of fact, even Augustine in that same section of City of God–was clear that intention was a crucial factor in determining a sin.

This is where the comparison with the Crusade sermon becomes so revealing. The knight explicitly hopes to survive, even if he knows it is mathematically unlikely. Jacques could have given his hagiographical beguines this way out, but he did not. “Two of the enemy came to her in a boat and intended to commit vile fornication with her. But what can happen to the chaste among lions, to a lamb among wolves, to a dove among eagles? She preferred to sink again into the river than to be violated.” [5] The Liege beguines’ intention is death, or more flatly: their intention is to kill themselves. Despite this fairly flat contradiction of Church doctrine, Jacques intended this scene as an argument for the legitimacy of the beguines’ lifestyle.

The premium that Christianity places on martyrdom has long carried the uncomfortable flip side of where to draw the line between accepting one’s death and making one’s death happen. The rhetorical strategies of Jacques de Vitry in his vita of Marie d’Oignies and his Crusade sermons add an additional gendered dimension onto the dilemma. And in light of Jacques’ goal to promote the beguine movement, a comparison of the two texts suggests that when it came to arguing for orthodoxy, might heterodoxy be the best policy?

Cait Stevenson, PhD.
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

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[1] Jacques de Vitry, The Life of Marie d’Oignies, trans. Margot L. King (Peregrina, 1987), 19.

[2] H.J. Nicholson, trans., “Jacques de Vitry: Sermons to a Military Order,” De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History, April 12, 2014.

[3] Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2004), 65.

[4] Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (T&T Clark, 1913), digitized here.

[5] Life of Marie d’Oignies, 19.

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By the Bones of Saint Cuthbert: Books, Embroidery, and Bodily Incorruption

When the Vikings invaded the northeastern coast of Britain in 793, they raided the monastery at Lindisfarne. The monks fled – and they carried with them the remains of Saint Cuthbert.

His coffin not only contained a corpse but also material relics, the Saint Cuthbert Gospel among them. The book so well preserved in his coffin has been recognized as a marvel among medieval manuscripts, along with the Lindisfarne Gospels, which the monks also saved from destruction by the Danes. Much like these extraordinary books, the embroidery that survived alongside Saint Cuthbert’s body is remarkable for its rarity.

The Lindisfarne Gospels has, as the British Library says, “long been acclaimed as the most spectacular manuscript to survive from Anglo-Saxon England.” Created circa 700, the elaborately decorated manuscript contains the four Gospels, which recount the life of Christ, as well as other associated texts. Photo of the front cover of the Lindisfarne Gospels, courtesy of the British Library.

Cuthbert of Lindisfarne was born in 634 and spent his life as a monk, bishop, and hermit in the Kingdom of Northumbria. When he died in 687, he was buried at Lindisfarne. As the Venerable Bede recounts the story, Saint Cuthbert’s coffin was opened again 11 years later with the intention of removing his bones to a reliquary, but his body was found to be perfectly preserved.

From Bede’s “Life of Saint Cuthbert,” British Library MS 39943, dated 1180.

Under the duress of Danish attack, it was more than 100 years before the monks laid Saint Cuthbert to rest in Durham, where they settled in 995. Several artifacts accompanied Saint Cuthbert as he traveled posthumously around the English countryside, and the book and embroidery are very special for their survival.

The Saint Cuthbert Gospel was discovered when the coffin was opened at Durham Cathedral in 1104, and like the body of its patron, the book remained incredibly well preserved. Dated to the early 8th century, it is the earliest European book to retain an original, intact binding.[1] The covers are made from goatskin that has been dyed red and decorated; the tooled leather is stretched over wooden boards, most likely birch. It is a pocket-sized book measuring 5.4 by 3.6 inches, and the manuscript contains the Gospel of Saint John.

Housed at the British Library in London, the Saint Cuthbert Gospel can sometimes be seen on display in the Treasures of the British Library exhibition, sometimes alongside the Lindisfarne Gospels. Photo of the front cover of the Saint Cuthbert Gospel, courtesy of the British Library.

The British Library’s description of the binding beautifully correlates the book’s cover with its content. On its front cover, “the central motif of a stylised vine sprouting from a chalice reflects Christian imagery from the eastern Mediterranean. The plant on the cover of the Gospel has a central leaf or bud and four fruits, echoing the text, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches’, from St. John’s Gospel 15:5.”[2] On the back cover appears “rectangular borders containing a geometric, step-pattern double-armed cross, recalling John’s central role in the Crucifixion narrative.”[3]

Back cover of the Saint Cuthbert Gospel, courtesy of the British Library.

The other relics were discovered much later when Saint Cuthbert’s tomb was opened in 1827. In addition to the saint’s body, Canon James Raine found a pectoral cross, a portable altar, an ivory comb, and a set of embroidered vestments.[4] The vestments, or religious robes, date between 909 and 916 and are the earliest pieces of embroidery that survive from the medieval period in England.

Only a few pieces of Anglo-Saxon embroidery survive at all, and these pieces are unique among the extant examples in that they feature full-length human figures. The vestments include a stole decorated with figures of Old Testament prophets and Apostles, as well as a maniple, a girdle, and bracelets. They are made from Byzantine silk with silk and gold thread decoration. According to inscriptions on the fabric, the vestments were commissioned by Queen Aelfflaed for the Bishop of Winchester and produced between 909 and 916. Her stepson, King Athelstan, who ruled England from 927 to 939, placed them in Saint Cuthbert’s tomb when he visited the shrine in 934.

The style of embroidery called Opus Anglicanum, or English Work, was used on clothing, hangings, and other textiles, often created with silk and gold or silver-gilt threads stitched on linen or velvet backgrounds. Between the late 12th and mid-14th centuries, these luxury goods were in great demand across Europe. Often they were procured as diplomatic gifts, and they were very expensive. They were produced for both secular and ecclesiastical use, but most of the surviving examples were designed for liturgical use like those found alongside Saint Cuthbert.

Although English embroidery was renowned for its beauty during the medieval period, the majority has been lost to neglect or destroyed for the extraction of precious metals or stones, such as pearls and other jewels mentioned in inventory descriptions. Fragments, however, can be found in museums, and one of the most substantial collections of Opus Anglicanum can be found at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Embroidered in the Opus Anglicanum style, the Butler-Bowdon Cope is a ceremonial cloak that was created circa 1330-50 for use in church services and processions. The embroidery incorporates gold, silver, and colored silks, as well as freshwater seed pearls and glass beads, and depicts events from the life of the Virgin Mary. Photo of the Butler-Bowdon Cope, courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The vestments recovered from Saint Cuthbert’s tomb can be seen on display at Durham Cathedral, where visitors can view the entire Treasures of Saint Cuthbert collection. The oak coffin made to cradle the saint’s body when he was found incorrupt in 698 also resides among the relics, its own fragmented body a reminder of what arduous travels medieval artifacts endure to remain with us in our own time.

Emily McLemore, Ph.D.
Department of English
University of Notre Dame

[1] “St Cuthbert Gospel,” British Library.

[2] “St Cuthbert Gospel,” British Library.

[3] “St Cuthbert Gospel,” British Library.

[4] “The treasures of Saint Cuthbert,” Durham Cathedral.