Darren Webster was meant to be going back to work after dropping
his son off at home when, on a whim, he stopped by a field and
decided to have a quick forage with his metal detector. Within
20 minutes he made a discovery that was to introduce a new name
to the turbulent history of medieval England. One of the objects
in a hoard of silver buried one metre down in the earth was a
coin marked with the name of Airedeconut, thought to refer to
Harthacnut, a previously unrecorded Viking king powerful enough
to have his own currency in 10th-century Northumbria. Mr
Webster, who has a stone tile workshop in Yealand Conyers,
Lancashire, said that he had permission to search in the field
near his home in Silverdale but did not choose it for any
particular reason. “My machine was telling me that I’d found
some kind of silver. So I was slightly disheartened when I saw a
lead pot. It was as I was lifting it that silver pieces started
falling out of it.” Once the lead container had been prised open
there were 201 silver ob