The Staffordshire Hoard alone transformed what historians thought they knew about early medieval England's warrior culture, and the Codex Calixtinus case is a reminder that irreplaceable things can disappear from right under our noses. Both stories turn on the same question: what does it mean when something precious vanishes, and what do we recover when it comes back.
Terry Herbert’s metal detector cost him £2.50. It was second-hand. On 5 July 2009, it made him a millionaire.
Over five days of searching a Staffordshire field near Lichfield, Herbert unearthed more than 1,500 pieces of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver: the largest hoard of its kind ever found in Britain. The field sat in the heart of ancient Mercia, the early medieval warrior kingdom that dominated central England. What came out of the ground was not jewellery or coins but objects of war, sword fittings, helmet fragments, military equipment of humbling craftsmanship, most likely war loot taken from defeated enemies.
What Was It Worth?
The hoard was valued at £3.285 million and split between Herbert and Fred Johnson, the farmer who owned the land. Beyond the money, the find fundamentally shifted historical understanding of Anglo-Saxon England, revealing a sophisticated warrior culture that scholarship had not fully appreciated.
It is the sort of discovery that makes you wonder what else is sitting quietly in a field somewhere, waiting for the right person and a bargain detector.
Meanwhile, in Santiago
Exactly two years to the day, on 5 July 2011, staff at Santiago de Compostela Cathedral in Spain noticed something was missing. The Codex Calixtinus, a twelfth-century illuminated manuscript compiled around 1160, had vanished. This was not a minor inconvenience: the Codex is considered the world’s first guidebook to the Camino pilgrimage route, and it is entirely irreplaceable.
The investigation that followed led to the arrest of a cathedral electrician, Manuel Fernández Castiñeiras, who had stolen the manuscript along with other treasures. The Codex was recovered in 2012. In 2015, Castiñeiras received a ten-year prison sentence, and the manuscript was returned to Santiago under considerably tighter security.
Two Kinds of Lost
The pleasure of this episode is in the contrast. One treasure was buried for over a millennium before a man with a second-hand machine pulled it back into the light. The other was gone for less than a year before a very different kind of investigation brought it home. Both are stories about what happens to precious things when they disappear, and what their return reveals, about history, about human ingenuity, and about the occasionally very poor judgement of the people put in charge of looking after things.
If the fifth of July has ever seemed like an unremarkable date, this episode will change that. Ten minutes, two stories, and considerably more than £2.50 worth of history.