On 5 July 2009, unemployed metal detectorist Terry Herbert began unearthing over 1,500 pieces of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver from a Staffordshire field, the largest hoard of its kind ever found in Britain. The discovery, made with a £2.50 second-hand detector, transformed understanding of early medieval England and revealed military treasures of astonishing craftsmanship from the warrior kingdom of Mercia. Exactly two years later, on 5 July 2011, staff at Santiago de Compostela Cathedral noticed the disappearance of the Codex Calixtinus, a twelfth-century illuminated manuscript and the world’s first guidebook to the Camino pilgrimage route. The international investigation led to the arrest of a cathedral electrician who had stolen the irreplaceable manuscript along with other treasures. Both stories illuminate the tension between what we bury, what we lose, and what we find again, whether after a millennium or a single year.
