Curated Silver

The Mildenhall Treasure: Roman silver on a Suffolk sideboard

On a bitter January morning in 1942, a ploughman named Gordon Butcher was working a field at West Row, near Mildenhall on the edge of the Fens. He had been hired for the job by Sydney Ford, a local agricultural engineer. Partway down a furrow, his plough struck something hard. Butcher climbed down, scraped at the soil, and found the rim of a great metal dish.

He went to fetch Ford, who was known locally as a collector of old things. Together they dug out a heap of blackened, crusted tableware: 34 pieces in all, including platters, bowls, goblets, ladles and spoons. Then the two men's stories part. What is certain is that Ford took the whole hoard home, and Butcher went back to his ploughing.

For the next four years, much of the finest late Roman silver ever found in Britain sat in a farmhouse. Ford cleaned and polished it, and kept the pieces on display at home. The star of the collection was the Great Dish, about 60 centimetres across and weighing over 8 kilograms. Its surface swirls with sea nymphs and a wild-bearded Oceanus at the centre, ringed by a drunken procession of Bacchus, Hercules and dancing satyrs. It was probably made around the 4th century AD for an extremely wealthy household.

The secret broke at Easter 1946, when a local antiquarian, Dr Hugh Fawcett, visited and was shown some of the pieces. He knew silver when he saw it. Ford insisted he had believed the objects were pewter, which would not have counted as Treasure Trove. The British Museum's tests said otherwise. An inquest at Bury St Edmunds declared the hoard Treasure Trove, and the British Museum acquired it, where it is still on display. Ford and Butcher were each awarded £1,000, but not the full reward, since the find had not been reported properly and few believed their account.

The tale might have stayed a local curiosity if not for Roald Dahl. Then writing for American magazines, he read a newspaper report, drove to Suffolk and interviewed Butcher. His telling, The Mildenhall Treasure, casts Butcher as an innocent who unknowingly let a fortune slip through his fingers. Had he reported it himself, he might have been owed its full value. Dahl reportedly sent Butcher half his fee.

Archaeologists who studied the case afterwards could agree on only one thing: Ford's account of where and how the silver was found did not add up. Exactly where it lay, and who buried it, remains a mystery.

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