Treasure in the English countryside

Imagine a group of soldiers or thieves travelling down an old Roman road. They step off the road and dig a pit, fill it with their goods, cover it and walk away. Travel forward 1300 years and you're now in the English countryside, farms all around you. Equipped with your metal detector you ask a local farmer if you can walk his field. On July 5, 2009, Terry Herbert came to the farmhouse door and announced to farmer Fred Johnson that he had found Anglo-Saxon treasure.

The Staffordshire Hoard as it's now known, consisted of thousands of gold, silver, and garnet objects all from early Anglo-Saxon times worth just over $5.3 million. Under British law, the value of any treasure discovered is split evenly between the landowner and the discover, so both Terry Herbert and Fred Johnson walked away with around 2.65 million dollars.

The vast majority of the objects were military in origin, so it's suspected that they belonged to a noble's retinue. Why they were buried in the ground has been lost, but perhaps they were buried after the nobles death, or hidden by soldiers gone rogue.

View more photos of the hoard, and learn even more at National Geographic.