Grant Ensures Treasure Will Go to Museums
Not long after Terry Herbert found the Staffordshire Hoard, a collection of more than 1,500 pieces of gold and silver Anglo-Saxon treasure, in a farmer’s field in Britain, Mr. Herbert, an out-of-work metal detectorist, said, “I’ve had people go past and go, ‘Beep, beep, he’s after pennies.’ ” Now we know that Mr. Herbert’s discovery, part of which is at left, is worth just a bit more than that. On Tuesday, Britain’s National Heritage Memorial Fund gave a grant of £1.29 million (about $1.9 million) to two museums that will keep the treasure, having raised £3.3 million (about $4.9 million) to keep the collection intact, The Guardian reported. The Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent museums will pay that money to Mr. Herbert and Fred Johnson, the farmer in whose field the hoard was found, having raised donations from around the world in a campaign that began in January. David Starkey, the historian who started the fund-raising campaign, told The Guardian, “Frankly they’d have been demented not to give the money.”
Source: The New York Times, 24.03.2010
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