There are two notable Ipswich Hoards (which is to say, ancient hoards found in

Ipswich Ipswich () is a port town and borough in Suffolk, England, of which it is the county town. The town is located in East Anglia about away from the mouth of the River Orwell and the North Sea. Ipswich is both on the Great Eastern Main Line ...

, the county town of Suffolk, England). The first was a hoard of

Anglo-Saxon The Anglo-Saxons were a cultural group who inhabited England in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to settlers who came to Britain from mainland Europe in the 5th century. However, the ethnogenesis of the Anglo-Saxons happened wit ...

coins discovered in 1863. The second was a hoard of six

Iron Age The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three-age division of the prehistory and protohistory of humanity. It was preceded by the Stone Age ( Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic) and the Bronze Age ( Chalcolithic). The concept has been mostly ...

gold Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile ...

torc A torc, also spelled torq or torque, is a large rigid or stiff neck ring in metal, made either as a single piece or from strands twisted together. The great majority are open at the front, although some had hook and ring closures and a few had ...

s that was discovered in 1968 and 1969. The latter hoard has been described as second only to the

Snettisham Hoard The Snettisham Hoard or ''Snettisham Treasure'' is a series of discoveries of Iron Age precious metal, found in the Snettisham area of the English county of Norfolk between 1948 and 1973. Iron age hoard The hoard consists of metal, jet and ...

in importance as a hoard from the Iron Age, and is held at the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

First hoard (1863)

The first hoard was found in an earthenware pot buried about beneath the doorstep of the house at the corner of Old Buttermarket and St. Lawrence Lane in

, which had previously belonged to numismatist

James Conder James Conder (1761–1823) was an English businessman and numismatist. He is known for giving his name to Conder Tokens and because of the coincidence of an ancient hoard of coins being found ten feet under his doorstep when his house was demoli ...

(1763–1823), when it was demolished during road widening in 1863.Coins offer up clues to the past
, East Anglia Daily Times, 15 July 2010 It was reported as consisting of 150 coins, although only 75 are known now. The coins were all silver pennies of the reign of

Æthelred the Unready Æthelred II ( ang, Æþelræd, ;Different spellings of this king’s name most commonly found in modern texts are "Ethelred" and "Æthelred" (or "Aethelred"), the latter being closer to the original Old English form . Compare the modern diale ...

, minted in London and Ipswich. It is tempting to associate this find with the ravaging of Ipswich which took place in 991. However clues in the coins indicate that the hoard may have been deposited between 979 and 985.An atlas of Anglo-Saxon and Norman coin finds, c.973-1086
David Michael Metcalf, p. 109, accessed August 2010

Second hoard (1968-9)

Discovery

Five neck ornaments called

s were discovered in 1968 by the operator of a mechanical digger preparing the ground for the construction of new housing in

Belstead Belstead is a village and civil parish in the Babergh district of the English county of Suffolk. Located on the southern edge of Ipswich, around south-west of Ipswich town centre. It had a population of 202 according to the 2011 census. Belste ...

, near Ipswich, for which the driver received £45,000; a sixth torc of a slightly different design was discovered a year later by the owner of one of the newly completed houses when sorting through a pile of earth left by the building in his garden, for which he received £9,000.

Appearance

The torcs were manufactured by twisting two strands of large diameter wire around each other and fashioning them into a near circle. The ends of the twisted wire are finished with terminal decorations. They are made from green gold as they have a lower proportion of silver in them than later finds, leading British Museum experts to date their manufacture to about 75 B.C. However, the torcs may have been used by many generations before they were hoarded away. The museum estimates that the maximum neck diameter of the people who wore these torcs was . These would have been created in wax around the ends of the wire. The wax is then coated, at least once, with a ceramic slurry and left to harden. The ceramic is then heated which allows the wax to leave and gold is poured into the cavity. This

lost wax Lost-wax casting (also called "investment casting", "precision casting", or ''cire perdue'' which has been adopted into English from the French, ) is the process by which a duplicate metal sculpture (often silver, gold, brass, or bronze) is ...

process allows the terminals to include a level of detail that was initially created on the wax. The terminals created for these torcs were hollow. Each of the torcs has a slightly different design for the left and right terminal.Gold torcs from the Ipswich Hoard
British Museum, accessed 18 August 2010

Today

The 1968 finds are in room 50 of the British Museum, but there are also copies of these torcs in the

Ipswich Museum Ipswich Museum is a registered museum of culture, history and natural heritage located on High Street in Ipswich, the county town of Suffolk. It was historically the leading regional museum in Suffolk, housing collections drawn from both the fo ...

.The Celtic Coin Gallery
, Sheshen Eceni, accessed 20 August 2010

References