There are two notable

Ipswich Ipswich () is a port town and Borough status in the United Kingdom, borough in Suffolk, England. It is the county town, and largest in Suffolk, followed by Lowestoft and Bury St Edmunds, and the third-largest population centre in East Anglia, ...

Hoards. The first was a hoard of

Anglo-Saxon The Anglo-Saxons, in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English, were a Cultural identity, cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced t ...

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

Iron Age The Iron Age () is the final epoch of the three historical Metal Ages, after the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age. It has also been considered as the final age of the three-age division starting with prehistory (before recorded history) and progre ...

gold Gold is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol Au (from Latin ) and atomic number 79. In its pure form, it is a brightness, bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal ...

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 have hook and ring closures and a few hav ...

s that was discovered in 1968 and 1969. The latter hoard has been described as second only to the Snettisham Hoard in importance as a hoard from the Iron Age, and is held at the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

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 (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 (,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 dialect word . ; ; 966 � ...

, 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 (1968–69)

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, 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 castingalso called investment casting, precision casting, or ''cire perdue'' (; loanword, borrowed from French language, French)is the process by which a duplicate sculpture (often a metal, such as silver, gold, brass, or bronze) is cas ...

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

References