A Birmingham cafe owner who took up metal detecting only six months ago has described his “once in a lifetime – no, once in 30 lifetimes” discovery after unearthing a spectacular Tudor gold pendant in a Warwickshire field. Charlie Clarke was about to call it a day when a clear beep on his detector led him to dig to the depth of his elbow. What he found made him shriek “like a little schoolgirl, to be honest. My voice went pretty high-pitched.”
The pendant is made of 300 grams of 24-carat gold and attached to a chain of 75 links. It is heart-shaped and decorated with a bush bearing the Tudor rose and a pomegranate, the symbol of Henry VIII’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon, while the reverse bears the initials H and K. Ribbon motifs carry the words TOVS and IORS, which Rachel King of the British Museum described as “a beautiful early English Franglais pun” on the French word “toujours” and “all yours”.
King, curator of Renaissance Europe at the British Museum, said she had to sit down when she first heard of the discovery. Nothing of this size and importance from the Renaissance period had been found in Britain for more than 25 years, she said. While scientific analysis has confirmed the pendant is genuine, no personal link to Henry or Katherine has yet been established. “Nonetheless, its quality is such that it was certainly either commissioned by or somehow related to a member of the higher nobility or a high-ranking courtier,” she said.
One hypothesis suggests the pendant may have been commissioned for a tournament around the time of the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520. Its size suggests it would only fit a woman, but it may not have been intended to be worn. “In the British Museum, we’ve got the largest collection of objects from the early Tudor periods in precious metal; none of them are anything like this,” said King. Why it ended up in Warwickshire remains a mystery. “We don’t know why it was in Warwickshire and who had it there. At least not yet,” she added.
The pendant was unveiled at the launch of the annual reports of the Treasure Act for 2020 and the Portable Antiquities Scheme for 2021, during which 45,581 archaeological finds were recorded, 1,085 of them classed as treasure. It has not yet been valued, but Clarke will split the proceeds with the landowner. He said the find would give his four-year-old son, also called Charlie, “the best education possible”. His son now wants to be a treasure hunter, Clarke added. “People say it’s like winning the lottery; it’s not. People actually win the lottery. When was the last time a crown jewel was unearthed?”
