Alice Loxton

Historian’s notebook: Chaucer’s questionable fashion sense

And meeting the superstar detectorists

  • From Spectator Life
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I am chatting to Jon, an ex-tree surgeon from Derby, in one of the galleries of the British Museum. He became an amateur metal detectorist when his wife, Julie, gave him the kit on Valentine’s Day a few years ago. ‘Our honeymoon to Barbados was cancelled because of Covid’, he explains, ‘so this present was the trade-off’. It has proved a source of marital bliss: Jon adores his new hobby, and Julie enjoys ‘weekends of peace’. 

How remarkable that these objects have spent centuries lying forgotten underground until – Beep! Beep!

A few months ago, Jon pulled a strange, curved object from the sandy Staffordshire soil, which at first he thought was an aluminium drawer handle. Then, after wiping it down, the colour changed, revealing its true, dazzling form: a 3,000-year-old gold clothes fastener in perfect condition. It was, historians think, made in Iron Age Ireland and is one of only seven to have been discovered.

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