In March 2009, Terry Herbert was metal detecting in a field in Staffordshire in the middle of England, just north of Birmingham. When his detector gave a beep, he dug down and retrieved what he originally thought was the brass key plate from a lock. He soon realized, however, it was not bronze but gold. Over the next few days he continued to find more and more gold objects, most of them small and broken up, but many highly decorated and some set with red garnets. He carefully bagged the objects as he discovered them, keeping them together in groups as far as possible, until eventually he had accumulated over 240 bags of miscellaneous objects that he thought were probably Saxon. Over many years of metal detecting, he had learned a lot about how to date the objects he found.