Although this booklet was issued so soon after initial cleaning and conservation and immediately after the Hoxne cache was declared Treasure Trove, it bears every sign of the high standards of scholarship which are the hallmark of its two authors. Its publication was an act of faith by the Museum authorities, for at the time it was by no means certain that the entire Treasure could be secured for the nation. Happily this has now been achieved and the work of conservation, study, and publication can now proceed. Some aspects will receive attention sooner than others; Roger Tomlin, for example, has reported on the inscriptions on the spoons and one of the bracelets in the pages of this Journal (Britannia xxv (1994), 306-8). The text, short as it is, makes statements which should be regarded in some instances less as fact than as an invitation to dialogue. The excellent photographs, the majority of them in colour, are far from being a complete record, but in conjunction with experience of the material on display in the British Museum, they too allow others to make suggestions about the find. The Treasure seems to have been contained in a wooden chest. The quantity of coins alone, including 565 gold and 14,191 silver down to the reign of Constantine III, is astonishing as is the gold jewellery and silverware. However the Treasure can only be part of something much larger. The silver vessels were all small ones. Surely there were large plates and bowls like those from Mildenhall in the ministeriuml Missing too are pendants from the necklaces, and the rings have certainly had their settings removed. Roger Bland hints that 650 gold coins found at Eye in the eighteenth century about four miles away may have been a related parcel of finds. The assumption is that the original owner was a wealthy aristocrat, perhaps the Aurelius Ursicinus whose name appears on ten of the spoons. It is worth wondering why this and so many other Treasures come from a part of Britain not noted for palatial villas rather than from the Cotswold region or the SouthWest , though this is not a problem to which it is possible to provide an easy answer (but see below). Even if the original owner was a magnate whose main residence lay elsewhere in the Empire, he would still have required a country-seat appropriate to his status. What were the particular circumstances of the burial of the treasure? Was the Hoxne Treasure hidden by the owner or his steward at a time of unrest or even invasion, perhaps with other material being left elsewhere on the estate or taken away to the continent or to elsewhere in Britain? Is there any chance that the reason for deposition was religious rather than secular, as we believe to have been the case at Thetford (C. Johns and T. Potter, The Thetford Treasure, Roman Jewellery and Silver (1983))? It seems possible that the Thetford Treasure itself contained coins and there were three other hoards in the immediate vicinity. Although the Thetford material was dedicated to the god Faunus, there is a Christian counterpart in t...
