Jonathan Thomas (00:21)
Welcome to the Anglotopia Podcast, where we explore British travel, history, and culture. I'm your host, Jonathan Thomas. Beneath Britain's fields and hills, and under the haunted barrows, the ruined abbeys, the old hill forts and castles, there is gold. Or so people have believed and told each other for a thousand years. Today, we're going to dig into one of the richest seams of British folklore there is the legends of buried treasure. Not the real hordes and museum cases, though we'll talk about those too, but the imagined ones.

The ones guarded by dragons and demons and little black hens, cursed so that one small mistake brings ruin, promised in dreams, whistered about for centuries in villages where everyone knew that a great treasure lay somewhere out there in those fields. If only you could find it. My guest has gathered hundreds of these stories together for the first time. Jeremy Harte is the folklorist and curator of Bourne Hall Museum in Surrey and one of our one of the finest writers on the uncanny side of the English landscape.

He's the author of Cloven Country, The Devil in the English Landscape and Travelers Through Time, A Gypsy History, and a winner of the Catherine Briggs Folklore Award. His new book, out published this month by Reaktion, is Treasures On Earth Buried Wealth in the English Landscape. Here it is. And it argues wonderfully that these stories were never really about the gold at all. Jeremy, welcome to the Anglotopia Podcast.

So Jeremy, before we start digging, tell us about yourself. You're a folklorist drawn to the landscape and to stories of other worlds, and you curate a museum in Surrey. So how did you come to spend your life chasing these legends of the English countryside?

Jeremy Harte (01:51)
Well, thirty-five years looking after a museum has given me a certain acquaintance with old things found in the ground. ⁓ and in fact, emotionally and and and a lot of the book is actually about emotions. I was taken back to ⁓ the time when we actually had ⁓ an old lake surface exposed, it had dried out, some metal detectors had been mooching around, and one of them kind of came in and went, Yeah, yeah, can you get me a coffee? And I got him a coffee.

It's only at that point that I noticed that he was sitting in between me and the door as he got out this little package and very, very cautiously unwrapped it. And there was an Iron Age gold coin. And looking at gold and looking at it in that context, he was quite, you know, I I could never have seen him again if I'd kind of reached out a hand, put it over it, and went, excuse me, I think you'll find that actually belongs to the council whose land you were detecting on. It was a point at which I said, that's wonderful, you know.

You find a lot of stuff like that, and it's like gave him essentially free license to to work over the site provided. He told us what he found. But you know, it had been anything else, you know, it'd been a Roman brooch, if it'd be been a kind of standard, you know, hoard of four century you know bronze coins, that would have just been archaeology. It was the gold that made that different emotive feeling. And I thought I ought to be exploring that a bit.

Jonathan Thomas (03:17)
you've written about the devil in the landscape, you've written about ⁓ gypsy in history, about fairies and holy wells. So what drew you specifically to the buried treasure and how long have you been gathering these stories?

Jeremy Harte (03:29)
We were talking about it in lockdown. Ham Hampstead Heath was it was our walk of choice. The the the great English thing was that you know you were allowed to bubble and you you were allowed a walk. this is at a stage where you could actually get on a train and go into the the London outskirts and meet people. So ⁓ Hampstead Heath at that point was actually a large brown splodge because quite a lot of Londoners were going for a walk. But as we talked it over, I was kind of kicking ideas over, and again it was one of those points it's almost like you know

You found a resistance. You found ⁓ gold, treasure. Well, you know, what does people know about treasure? Well, trackens, kings, magic. And it was like, my God, you know, this is a point where everything converges. I ought to be doing some more thinking about this. And it took about ⁓ I not not incredibly long, six months to a year, you know, people kind of go, Well, how do you find all of this stuff? But one of the things about folklore scholarship is that years and years have been spent

essentially indexing, because you know, the guiding principle, certainly for a a certain old fashioned perhaps kind of ⁓ folklore research, is just to highlight everything that resembles everything else. ⁓ classifying it. Some of the cla you the the great treasure stories like the Petra Swatham have got their own classification number in the in the Arm Thomson system. It's there for you if you work it through. And in the ⁓ the great folklore classics ⁓ in Britain

⁓ are all written really like nineteenth, early twentieth century. ⁓ so they're accessible. You know, I I I I I could sit there pulling up one treasure story after another and then trying to work out what I had apart from a heap of stuff.

Jonathan Thomas (05:11)
So here's a here's a line from the book that stopped me. you say treasure is so potent it doesn't have to exist to destabilize human life, that most of the hordes in the book will never be found because they were never there. So make the case for us that these stories aren't really about gold. What are they about?

Jeremy Harte (05:26)
They're about taking over people's lives. ⁓ and although I didn't ⁓ go out of folklore into popular culture, I spent a lot of time reading up on things like Oak Island and the you know, the modern treasure obsessions. And I was reading story after story of of people who have basically given up on ordinary human life because they wanted to find it. And I thought once you get into that, you know.

That has taken over your life, that has become more meaningful to you than home and comfort. And of course I then thought of my dragons on the barrows, this kind of classic Anglo Saxon trope about the dragon, that he does nothing but guard gold, ⁓ and and sacrifices whatever a dragon life would be, just to sit there forever in the darkness on the treasure. And I thought, yeah, there there is a common theme here.

Jonathan Thomas (06:17)
So you've you've organized the book by emotion rather than by region or date. So memory, ruin, strife, terror, and so on. Why did you take this approach and and what does it reveal ⁓ or map about the timeline that a timeline wouldn't have?

Jeremy Harte (06:33)
I think when you're kind of working on a folklore book, firstly, this sounds, you know, a little bit like, we know better. There's been a great tradition of like the folklore gazetteer. And this is great stuff if you're traveling the country, you know. I mean, some of them are actually designed as road books. You can skid to a halt in a village and lean out of the window and say, excuse me, you know, excuse me, nice lady walking your dog. ⁓ you know, can you tell me all about the stone or all about the ruined abbey? ⁓

But that doesn't kind of go to the heart of what makes people tick. It's still superficial because it's not excavating down to what makes a story memorable. and the answer with a lot of it, I think. I mean, the great advantage also about folklore, unlike almost any other you know, discipline, you are both dealing with the material and you're in the material because, of course, in order to talk about folklore, you have to retell the stories.

You're kind of getting into the story and seeing what makes it work. And this is where I mean one of the cr the great things about, you know, I have have a job where I have to talk to lots of small children. You can try out an awful lot of stories and and see where it's going to. ⁓ and I I would hate not to have that. I would hate not to have the audiences that I've been able to talk to, because very often the work of putting together a presentation makes you think a lot more, I think, than if you're just sitting in a study.

But no, it it was the driving story force behind it, which I found to be these particular emotions. And obviously there's a certain amount of o overlap. You know, so some some some monks went under ghosts, some monks went under wars. ⁓ but ⁓ you could follow stories that were dominated by one particular theme, and often dominated by one particular punchline. ⁓ you know.

I I only have to hear, you know, I will, I will, I will and I remember that farmer being driven screaming by the ghosting he's defrauded from the goal.

Jonathan Thomas (08:33)
So let's ⁓ let's start where the book starts. ⁓ with the treasures that are real, some legends seem to have come spectacularly true. So tell us about a case like the Cuerdale horde on the banks of the Ribble or the Golden Cup dug from the Rillaton Barrow in Cornwall. ⁓ and and do you find that some some of these local stories actually matched very gold legends?

Jeremy Harte (08:55)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah. And and one of the things that you you find, ⁓ again if you ⁓ work with the archaeology, and British Museum has published some wonderful stuff on horns. ⁓ it's a complete opposite of the folk approach. ⁓ you know, there this this is, you know, a tot total lack of interest in in the the haunted atmosphere most of the time and and and the fascination in what sort of bag it was buried in. And but there there have been an awful lot.

of buried treasures out there. Of course the the thing you tend to forget when when you're talking about ⁓ you know the finds made Kurdelhord was in 1840s, you know, like the last hundred and fifty years. That's only the fag end of huge treasure deposits. You know, in our time, big Roman deposits have have come to light. And yet people have been digging up Roman deposits ever since the fifth century.

Know the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle just assumes that you know the landscape is dotted with them. So one of the motivating factors is quite genuine that there has been a lot of real gold coming out. But historically, all of this stuff is found completely by accident. And you know, the Cure Dale Horde is just found by a bunch of labourers who are trying to straighten out the course of the River Ribble and come across what is apparently the treasure chest of a 10th century army.

Jonathan Thomas (10:19)
And so, ⁓ in your book you're a little you're quietly skeptical about those legends predicted its stories. So you point out that we almost never hear about that tradition until after the find has been made. So what what's really going on there is memory doing something creative after the fact to sort of justify the the story?

Jeremy Harte (10:26)
⁓ yes, yes.

And there's an element there, I think, of revenge on the gentleman. when stuff is found in archaeological digs. ⁓ you know, fair enough, everybody turns up. There's been quite a few digs which have been attended by a large crowd waiting for the wonderful treasure to appear, and then, you know, going away rather disappointed at lunchtime, going, well, that wasn't a 30-foot long golden boat, call that an archaeological dig. ⁓ But there's also a kind of we knew about it all the time.

And this is very common in in, you know, traditions of basically, you know, subaltern communities, where when the expensive people turn up and and you know sort start start trying to ⁓ interfere in the local landscape. So I think something like ⁓ the Rillaton Cup, you know, w which is absolutely Packer, it's a Bronze Age golden cup. you you can see it in the British Museum after it ⁓ had a short shape. ⁓

And was actually used by George the Fifth to put his toothbrush in for a while until somebody suggested it might actually be better off in an archaeological display. But then the story is concocted almost certainly out of a book published in 1860. So you know, 40 years after it was found, but still within living memory, somebody felt that it was no good having it unless there was a good story to go with it. The curiosity is the bronze, is the the gold.

Cape of Mould, Bronze Age Gold Cape, where although a lot of people I know have kind of, well, you know, it's all post-excavation traditions, so many people said that they had seen a golden ghost. ⁓ that ⁓ you know, I put all of that in and I kind of reserve judgment. But of course it's a ghost, not a tradition. What ghosts do is another department entirely.

Jonathan Thomas (12:28)
So there there's a lovely example in the book, speaking of ghosts, is the ghosts who promise to reveal the gold mine of Largo Law if the cock doesn't crow and the horn doesn't blow, so the shepherd wrings every cockirill's neck on the farm. These stories are often funny as well as eerie. So how how important is comedy to this tradition?

Jeremy Harte (12:47)
I think it's a very important part of British local law. One of the hesitations here is that you need to be quite careful about the quality of the recording. I mean, generally speaking, the folklore in the book predominantly comes from like what we'd call the long 19th century, 1790s to 1910s, which is when the bulk of English local legend was recorded. And the bulk of this stuff is taken down by people of different social classes.

going out and ⁓ at varying levels. Scotland is different because there isn't quite the same class divide, you know, you know, a good education was provided. You've got interesting people like Henry Miller, who is actually a stonemason but who writes a book on folklore.

There's a sense in which people know that they're writing for the market, ⁓ and therefore the pathos and the humour, you know, are something that they reach for. There's also a sense that this is ⁓ local storytelling, ⁓ and nobody's going to catch, you know, an audience unless they, you know, make the most of the stories for what they've got in these ways.

Jonathan Thomas (13:56)
So much treasure in these legends is guarded not by locks but by dragons and demons and giants and uncanny keepers. There's the iron castle full of gold beneath ⁓ Ruborough camp and it's with its single door that only opens at the full moon. So why did the imagination surround buried gold with monsters and and elaborate spells?

Jeremy Harte (14:15)
Yeah. What what

I love is the guy out Ruborough who who leans on his, you know, bill hook while he's doing a hedge and says, ⁓ yes, you know, castle's full of gold and and the the antiquarian kind of goes, Well, why don't you dig it up? But and there's always this but ⁓ and you realise that in some ways and probably, you know, at some level of consciousness, people always put in, you know, that little rider.

As to why they can't simply go off and make themselves rich. And of course, the whole thing is an internal illogic anyway. I mean, if you actually knew where some gold was buried that you could get your hands on, the last thing you're going to be doing is leaning on a ditch, you know, saying to an antiquarian where it's to be found, it's like, excuse me, you know, can I borrow that tool? I'll be back shortly. ⁓ the circumstances under which people go searching for treasure.

Are quite complicated because they always involve that overcoming the feeling that you can't find it. You've either got to feel well, you might be the person chosen by destiny, or it's a, you know, quite frequently it's a group outset. Nobody wants to let the others down. So they all kind of sign up for a syndicate. I mean, it interested me historically, because there's been excellent book written on German treasure hunting, that the magical syndicate.

Where you know you you get in a guy who can tackle the guardians ⁓ and and who knows where it is, and the rest of you just do the digging work. That's like a classic English sixteenth century thing, dies out in the seventeenth century, whereas in Germany it went on right into the nineteenth century. And you're kind of going, what sort of changing circle circumstances are being represented there?

Jonathan Thomas (16:04)
So my my favorite guardians are the birds. You've got ⁓ examples of the black hen brooding on a crock of money, the cockerel that mustn't crow. There's the tale of the man who tried to shove the little black hen off her treasure and got hurled across the room. So what's going on with these humble, absurd, unbeatable little guardians?

Jeremy Harte (16:22)
Well, there's definitely imaginative play with with with the idea of domestic animals. Nice you know, 'cause there's also the cats, you know, they're sort of cute little cats that, you know, you really shouldn't mess around with. ⁓ some of the dogs are are not savage at all, but are like that dogs. Until you get closer to them. It's a sort of relationship with the supernatural. I mean, there are other stories about black hens, in the the magic cycles, ⁓ that ⁓

The the servant who opens the magician's book, ⁓ Sorcerer's Apprentice style, raises ⁓ and you know, again, a little black hen and chicks, what could be more innocent than that? And they get bigger and bigger and less and less innocent. There is there is some thinking, I mean of course when people talk about witches and their imps, they're always little animals. ⁓ don't don't don't don't don't don't interfere with you know, the little pets of little odd ladies seems to be one of the morals here.

Jonathan Thomas (17:17)
And then there are the fairies, ⁓ who don't guard the gold so much as trick you out of it, the the diggers driven off again and again by sudden hail and lightning, or who lever up the great stone only to find it standing untouched the next morning, the ground healed over. How did fairy belief shape treasure hunting?

Jeremy Harte (17:33)
I think that if we were, you know, going back to the 16th century, we would find an awful lot more of it. ⁓ again, it's one of those mysteries that you know certain categories of belief are absolute common sense for one generation, and then at some point they just slip out of the imaginatively possible. ⁓ I mean, we know people taking ⁓ very seriously into the 16th century.

'cause an an awful lot of cun cunning folk, domestic magicians, ⁓ including mostly the women included them in their repertoire. And of course one of the things that cunning folk were asked for, but I think, you know, it's in the top five things, ⁓ you know, up there with curing illness and and taking out contract killings, ⁓ was, you know, can you find treasure?

Wha how how they managed, you know, a conspicuous inability to find treasure, i it is one of these difficult questions about how they made a living at all, but it's an awful lot to do with charisma.

Jonathan Thomas (18:33)
And so you you trace the how the cast changes over the centuries. You've got dragons and giants, they have their hour, then fairies and demons, then ghosts, each giving way to the next. What does that turnover tell us about how belief itself evolves?

Jeremy Harte (18:47)
Well, think about the kind of legendary belief that we're looking here. It's always balanced between, ⁓ it could be true, or it like, no, no, I come on come off it, come off it. Well, but here's the evidence for it. if you if it's absolutely literally obvious, it's not a legend at all. It's just a piece of local history. If it's completely fictitious, it's a fairy tale, and you're just telling it to the kids. But it has to be the kind of thing that you can announce in the pub and there will be a kind of

lively discussion with people sort of banging down their pints on the table and going, well bits of it could be true or it could actually be, you know, a misunderstood reference to something else. And people can only hold so many things at once in that kind of category of stuff that could be true. I mean it's interesting when you look at these surveys of what people are are prepared to to believe in. You see that

What were clearly, you know, part of the mental landscape, and you're going back to old English period, there's a whole category of supernatural beings that just disappear because people stop talking about them. ⁓ there's also nuances of belief. We find it now much, much easier to believe in anything to do with the past. All our ghosts are ghosts of people who once died, as opposed to just like spooky things out of nowhere.

That gives a grounding, that's got the kind of reality feel to it. ⁓ And that's why we accept it. I mean, the you know, the remaining ethnographic communities with the whole tradition of completely independent supernatural beings are not interested in the past. They you know they're they're still kind of, well, you know, we dad and my dad's time, and that's it. We've got these hundreds of years behind us. And for a lot of people, I think the deep past, that's a quality of the supernatural. ⁓ it's a place where you can believe in anything.

I mean this is why people now ⁓ are are in love with the gold of the Knights Templar. They're kind of real, they're historical, but they're in the past. So they're like almost mythical heroes.

Jonathan Thomas (20:52)
So a lot of the treasure buried buried in your book is buried in times of upheaval, war, the Viking raids, the dissolution of the monasteries, you know, the there are the golden gates of abbeys thrown into ponds or hidden in tunnels as the king's commissioners wrote up. How does real historical trauma get folded into this treasure lore?

Jeremy Harte (21:12)
Slowly, and that's the difference between memory and social memory. I mean, I was fascinated by this, of course. You know, my first response, it's like, you know, the dissolution of the monasteries is is recorded historically, basically day by day. ⁓ you know, people were turning up with notebooks to the big abbeys and and and making a record ⁓ of essentially the abbey treasures. I mean, almost everything was on display, simply because it's much easier to have it on display and have a bloke in a little room looking after it and putting it away somewhere where it could get nicked from and you wouldn't know about.

⁓ so in fact, what happened to the stuff is pretty well recorded. ⁓ Henry the Eighth and ⁓ you know Edward the Sixth were neither of them likely to kind of, you know, go, I don't know what happened to that hundred pounds worth of gold that we were expecting from So and So Abbey. ⁓ where there were ⁓ cases, it it was quite obvious. By and large, ⁓ most of it was done by dodgy accounting rather than by hiding gold in the ground. But what happened then is is that although you've got this big contemporary record.

People don't put together the ⁓ the trauma of of the dissolution un until almost fifty/ hundred years afterwards. It's not until well into the seventeenth century that ⁓ you get the tropes of the monastic ghost, you get people mooching around ruined abbeys for the atmosphere, you get people telling the stories about the buried treasures, you get people talking about ghost monks. ⁓

And I I think that's the difference. You if you're if you're knocked off the front of a bus, you have trauma from you know moment one. You don't like buses. Even with a modern phenomenon like the First World War, it took ten people, it took people ten years ⁓ to figure out whether they were traumatized by the First World War or not. There's a course sort of pause afterwards, and only, you know, gradually does society mull over things and then actually come to

collective conclusion was that bad or wasn't it? It's a very very odd phenomenon and and folklore is part of that. The stories that we tell about something influence how traumatised we are by it or not.

Jonathan Thomas (23:17)
Then there's the ghost money, treasure hoarded in sorrow, guarded by the restless dead, the white lady of Blankensop Castle who ⁓ visits a local a little boy night after night, desperate to lead into the gold that keeps her from resting. Why do so many of these hordes come with a grieving, trapped spirit attached?

Jeremy Harte (23:36)
Well, I think this point you've you've got to address the role of romanticism, both in what kind of made a good story in print, ⁓ but also I think in in in terms of of conversations. Because one of the things an awful lot of these stories, like the Blinkensup Castle one, come from ruins. ⁓ and they are recorded by ruin tourists. ⁓ Barry Pomeroy in in Devon's kind of classic, it's got a great treasure story. ⁓

But from the early nineteenth century, right right down to the present, the English Heritage, who are actually in charge of giving you the little, you know, ⁓ sound unit you carry around to listen to the recorded story of Barry Pommery have just abandoned all attempt at being proper antiquarian historians and given you the ghost stories, because they know that's what people are turning up for. So romanticism is behind a lot of.

stories and romanticism is very, very big on on sad ghosts, ⁓ very big on ruins. Not so big on treasure, which I think is the the folk contribution, but that's what links the two together.

Jonathan Thomas (24:42)
The failure chapter is particularly heartbreaking. You've got treasure lost forever through one tiny mistake, a single word spoken, a curse, one black hair on a white ox's back. Why is the folklore so cruel? Why is the fortune always snatched away at the very last minute?

Jeremy Harte (24:58)
Well these are stories circulating amongst ⁓ people who had not done too well for themselves. I th this is one of the one of these great questions, who were the people telling the stories? ⁓ but where we can actually get back to individuals are either as the the focus of the story or or or the people telling it, ⁓ by definition, you know, something has gone wrong. ⁓ and there are, you know, a number of comments in in internationally.

that you know, the poorer the community, the more likely they are to be telling stories of lost treasure. So there's a sense here of ⁓ the unkindness of fate. People who felt that they, you know, had mastered fate and done quite well for themselves were were sitting in the other corner and not actually contacting the gentleman with the story.

Jonathan Thomas (25:45)
And then there's the curses. You've got the horde at Worwell that brings sudden death to whoever digs for it, the rector who applied to the home office for permission to open the cursed graves, hoping death might strike some dispensable bureaucrat instead of a parishioner. Were these curses a kind of insurance policy for a story that could never deliver?

Jeremy Harte (26:03)
I think very much so. It's interesting that the idea of the curse, ⁓ although it's present, ⁓ is not as common ⁓ as as as the idea of the fatal obstacle. There are many, many more stories and more elaborate stories about the one thing that goes wrong in the magical operation. Magicians, of course, are always big on you have to do it absolutely right, and if you don't do it absolutely right, ⁓ it's not going to work because it gives them a kind of insurance clause.

I think you'll find that you didn't actually say that word correctly. it's interesting emotionally again that the idea of the curse is not one that speaks to a lot of people in 19th century England. ⁓ I think it had kind of dropped out of their moral vocabulary. It's still there in a few remnants of us. The other thing is that you know, any folk corpus has got stories lingering in it from an older time. It's kind of got, you know, the first.

Adumbrations of news stories. It's never quite stratified. Of course, people tell what they know. It's only slowly that things like curses, which I suspect were a much stronger Elizabethan theme. You look at actual, you know, Eli Elizabethan trials for people cursing each other in the street. That drops out slowly and is replaced more by impersonal stories.

It's interesting that the stories that people prefer actually relate to an impersonal fate ⁓ and not to personal magic.

Jonathan Thomas (27:37)
Hmm. And so behind the legends are real people who genuinely went looking for these treasures with divine rods, with spells, digging trenches into mounds at night. Who were these treasure seekers and what does your book tell us about the hopes that actually drove them? Poverty, war, desperation.

Jeremy Harte (27:55)
Well, I in in the earlier period I'm quite convinced that ⁓ as as as across Europe we we had magical syndicates. how they got put together is an interesting question, but I also suspect that there's an urban base for them, simply because that would you know, by and large, ⁓ service magicians lived in the seedier area of towns because their clients had to be able to find them. ⁓

They cease to be, and then what happens later on is that you have a series of single obsessives. ⁓ you know, Judy of the Gold, so known by her neighbours, who has dreams and who goes out and acts on them. Again, you don't know what these people's mental health is like. ⁓ you also remember that a lot of these communities, you know, once you're an eccentric, you're fixed as an eccentric, you know, your neighbors want to know what to make of.

and so having a fascination with with with treasure digging and it gives you, you know, it gives you purpose. ⁓ it's it's not just, you know, in in in a life where nothing else might mark you out, it would be great to find the treasure, but the next best thing is to be marked out by the person who knows where it is but has just somehow never been able to find

Jonathan Thomas (29:05)
And so there's a there's an extraordinary true story running through the failure chapter. ⁓ Mary Parrish, the brandy loving London cunning woman, and Goodwood Wharton, the gullible aristocrat who she leads on a years long hunt for fairy goal. Can you tell us about this pair and their story? And it reads like a con, but it's a love story as well.

Jeremy Harte (29:22)
they they are.

You know, they're such a nice couple. My my my heart warmed to them. ⁓ of course, you know, we have this an entirely one-sided record. Goodwin Wharton was the literary half of partnership, ⁓ and we know of it from his very, very odd diary. ⁓ the diary goes on and on. ⁓ he even after you know the relationship with Mary has tailed off a bit, ⁓ he actually organised diving bells to try to dig up the treasure of the Armada off the coast of Scotland.

⁓ and the you know, the bizarre thing is that at the same time he is actually a fairly successful MP and and is making his way up in the government. ⁓ you know, leading me to wonder, you know, what secrets might possibly lie in the diaries of some of our present members. But you know, we won't find that for another hundred years. They're they're they're lovely. One one reason, of course, is you know, their failure doesn't do anybody any harm but themselves. ⁓ you know.

The earth doesn't fall in on anyone, nobody's life is is deranged, both of them can quite clearly afford to do this. It is an interesting relationship. There has been one life published of Mary. I think it needs a a new one, because of course the problem is that she was clearly a compulsive liar. I have serious doubts whether any statement about her, other than possibly the fact that she was born and married Mr Parrish, can be validated.

But to chase her up, the seventeenth century is a period when there's plenty of documentation, and to actually find out what she was doing in the documentary record, ⁓ would have would help cement this relationship a little bit more against a background of reality. What other people thought about them, we don't know. But quite clearly, you know, Wharton was convincing. ⁓ you know, he raised money for syndicates. He he, you know, he seemed to be a person who knew what he was doing.

Jonathan Thomas (31:14)
And so you make a point make the point that the people who actually found gold usually kept quiet and then the many who dug and found nothing were too embarrassed to speak out. So the stories mostly come from unreliable third parties. So how does that shape what survives? Are we hearing the diggers or the village talking about them?

Jeremy Harte (31:31)
We're we're hearing the village because one of the things here is it's very, very difficult to keep this sort of thing quiet. you know, I love I love the bit where it's kind of and you must dig at the time of the full moon and it's like if I'm venturing out into the English countryside with no street lights to dig a hole, I'd like to be able to see what I'm doing. ⁓ but it does also mean that people going about their business in the nighttime countryside could look over and go, ⁓ bunch of lads over there with spades. I suspect also that ⁓ a lot of the

documented attempts to ⁓ to go out and dig the treasure are very loose-edged crowds. And there was a kind of tradition whereby, you know, obviously the underlying concept was that you were going to share the chest of gold out amongst all of you. Everybody who got ⁓ wind of what you were doing was immediately taken in on the partnership because it was cheaper to lose a few more gold pieces to another partnership member than it was to have somebody come down on you. And again there is, you know, people are conscious

in in terms of actually finding real things, ⁓ the law of treasure trove and also the the ownership of the soil, that almost invariably if you did find something, ⁓ an upper class person would be attempting to take it off you immediately.

Jonathan Thomas (32:44)
So some treasures are reserved by fate. They're revealed in dreams or promised by prophecy for some distant day. You've got the the golden stag berry, clan with more, you've got that will make the town thrive when it's found, all Scotland will be rich. How is prophecy different from ordinary greed in these stories? You you say it's oddly generous.

Jeremy Harte (33:05)
Yes, I th I I did notice that the further away you were from London, the more generous you were. ⁓ there's a s I mean th you know, there there is some sort of ⁓ talk here about early capitalism. that people want money. I mean there there are stories about ⁓ people finding money, again going back to ⁓ literal treasure finds. what one of my lovely Dorset accounts, which is actually in the early county archaeology.

⁓ is is of a chap who digs up ⁓ a bushel of Roman coins, copper coins, not not gold, because this is an actual Roman find, sells them on the seafront at Weymouth, invests some money in buying a smuggling vessel, which was obviously like the equivalent of buying a pub in the 1820s, and did very nicely for himself. I did actually get a friend to follow the family history. And we we you know we finally got down about four generations to some people living in a very nice house in the Cotswold.

Who had made all of this out of a casual find of treasure in an old camp. So ⁓ there were people who did well, but in order to do that, you have to be integrated into an economy. And of course, the further out you are, the less capable you are of spending money at all. There's a lovely story from one of the fairy traditions, of course, you know, not specifically treasure, but one of the things that fairies do is leave a silver coin for people who have pleased them.

So the guy, you know, does his stuff, goes over, there's a silver coin by the well, picks them up ⁓ week by week, ends up with a whole pot of them. And I think this is the sophisticated bit. It doesn't turn into leaves, as as fairy money is said to, but he can't spend it. Because he's a labourer. He can't go anywhere with a silver coin and buy anything for it in the remote countryside without somebody saying, Where the hell did you get that from? What do you think you're doing with it?

Excuse me, I think we ought to go and have a word with the Lord of the Manor. ⁓ for a lot of these people who fantasized about finding infinite wealth, you know, a single coin would have been completely impractical for them to do anything with, let alone a golden stag. You might as well away.

Jonathan Thomas (35:19)
It's amus

it's amusing to think 'cause anybody finding a massive hoard of of money today would immediately have the same issue if they went to the bank to try and deposit it. Well, where'd this money come from? I mean, you know.

Jeremy Harte (35:31)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (35:33)
And so at the heart of the book is this idea that we find treasure, ⁓ to find treasure is to be utterly transformed. You're made free of who you once were, to be rich, as one of your old countrymen has put it, is really euphemism for never having to work again. Is that the real fantasy underneath it? Not gold but escape?

Jeremy Harte (35:53)
Yeah, but the the fantasy is is to become a gentleman. and and and of course, you know, gentlemen are are conspicuously visible in the countryside as people who wander around having, you know, no no no apparent need to work at anything whatsoever, which of course is why they can go around collecting folk tales.

Jonathan Thomas (36:09)
And so your your book ends on a haunting note, the gardener at Wallingford who dug for buried treasure in his spare time, until one day they found a fresh hole, his spade and his gloves beside it, and the man himself was never seen again. Why in there? What did you wanna what did you want that last image to leave us with?

Jeremy Harte (36:24)
I j I just loved that sense that, you know, he'd disappeared and it was almost like, you know, if I'd been giving a talk, it would have been time for me to wave bye bye and disappear behind a curtain and go out the back. ⁓ it was driven also by the fact that although obviously I wasn't in a position to, you know, go everywhere where the treasure was buried, ⁓ I did go to Wallingford, I had a lovely day out wandering in the castle grounds. ⁓ and, you know, I could just sit there imagining

That that little hole in the ground. It was so vivid in my mind's eye I thought I had to stop there.

Jonathan Thomas (36:56)
And so the this longing for buried treasure hasn't gone away. Today it wears headphones and carries a metal detector. Do you see today's metal detecting hobby as a direct descendant of these old treasure legends? Are detectorists in the field the same people at heart trading stories and legends about where there might be an Iron Age horde as the men who dug into barrows by moonlight?

Jeremy Harte (37:17)
Yes. Yes and no. yes because the the desire to kind of validate yourself by finding something. you know, you you you you hear about people who, you know, by by by sheer good luck came across, you know, the classic discoveries and you kinda go, It would be nice to be one of them. But also just what what drives you when you're doing detecting is is precisely, you know, there's going to be something

Not that far. I mean archaeologists and metal detectors, you know it's it's a lovely relationship. Each still sees the you know the the the different side as being a bit of the other to them. I mean it's significant in fact that ⁓ by and large, ⁓ you know, any metal detector who is in it for any length of time, ⁓ you know, despite, you know, subscribing to Treasure Seeker, ⁓ is going to be interested in everything you find in that kind of classical archaeological way.

You know, any little curiosity. And also you have to, you know, cover everything because it might turn out to be interesting. You might not even know that it's interesting until you've talked to somebody. So it's the archaeological mode where it's the meaning rather than the bully and value. On the other hand, that sense of self-validation, and very often people do talk about having hunches.

And people do and you know, in other parts of the world where there's more actual treasure in predictable places. And people like the Etruscan tomb robbers who are, you know, clearly looking for monuments where valuable stuff is going to come out of the ground not being looked for at random. They often do have the whole treasure mythology behind them. They hear ghosts, they follow ancient clues. ⁓

there is that sense in in which they have a different and and they pride themselves on having a different relationship with the past from the archaeologists because they're keyed into the local landscape. They're not just outside.

Jonathan Thomas (39:16)
And so I have to ask you about Dectectorists Mackenzie Crook's beloved comedy about two friends sleeping Essex fields with their detectors, mostly turning up ring poles and buttons while dreaming of Saxon Gold. It feels like it captures exactly what your book is about. The yearning matters more than the fine. Have you watched it and does it ring true to you?

Jeremy Harte (39:19)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah,

and and it it it did underlay, you know, my understanding of Goodwin Morton and Mary Parrish. I they you they always struck me as basically detectorists, you know, o only without the tech. human relationships in a in a way was an underlying theme because ⁓ they trusted each other. And the thing I noticed about a lot of my treasure hunting syndicates.

⁓ is that they're obviously doomed to failure because the guys were all looking at each other and didn't trust each other a button. ⁓ you know, who was going to run away with the treasure first. You think, well, that's a pretty disastrous way to start any project, you know, let alone one involving increasingly dangerous holes to find something you aren't going to find anywhere in the first place. But people making making an you know, it's people making a story of their lives. And I think an awful lot of folklore is is about that. The story is ⁓

are classifiable, they, you know, they're tellable. But ultimately when the people have a favourite story, it is often very much the story of this kind of tells you a bit about who I am.

Jonathan Thomas (40:36)
The the the real treasure is the friends you make along the way, right?

Jeremy Harte (40:40)
Yeah. Or of course the friends you lose, depending on how how how the magic's going. The the people who I admire in a backhanded way, ⁓ are are are are are the magicians. ⁓ you know, who obviously make a living out of this, out of many other things. Of course I found out there were basically two sorts. ⁓ that they're they were the ones who were like embedded in a community. So that, you know, people kind of went, Well, you know, all right, we didn't actually find the treasure but on the other hand, you know, he got rid of my wife's acne, so he's

Jonathan Thomas (40:45)
Yeah.

Jeremy Harte (41:09)
reasonable quality magician. And then they were the ones who solved the entire problem by just moving on every time it didn't work out.

Jonathan Thomas (41:16)
And so for for for for my last question, what's your favorite story o out of all the stories you collated for this book? And which one do you kind of believe is is true and that treasure is out there?

Jeremy Harte (41:17)
Okay.

⁓ I I I belief belief is a funny thing. When I actually go on site, you know, I am suddenly, you know, my scepticism it rolls away after about five miles walking. And I'm like kind of going, Ooh, you know, let's just, you know, have a quick look underneath here. look, there's a patch of dirt here. Let's just check. And I think that's something when when you're out there.

⁓ you're you're standing on a lot, you know, you're standing on one of these hills. ⁓ you're looking out, ⁓ you know exactly where it ought to be, you know it ought to be under your feet, somewhere near here. And in context, if you're a believer, it it it's like, you know, people you know, put people in a graveyard and they'll start believing in ghosts. ⁓ legend again is is is all about that. People don't just like believe or not believe in in a kind of

Ticket off on a questionnaire way. They believe differently according to the circumstances you put them in. ⁓ and yes, I've I've I've often been there. Of course, what then, you know, arises for me is I thought it'd be terribly embarrassing if I did actually find a hoard of gold. I mean it's like kind of, yeah, publicity exercise.

Jonathan Thomas (42:44)
It's the most English answer ever.

Jeremy Harte (42:45)
Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (42:46)
So, Jeremy, this has been an absolute delight. You've taken us down the tunnel past the Black Hen and the Sleeping Dragon and shown us that the real treasure was the longing all along. Thank you so much for joining us on the Anglotopia podcast. The book is Treasures on Earth, Buried Wealth in the Landscape and Legend, out now from Reaktion Books. It was an absolute joy to read. We'll put the link in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, or comment and tell us the buried treasure legend from your own corner of the world over on YouTube.

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Jeremy Harte (43:34)
Thank you best of luck.