The Usual UK Press Fluff on Metal Detector Find Challenged

Despite what the British press are cribbing from somebody's press release, there’s no evidence at all that a gold bead found in Yorkshire, England November 2021 by Buffy and Ian Bailey is intended to represent a Bible (Kathleen Kennedy When a Bible’s Not a Bible Hyperallergic 14 Nov 2021).

Recently, news broke that British metal detectorists discovered a miniature 15th-century “Bible.” The one-and-a-half centimeter, five-gram, gold bead’s exterior is cast in the form of an open book, and the interior is carefully engraved with images of St. Leonard and St. Margaret. But beyond that, as Luke Skywalker said, almost everything currently published about the newly discovered bead is wrong. Historical facts about late medieval England tell a much different story about this find. Hiding behind these mistakes lurks the myth of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages as poor, dark, and ignorant, which easily lets contemporary culture off the hook by inventing a false sense of cultural “progress.” We can probably blame the Daily Mail for muffing the story. We expect that. More surprising were the casual own-goals by the BBC, in theory a bastion of careful reporting, and one that has handled medieval finds better in the past. In this piece, Hyperallergic will correct the mistakes of these legacy platforms.

Most brits these days would probably not recognise a Bible if they tripped over it. This sort of news hype via "Treasure Hunting Magazine" frequently appears just before the object it concerns appears in the catalogue of a certain Northern British auction house. It seems not to be in the PAS database. So we have more chance of keeping up with so-called "responsible metal detecting" from the Daily Mail than the expensive government scheme set up with public money to keep the public informed about so-called "responsible metal detecting". Yeah? How is that in any way satisfactory?