The love of money is the root of all evil, as they say

Chris Upton tells the tale of the Tutbury Hoard and how it all ended in murder.

“Radix malorum est cupiditas,” proclaimed Chaucer’s Pardoner at the conclusion of his tale. The root of all evil is greed. The story itself, one of the best in the Canterbury Tales, tells how the discovery of a chest of treasure ends in the demise of four young friends. The gold is owned by Death himself, and he returns to claim his own.

The story has become the model for many a film over the years, including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart, and, more recently, Shallow Grave.

There’s no better demonstration of the Pardoner’s message than the saga of the Staffordshire Hoard. Throw more than £3 million into a relationship, and it’s bound to do strange things to it. The finder of the Mercian gold and the landowner on whose farm it was discovered – Terry Herbert and Fred Johnson – are now the worst of foes, in spite of the money they shared. Had Mr Herbert found nothing, they would still be the best of friends.

But what happened in Hammerwich is as nothing compared to the extraordinary find made in Tutbury back in 1831, and the ugly repercussions that followed. If the Staffordshire Hoard is priceless, then the Tutbury Hoard is more priceless still.

It was while some workmen were repairing the mill-race on the River Dove that the coins first came to light. What they found, all caked in mud and crushed together, was a hoard of silver coins, from England, Ireland, Scotland and Continental Europe, and all dating from the 13th and 14th centuries.

That first discovery led to others, and more and more coins turned up. In total they amounted to some 360,000 coins, the largest haul ever found in the British Isles. This kind of quantity is almost impossible to value with any real accuracy. When 26 of the coins were sold at auction in 2010, they were expected to fetch around £3,000. You do the math. In medieval terms they probably amounted to £1,500.

As with the other Staffordshire Hoard, the first questions we want answering about the Tutbury find are who, why and when. And luckily we are in a rather better position to offer some answers.

Back in the early 14th century, Tutbury Castle was one of the many strongholds of Thomas Plantagenet, Earl of Lancaster. Thomas was arguably the richest and most powerful nobleman in England, not only a grandson of King Henry III and Earl of Lancaster, Leicester and Derby, but by marriage (to Alice de Lucy) Earl of Lincoln and Salisbury, too.

Born in c1278, Thomas rapidly became one of Edward Longshanks’ most trusted officers, an ever-present in the Scottish wars. With more major castles at Pontefract and Dunstanburgh, he was not far from the action.

With the arrival of Edward II, however, Thomas’s loyalty was not quite so secure. Under weak kings English barons plot. Thomas was one of the judges who sentenced Edward’s buddy Piers Gaveston to death. After the disastrous Battle of Bannockburn, Thomas was virtually the ruler of England for four years, before another faction of barons ousted him.

In time, Thomas of Lancaster’s disaffection from the King turned into outright rebellion. He joined forces with the Scots and raised troops to confront Edward, but failed to detach enough barons from the King to turn a rebellion into a revolution. Thomas’s army was routed at the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1321, and then at Burton Bridge in March the following year.

Thomas’s trial was just as brief as Gaveston’s, though King Edward commuted his sentence to a mere beheading outside his castle at Pontefract.

Yet, within a few years, Thomas was being hailed as a saint and martyr, especially after the rise to power of his grandson, Henry Bolingbroke. Repeated calls for Thomas’s canonisation failed to win over the Pope.

So, you might still be asking, where did all that silver come from? The likeliest explanation was that the money was destined for Thomas’s troops and his Scottish allies. Perhaps the barrels of coins capsized into the River Dove while his convoy was attempting to ford it.

Allegations have also been made against the monks of nearby Tutbury priory. It has been suggested that the cash was due to be taken to the priory church for safe-keeping, or that it was spirited away by the monks for their own purposes. As with the Staffordshire Hoard, we will probably never know the truth. But for the people of Tutbury in 1831, this looked like a present that had taken 500 years to arrive. The first coins were gratefully pocketed by the workmen on the Dove, but as more and more coins were dug out on the river bank, so the numbers of prospectors willing to wade into the water with shovels grew. There were, said a contemporary newspaper, up to 300 men in the river at any one time.

Eventually the Duchy of Lancaster itself stepped in to protect the site, and the hoard was designated Crown property. The holes were back-filled and an order prohibiting further digging in the area was issued by William IV.

Of the 360,000 coins thought to have been found, only 100,000 or so was recovered for the Crown. In the meantime, the opportunity to get rich quick transformed the town of Tutbury into a place of plunder, theft and murder.

We have never had a proper gold rush in England, the kind that transformed California, but Tutbury in 1831 was the nearest equivalent. Once rumours of treasure spread abroad, carpetbaggers piled into the town, filling their days with time in the local hostelries and a spell in the middle of the river.

It was as if the mere smell of silver was enough to undermine the usual social niceties. Fights broke out, fuelled by drink. Whisky Galore and Lord of the Flies had come together in a quiet corner of Staffordshire.

But the curse of the Tutbury Hoard had a long reach, and it did not end when the coins were declared treasure trove and the site sealed off. More than 20 years later the smell of loot lived on.

In October 1852 a couple called John and Jane Blackburn were found murdered in their burning house at Ash Flats Farm. Once a little farming hamlet, today Ash Flats is a suburb to the south of Stafford.

Two decades earlier John Blackburn and his neighbour, Hugh Barber, were among the many who had been drawn to Tutbury by the lure of money. In those days the rumour mill at Tutbury was turning faster than the real mill, in whose stream the silver had been discovered. Workmen, it said, had recovered the coins which had been carried downstream by the water, but Blackburn and Barber had located the main hoard.

At any rate, Hugh Barber elected to cash in on his cache immediately, and returned to Ash Flats £100 the richer. As for John Blackburn, he spent only enough to hire himself a horse and trap, along with a gun to guard it with.

Sudden wealth can do strange things to people. Certainly it transformed John and Jane Blackburn. They became reclusive and uneasy, not allowing anyone near to their increasingly derelict farm, not even their two sons. And thus they hid themselves away until the night of their murder.

Acting mainly on guesswork, the Staffordshire police immediately arrested the couple’s two sons, Thomas and Henry Blackburn, though they probably knew little more about secret treasure than anyone else in Ash Flats. With nothing in the way of evidence, the arrival of a badly scrawled anonymous letter transformed the situation. Whoever had written it clearly knew more about the circumstances of the killings than had been divulged in official channels. The letter accused Henry Blackburn of being the murderer. The letter was traced to a semi-literate Irishman by the name of Charles Moore, who had once been employed as a farm labourer by John Blackburn. Moore was one of many who had been overheard talking about the treasure said to be hidden in the Blackburns’ home. The man claimed that he had been recruited by Henry Blackburn to kill the Blackburns and recover the silver, with a promise of a share of the loot.

In the end four men were taken to Stafford Crown Court in April 1843 to stand trial for murder. Henry Blackburn was one, Charles Moore a second, along with two fellow Irishmen, Edward Walsh and Peter Kirwan. Over the three days of the trial the men were cross-questioned, along with witnesses, one of whom claimed he had heard Moore discussing how to obtain resin and pitch with which start the fire.

The involvement of Henry Blackburn in the crime was shown to be a deliberate attempt to mislead the police, and the jury found Peter Kirwan innocent as well.

The other two men – Moore and Walsh – were found guilty, though the latter’s sentence was later commuted to transportation for life.

Only Charles Moore, then, went to the gallows. He was hanged in front of the country gaol on April 9 1853. None of the Blackburns’ silver was recovered, if there had been any at Ash Flats at all.

Today, what remains of the Tutbury Hoard is scattered far and wide. In 2010 an exhibition of some of the silver was staged at the British Museum, and some pieces have also been on show in Tutbury Castle. A small collection of 26 coins was sold at auction in the same year and snapped up by the Duchy of Lancaster, thus finding its way back to the estate that lost it almost 700 years ago. Less than a third of the hoard is now in public hands.

But for those tempted to go treasure hunting in Tutbury today, the order prohibiting digging on the banks of the River Dove remains in force. And finding more of the lost silver may come with a far higher price that what it makes at auction.