Viking Treasure Unearthed in Northern England

NICHOLAS GLASS, ITV News Correspondent:

This was, as one British museum curator called it, something of a Viking piggy bank. Almost everything here is silver. Fresh from the earth, it awaits a jolly good clean, but it still glints here and there. All of this was Viking currency to buy slaves, horses, hunting dogs, cloth, whatever. And all of it was found jam-packed into a single vessel or pot.

It's been buried for over 1,000 years. And as you can see, it's obviously still covered in a coating of dust and dirt and waits to be cleaned. It's silver, and it's gilded. It was probably used originally in the ninth century to dispense the host the bread to the congregation, probably somewhere in France or Germany. How the Vikings came by it, we can only hazard a guess.

The swish of a metal detector across stubble on Yorkshire farmland. Dave Whelan is from Leeds and, at 51, semi-retired. Obviously, this has been his hobby for the last three years. His son, Andrew, a surveyor, usually tags along, too. They've never ever really found much — the occasional Roman coin — until, that is, they tried a farm near Harrogate.