Does relic contain a coded message?

Local historian Maxwell Craven reveals the fascinating mysteries behind the Risley Park lanx.

THE greatest treasure ever found in Derbyshire was on display for nearly nine months in 2006. It featured in the 1,700th anniversary exhibition held at York to commemorate the elevation of the Roman Emperor Constantine in 306AD.

The object is a rectangular silver dish measuring 15.25x19.5ins and weighing in at more than 35lbs. The Roman name for a flattish serving dish of this type is a lanx quadrata but the object, prominently displayed, is usually called the Risley Park lanx.

Despite being the greatest and most spectacular treasure ever found in Derbyshire, it is an object crowded with enigmas. Until 1991, one of those enigmas was its very whereabouts, for many people considered that it had been melted down and lost.

It had been found on the Risley estate on June 9, 1729, by a plough team, whose plough share struck and broke an object which was lying at a depth of some three inches. What they saw were fragments of black metal and, having extracted all they could locate, they divided the 26 fragments among themselves.

The agent of the owner of the estate, Catherine, Lady Aston, who lived at Risley manor house, swiftly recovered six pieces, including the central plaque, which had the dish’s foot soldered beneath it.

The find was identified by the antiquary, the Rev William Stukeley, who published it in 1736, having inspected and drawn the central tablet (which measured 7x5ins) in 1730. Aided by the discovery of another lanx of similar size but of quite different design at Corbridge, in 1735, he considered it Roman; all modern commentators date it to the late 4th century.

The central tablet shows a boar hunt, perhaps that of the legendary Celydonian Boar and the beaded edge is embellished with rich pastoral scenes, with a head in each angle. Beneath the lanx, along one side of the foot, Stukeley saw an important later inscription which he also published. The detailing of the whole is said, by Stukeley, to have shown signs of gilding.

Now, in Stukeley’s time, this was the greatest Roman treasure ever to have been discovered in Britain, let alone Derbyshire. But it then appeared to have vanished without trace.

Until 1991 that is. In that year, a Midlands farmer arrived at an auction room with a suitcase, from which he extracted a tartan rug covering a heavy silver tray. The expert on duty realized almost immediately that it was the Risley lanx. Not just the six pieces seen by Stukeley and engraved in 1736, but all of it.

Or was it? It was suspiciously clean and the detailing held numerous anomalies, like the solder used to attach the foot to the underside was not solder at all but silver.

The 26 pieces, however, were soldered. Metallurgy was applied and what emerged from a lengthy analysis was that there was only one explanation for all the anomalies, including some traces of cadmium, not present in silver solder until the 19th century.

Other clues made it certain that it was not a forgery. It was clear that the agent at the time of the original discovery, John White, eventually managed to reclaim all the missing fragments of the lanx. That seems to have been as far as the matter got, for the pieces were clearly not further touched until the era of cadmium solder.

Then, the owner seems to have taken all the pieces to a silversmith and asked him to re-assemble them. However, they were presumably so corroded and thin that, instead, an accurate mould was made of each piece and then the original was melted down and re-cast, the result being soldered carefully together.

Thus the present lanx has no soldered joins where the original had, only where the pieces were re-attached, and most of the lanx’s flaws are casts of flaws which arose from the manufacture of the original some 1,800 years ago.

The person who brought the lanx to the auction room said that the object had been in the possession of his family for some generations. The question is: how did they get it? When Lady Aston died around 1739, her son Baronet Sir Thomas Aston lost interest in Risley – the house was early Tudor and impossibly large.

When he died five years later, it was tenanted by the agent’s two sons, John and Thomas White.

In 1757, after a failed attempt to sell the estate, the baronet’s sister and heir, Catherine Hervey, evicted the Whites and demolished the house, selling the site and much of the land in 1770 to a new agent, John Hancock, whose family, the Hancock Halls, lived in the present hall for nearly a century.

One suspects that the lanx was in the house, no doubt in a strong box, and was restored by whoever had the bits in the 1840s or 1850s. The question is: what happened to the box in the interim? One presumes that it was forgotten about and went with the estate.

But, with the old mansion destroyed in 1757, Mrs Hervey could have claimed it and it could then have passed down through her rather grand family who lived at a hall at Aston-by-Sutton, Cheshire, until 1938 and nearby thereafter.

More likely, though, the wily agent sneaked it out for safe keeping – no doubt with many other choice items unlikely to have been missed! Either the 1991 owner was a descendant, or the Halls had subsequently sold it with some other items, not realising, after the lapse of time, what the hefty clutch of black metal fragments actually were.

So much for the mystery of its history up to 1991, as far as can be ascertained or surmised. What about the object itself? It has been established that it was made as a piece of household plate for a very grand family some time in the closing decades of the 4th century.

Since its discovery, several further British high status treasures have emerged, like Mildenhall, Water Newton, Traprain Law and Hoxne, which have established that there were exceedingly grand landowners in Britain early in the 5th century who could afford this sort of plate.

It is assumed that most withdrew to the continent when imperial control broke down on the death of Contantine III in 411. Therefore, a long held belief, bolstered by the inscription, that the piece had somehow made its way over from Gaul, has now been discarded.

The workmanship, although in silver, bears close comparison with similar pieces in pewter known to have been made in Britain. The most tantalising aspect of all is the inscription. With the recovery of the cast, which was purchased for £120,000 by the British Museum, this can now be read as: E.XVPERIVS.EPISCO[P]VS.ECLESIAE. BOGIENSID.EDIT.XP.

“Bishop Exuperius gave [this] to the church of Bogi [anum].” There are imperfections, like the “O” of “episcopus” which is only half there, the “A” of “ecclesiae” which has no crossbar and the lower part of the “G” of “bogiensi”, along with the odd intervals created by the dots.

The Chi-Rho, or Christogram – the first two letters of Christ in Greek – appears at the end, whereas one might, from other examples, have expected it at the beginning.

The implication for this, bearing in mind that the text was added at a later, probably 5th century date, is that there may be a hidden message, or computus, within the writing, of the sort so convincingly unraveled in stone-cut inscriptions of this period by Professor Charles Thomas.

He has shown that educated Latin speakers frequently based hidden messages, usually spiritual but sometimes quite otherwise, on the numerical values of the letters of the 20-letter Roman alphabet in inscriptions, as pointed up by just the sort of irregularities as the stops in the Risley inscription. Omitted letters that any half literate Latin speaker would have included, like one of the “Cs” in “ecclesia” tend to be devices for reducing the total number of letters to match a desired and significant total.

Numerically literate code-breaking enthusiasts might allow themselves a field day here. The outward meaning, however, remains the same but, until recently, much scholarly debate centred upon who the donor was and where was the place.

The donor’s name is a common 4th-5th century one, a period when the old Roman naming system had quite broken down, except among the most aristocratic members of the senate, to be replaced by a simpler formula of familiar name and family one, the former being used almost exclusively.

St Jerome wrote about a much admired and canonised Bishop of Toulouse of this name and there are four other saints in the Roman calendar who bear it, only one of them, however, a bishop.

There are two provincial governors called Ex[s]uperius recorded from the 4th century. But it is generally accepted that none are likely to be the donor of the lanx.

The next problem is “ecclesia Bogiensi” – “to the church of Bogium (Bogiacum or Boianum)”. There are a number of places, two of them in France, that are known with the “bog” element, a known Celticism, from which the village of Bauge and the city of Bayeux (to use their present names) have been canvassed and which, for a variety of reasons, have since been discarded.

A friend has also suggested a Bocconium in Roman Africa, any of which would be attractive enough had the donor been accepted as the famous St Exuperius, well known for the giving of gifts to distant churches.

But now that the workmanship is accepted as British, we have to accept that our Exuperius was also British, one of the unrecorded bishops alluded to only collectively in the scant surviving record of early Romano-British Christianity.

The latest commentator on the lanx, Dr Kenneth Painter, in a short essay on the treasure in the catalogue of the York Constantine exhibition last year, says: “There is, however, no reason why the personal name and the place should not occur in Britain. The [church] may therefore be the episcopal church of Exuperius at Bogiacum or Boiana, the estate of Bogius. If so, the estate and bishopric should probably be sought first in the vicinity of the find-place.”

There is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence to support this, too. In the last years of the Western Roman Empire, many villa estates sprouted domestic churches, as in Britain at Lullingstone, Kent. Some were even turned into monasteries and, in France, formed the core of what later became villages.

A British example seems to have been the villa of Eltutus (St Illtyd), seat of a notable monastic settlement, now called Llantwit Major, Glamorganshire.

There is no reason why a well-watered south-facing slope like the one upon which the parish of Risley lies could not have had an, as yet undiscovered, Roman villa on it which could have later had a church, all obliterated by the coming of the pagan Mercians from c550AD.

Exuperius could have been based somewhere like Wall, Roman Letocetum, which two recent commentators have suggested as the seat of a late Roman bishopric; why would St Chad have poled up there, before transferring to Lichfield, rather than, say, Repton, when brought from Northumbria in 657?

Perhaps the Lichfield Prebend of Sawley, the ancient parish of which may once have also included both Sandiacre and Risley, first recorded in the 9th century, went back a deal further and could have been a faint shadow of a much earlier link.

Evidence from Gaul tends to confirm that place name endings in “acum” and “iana/um” tend to be estate ones, while “ium” ones are usually settlements, hence a lost “Bogiacum” or “Boiana/Boianum” rather than “Bogium” is to be sought, if Dr Painter is right, somewhere in the angle between the Erewash and the Trent. The obvious diagnostic place name would be that of Boyah Grange, half a mile north of the find spot.

Dr Cameron, in his authoritative Place Names of England volumes on Derbyshire, gives “Boie’s enclosure” as the origin of Boyah, and Boia does occur as a Norse personal name. But he is unsure, adding lamely that it might be from “boy”.

The Grange was a very early property of the Abbey of Dale. Might not the foundation of that Abbey, less than half a mile to the north, reflect the then dim memory of a much more ancient monastic tradition in the area?

Finally, we are told that the discovery of the lanx led to an outbreak of local children being Christened Exuperius.

Yet, the fact that a Derby legal family had used it since at least 1580, could suggest that the treasure of “Boianum” buried in Risley Park may have consisted of a deal more than one large silver-gilt charger and that bits of it have been covertly recovered for centuries!

How else to explain Risley’s well-known stream, the Golden Brook, the course of which runs so close to the find-spot of Derbyshire’s greatest and most tantalising treasure? Explain that if you dare!

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