Caitlin Randall at Narratively wrote a fascinating article about father-son con artists from Northern England who sold at least 120 forged antiquities to museums, galleries, and auction houses.
He must have rehearsed his story a dozen times, aiming to get it just right, to tell it with a perfect mix of curiosity and candor: “I was lookin’ for pieces with my metal detector, up above the river terrace in Avenham Park. That’s in Preston, near me home in Bolton.” He would tell experts at the university that he’d found a treasure wrapped in a leather sack and hint that he might have uncovered something special, a piece of Anglo-Saxon history. It sounded possible, maybe even plausible. With luck and a bit of prodding, they would find their own way to identify it as an ancient reliquary, a silver chalice dating back to the tenth century. But inside the vessel was the real gem, a touch of medieval magic that could only be called inspired. The object itself was a small, squat silver chalice, its single handle sculpted in the shape of a lizard-like beast. At its base was a carved figure of Christ seated with a staff and a large cross. Inside was a small piece of wood mounted on rose quartz with gold leaf encrusted underneath, barely visible to the eye. But most intriguing was an Anglo-Saxon inscription that ran around the rim, hinting at the wood fragment’s origins: a sliver of the True Cross.
“Oh, the old man was a liar through and through. He was clever. The piece was constructed in a way so that each bit needed to be uncovered. The gold leaf for example was well-hidden,” says Dr. David Hill, then a senior research fellow at the Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies at the University of Manchester. It’s been twenty-odd years since his encounter with George Greenhalgh, but he remembers it well.
