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Two amateur treasure hunters were sentenced Friday to lengthy prison terms for stealing millions of dollars worth of 1,100-year-old coins. The coins date back to the period when the Anglo-Saxons were battling Vikings for control of England. British metal detectorists George Powell, 38, and Layton Davies, 51, dug up the 300 coins along with gold and silver jewelry in 2015 on farmland in central England but never reported it. That reporting is a legal requirement. Prosecutor Kevin Hegarty said the coins were estimated to be worth $3.9 million to $15.4 million. The archaeological wonders are believed to have been buried by a member of the Viking army that was being pushed across England...

THEIR reputation for raping and pillaging may not have set them out as the ideal role-models for an environmentally-friendly way of life. But it seems that lessons could perhaps be learnt from the Vikings after the intriguing discovery in Yorkshire of what is believed to be a metal recycling centre dating back to the 11th century. Historians and metal detector enthusiasts have made the find which is being heralded as evidence of how the Norse invaders recycled their fearsome array of weapons. Hundreds of pieces of metal including arrowheads, shards of swords and axe heads have been unearthed as part...

On Christmas Day 1013, Danish ruler Sweyn Forkbeard was declared King of all England and the town of Gainsborough its capital. But why is so little known of the man who would be England's shortest-reigning king and the role he played in shaping the early history of the nation? For 20 years, Sweyn, a "murderous character" who deposed his father Harold Bluetooth, waged war on England. And exactly 1,000 years ago, with his son Canute by his side, a large-scale invasion finally proved decisive. It was a brutal time, which saw women burned alive, children impaled on lances and men...

The Viking Great Army's arrival in 865 was recounted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:.. According to the Chronicle, the Vikings spent years campaigning through the territory of the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms -- East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, and Wessex... By 880, all the kingdoms had fallen to the Vikings except Wessex, with which they made peace... Excavations conducted [at Repton, the capital of Mercia] between 1974 and 1993 by Martin Biddle and his late wife, Birthe Kjolbye-Biddle, had revealed a small, heavily defended enclosure covering just an acre or two... some experts took these findings to suggest that the Great Army was...

A mass grave of 300 bodies uncovered in Derbyshire could be the burial site of the Viking Great Army's war dead, a new study has found. The mass grave was found in Repton in the 1980s and dating techniques at the time suggested it consisted of bones collected over several centuries.