As for his fellow hunters in the Bloxwich Research and Metal Detecting Club, he said, “I dread to think what they’ll say when they hear about this.”

He said that on the day of his discovery he reworked a mantra that he regularly used for good luck. “I have this phrase that I say sometimes  ‘Spirits of yesterday, take me where the coins appear’  but on that day I changed ‘coins’ to ‘gold.’ I don’t know why I said it that day, but I think somebody was listening.”

From the Birmingham museum, the Staffordshire treasure, much of it still encrusted with dirt, will go to the British Museum in London, where the artifacts will undergo months, possibly years, of study by archaeologists and historians. A court ruling this week declared the finds to be treasure, meaning that they belong to the British crown, which is expected to offer them for sale.

The crown’s practice, established in part by the many shipwrecks recovered off Britain’s shores, is that a reward equal to the value of the items  likely to be set in a bidding war among British museums  will be divided between Mr. Herbert as the finder and the farmer who owns the field where the discovery was made. His name and the location of the farm  beyond the fact that it is around Lichfield, north of Birmingham  have not been disclosed, to allow archaeologists to continue searching the area for more treasure.

Image The artifacts  like a hilt fitting, top, and a piece from a scabbard  are mostly items used in battle. Credit... irsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press

At the news conference, experts said that Mr. Herbert’s initial discovery, which he reported to a Staffordshire County official responsible for archaeological discoveries, was followed by a dig that was strictly supervised by professional archaeologists. They were assisted, the experts said, by a team from Britain’s Home Office that normally works on crime scene forensics.

The experts said that a painstaking search of the area had turned up no trace of a grave, a building or anything else that suggested a careful plan to bury the objects for later recovery. They said that information, and the fact that none of the discoveries appeared to be jewelry or other feminine items, added to the likelihood that the treasure was war bounty. It may have been seized by one of the seventh-century Mercian kings  men like Penda, Wulfhere and Aethelred  who pursued an aggressive, plundering policy toward neighboring kingdoms.