This morning the amateur treasure hunter Tim Pearson was already up and getting ready with his metal detecting routine in South Yorkshire in one of the many fields there, a thing he has been doing for 6 years or more now. In fact, it was already nearing seven years and all he found was a Roman coin. But that morning in 2005, he was destined to find something that may just be the discovery of his life with the use of his trusted metal detector.

He commented, “When I broke open the clod of earth the first I saw of the aestel was its flat back covered in mud. Seriously just looked like a piece of gold colored foil, hence the milk bottle top similarity. Obviously, soon as I had the object in my hand I knew it was something special!”

That aestel, its pointer, the dimensions of which is thirty one millimeter high and weighing a little bit more than four grams, is now called the famous Yorkshire Aestel. The cast pointer is what monks were using in the early days to read manuscripts. And according to history, King Alfred, who ruled from 871 to 899 has ordered some of these aestels to be created for bishops to use in translating the Regula Pastoralis made by Pope Gregory I.

The Yorkshire Aestel is only one among the few that were created, the most popular of them is the one discovered in Somerset in 1693 and can now be found in Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It is called the Alfred Jewel. The others have been named as The Borg Aestel which is in Norway, the Bidford Bobble in Warwickshire, the Wessex Jewel in Wilshire, the Bowleaze Jewel in Dorset, and the Minster Lovell Jewel in Oxfordshire.

The artifact is said to cost at least fifteen thousand pounds or twenty-seven thousand dollars on October 15 auction slated at Bonham’s which is in line with their sale of Antiquities in the London event.

And to think that Tim Pearson first thought of it as a milk bottle. The use of different metal detectors in his treasure hunt regimens indeed helped him in finding treasures such as this.