[1] It was found by Herbert Fordham, co-managing partner at a successful family brewery,[12][13] while digging for coprolites,[1] a particularly rich phosphate then used as fertiliser and the pursuit of which effectively provided the only employment other than agriculture in Cambridgeshire.

[14] Writing about the boar in 1904, his son Herbert George Fordham suggested that: I have always understood that it was found in the subsoil, or at no great depth, associated with some other objects, including (at all events) a small earthenware bead bearing incised pattern, the whole group occurring in what was, no doubt, a grave, and so placed with regard to remains of human bones as to suggest that the various objects were originally hung round the neck of the person buried.

[1]A drawing made between April 1882 and September 1883, held by the British Museum, shows the boar alongside a bronze ring and two glass beads, one amber-coloured, the other red with white inlay.

[3] It was again exhibited from 26 July to 16 October 2013, this time at the Diocesan Museum [de] in Paderborn, Germany, as part of CREDO: Christianisierung Europas im Mittelalter (Christianisation of Medieval Europe).

[3][18][19] The Guilden Morden boar is of Anglo-Saxon origin, so marked by the additional items found in the grave,[2][20] and by comparable helmets discovered elsewhere in England,[4] although until 1977 it was misidentified as Celtic.

[3] Understood in its broader context, the boar would likely have adorned an early model of the "crested helmets" known in Northern Europe in the sixth through eleventh centuries AD.

[5] The boar was an important symbol in prehistoric Europe, where, according to the archaeologist Jennifer Foster, it was "venerated, eulogised, hunted and eaten ... for millennia, until its virtual extinction in recent historical time.

[36] The boar persisted in continental Germanic tradition during the nearly 400 years of Roman rule in Britain, such as in association with the Scandinavian gods Freyja[40][41] and Freyr.

Ða wæs on healle heardecg togen sweord ofer setlum, sidrand manig hafen handa fæst; helm ne gemunde, byrnan side, þa hine se broga angeat.

Her onslaught was less only by as much as an amazon warrior's strength is less than an armed man's when the hefted sword, its hammered edge and gleaming blade slathered in blood, razed the sturdy boar-ridge off a helmet.

Then in the hall, hard-honed swords were grabbed from the bench, many a broad shield lifted and braced; there was little thought of helmets or woven mail when they woke in terror.

In another case, Hrothgar laments the death of Æschere, "my right-hand man when the ranks clashed and our boar-crests had to take a battering in the line of action"[10] (eaxlgestealla, ðonne we on orlege hafelan weredon, þonne hniton feþan, eoferas cnysedan[58]).