The hoard was said to have been discovered while ploughing in January 1942 by Gordon Butcher, who claimed he had removed it from the ground with help from Sydney Ford, for whom he was working at the time.

The numerous well-documented discoveries of high-quality Roman material in subsequent decades, including the Hoxne Hoard also found in Suffolk in 1992, have set all such doubts to rest.

In the 1990s, Richard Hobbs[1] drew attention to the importance of the partly fictional account by Roald Dahl, and addressed the issues surrounding the actual finding.

The two archaeologists who had represented the British Museum at the inquest – Tom Lethbridge and Major Gordon Fowler – continued to research the finding for some years after 1946, but in the end could only be sure of one thing – that Ford had not told the truth about how and where he had obtained the treasure.

The most striking object in the treasure, the Great Dish (see below) has been illustrated and mentioned in countless publications, including a major paper on late Roman "picture plates".

In the centre, the head of a marine deity, probably Oceanus, the personification of the ocean, is shown full-face, with a beard made of seaweed, and with dolphins emerging from his hair.

This portrait is surrounded by a narrow inner frieze of decoration, populated by nereids (sea-nymphs), tritons and other mythical and natural sea-creatures, while the deep outermost zone carries imagery of the Bacchic thiasos: the dancing, music-making and drinking revels of the god Bacchus.

Bacchus himself appears with his panther and Silenus at the '12 o'clock' position on the circle in relation to the orientation of the Oceanus head, so that in most illustrations of the dish, he is seen upside-down at the top of the picture.

A deep, fluted bowl with two small swing handles (which were detached at the time of discovery, because solder tends to loosen during burial) is of a type found in several late Roman silver hoards, such as those in the Esquiline Treasure from Rome, and from Traprain Law in Scotland.

The upper zone consists of conventional foliate ornament, while the lower is a scene of centaurs attacking various wild animals, separated by Bacchic masks.

The small raised rim at the top of the lid would have sufficed for handling it, but set within it is a 'knob' in the form of a silver-gilt statuette of a young, seated triton blowing a conch shell.

There is a matching pair of smaller flanged bowls,[17] (diameter 168 mm): they are intricately decorated with beading, foliate scrolls and small birds and hares on the rims, and have rosettes in relief in the centre base.

The ownership graffiti of Eutherios on the two small Bacchic platters, several of the Mildenhall pieces, in common with many large items of Roman silver tableware from other finds, bear weight-inscriptions.

Although domestic silver was used for social display, so that its artistic quality was important to the owner, the actual bullion value of precious metal was part of his wealth, and needed to be noted and recorded.

The rate of discovery of metal hoards of all periods has accelerated in Britain since the middle of the 20th century, due to a combination of circumstances that include changing agricultural practices, the rise of metal-detecting as a hobby, and better public understanding of archaeology.

Some have suggested the pieces were looted from sites in Italy during World War II, brought back to England and re-buried so as to stage a "discovery", though most scholars give little credit to that theory, and abide by the standard story that the objects were hidden by fleeing Romans who intended to return for them at a later date and never did.