In the summer of 1988, following correspondence concerning a collection that had recently come onto the market, Lord Alistair McAlpine, who at the time was an antiquities dealer based in London and also a Conservative member of the House of Lords, showed Dr Ian Stead from the British Museum twenty-two miniature bronze shields. At first, the provenience of these objects was unknown to the British Museum staff. However, despite this lack of provenience, the British Museum decided to purchase the artefacts anyway due to their rarity and significance. After some negotiation, McAlpine sold the shields to the British Museum for £55,000. Different suggestions had been made about the possible county of origin for the artefacts, including Dorset and Gloucestershire. Not long after the acquisition, rumours also began circulating that a discovery had been made of 1,500 bronze objects, including miniature shields.
Over the next few years, Stead and others tried to find out more about the mystery hoard then in December 1992 a breakthrough occurred. David Keys, a journalist with The Independent who had also been following the case, received a telephone call from one of the finders. Through further negotiations, the finder, who called himself ‘John of Salisbury’, was persuaded to meet Ian Stead at the Red Lion hotel in Salisbury, Wiltshire. Elaborating on details he had revealed to Keys, ‘John’ showed Stead photographs of the finds, one of which was later located in McAlpine’s catalogue. ‘John’ wished to sell the remainder of the artefacts that were still in his possession (some of which he had brought to the meeting in the Red Lion), including a razor, several socketed axes and two miniature cauldrons, to the British Museum for £20,000.
‘John’ would not reveal his true identity to Stead. However, over the course of investigations it was established that ‘John of Salisbury’ was in fact James Garriock, a metal detecting enthusiast from Salisbury.On 22 October 1993, Stead again arranged to meet Garriock (‘John’), along with Stuart Needham, also from the British Museum, once more at the Red Lion. Garriock thought he was meeting to negotiate a possible sale to the Museum of the Salisbury artefacts in his possession; he had by now lowered his asking price from £20,000 to £10,000. However, the meeting was in fact set up to facilitate his arrest for handling stolen goods. Later that day, Garriock’s associate and fellow metal detecting enthusiast, Terry Rossiter, was also arrested at his home in Salisbury. Rossiter led Stead, Needham, and the police officers into the field and showed them the find spots. It was also established that the landowners, on the outskirts of Salisbury, had not given permission for their land to be searched. Nor were they aware of the discovery that had been made.The investigation and subsequent trials revealed that the Salisbury Hoard had been found on 23 February 1985. The finders, Garriock and Rossiter, had the artefacts photographed by another metal-detector user,  apparently for the photographs to form a memento of the discovery. Garriock contacted John Cummings, an antiquities dealer from Lincolnshire, not long after this, and Cummings paid £10,500 for the majority of the collection. Some artefacts were kept back by the two finders and a small selection were given to the photographer, which he subsequently sold. The artefacts circulated among different dealers and collectors, for example through informal networks at coin fairs and other dealer events. Some of these apparently passed to McAlpine while other potential Salisbury Hoard artefacts surfaced at auction houses such as Christie’s in 1990, and were exported to Salt Lake City, USA. Others entered the collections of museums such as Devizes Museum in Wiltshire, who purchased their artefacts from a London antiquities dealer. A further fourteen items were listed for sale in the catalogue for Christie’s (South Kensington) Antiquities and Souvenirs of the Grand Tour sale of 27 October 1993. Lot 12 comprised eleven ‘bronze items’ with the provenance described as, ‘said to have been found in a well in Gloucestershire’ and with publication in an Ashmolean Museum Exhibition catalogue of some of the collection of Lord McAlpine.