When the discovery in Staffordshire as announced Thursday, experts described it as one of the most important in British archaeological history. They said it surpassed the greatest previous discovery of its kind, a royal burial chamber unearthed in 1939 at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk. That find shaped scholars’ understanding of the warring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of 1,300 years ago that ended up as the unified kingdom of England.

Mr. Herbert spent 18 years scouring fields and back lots without finding anything more valuable than a piece of an ancient Roman horse harness. Now, under British laws governing the discovery of ancient treasures, he stands to get half the value of the booty. When his discovery was announced on Thursday, he kept his wish list modest, saying he would like to use some of his windfall to buy a bungalow.

Since the July day when his detector picked up traces of the hoard beneath a field in Staffordshire, a Midlands county that was at the center of the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, Mr. Herbert said, he has been seeing piles of gold in his sleep. Awake, he has quietly celebrated his triumph over all the people who mocked him in the years when a typical day’s finds amounted to little but scrap.

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.

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.

One of the features that led specialists to suggest the items might have been seized in battle and prized for their value in precious metal and jewels rather than as trophies was that many appeared to have been decorative pieces ripped from other objects. The three Christian crosses in the find had been bent into folds, as had a strip of gold with a biblical inscription in Latin of a kind likely to have been favored by an ancient warrior: “Rise up, O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face.”

Archaeologists, anthropologists and historians who participated in the Staffordshire dig, or who have studied the finds at the Birmingham museum, competed in the superlatives they used in describing the treasure. “My first view of the hoard brought tears to my eyes; the Dark Ages in Staffordshire have never looked so bright nor so beautiful,” Deb Klemperer, an expert on Staffordshire artifacts of the Anglo-Saxon period, told the British newspaper The Guardian.

Kevin Leahy, an expert on Anglo-Saxon metallic objects who has been helping catalog the items, described their craftsmanship as “consummate” at Thursday’s news conference. He added: “All the archaeologists who have worked with the finds have been awestruck. It’s actually been quite scary working on this material to be in the presence of greatness.”