The Aufret ring, acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1871, has long been considered an Anglo-Saxon artefact, its inscription counted as part of the Anglo-Saxon heritage. Because of the similarity between the names Aufret and Alfred, it became associated with this king and with a ‘lost’ ninth-century coin hoard allegedly found with the ring. On the continent, however, the ring sits comfortably in a well-attested corpus of Lombard seal rings of the seventh century. Thanks to some archive archaeology and the identification of a drawing of the ring in a publication of Ludovico Muratori, an eighteenth-century antiquary, the story of the ring can be traced from its retrieval amongst the ruins of a tomb in Bagnoregio in 1726, to its acquisition by an Italian collector, the Marquis Capponi, until his death in 1746. In 1857 the ring was presented to Edmund Waterton, FSA, who eventually sold it to the Victoria and Albert Museum. By tracing the historical background, and demolishing a few misattributions, this paper restores the Aufret ring to its Lombard context.
