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A somewhat surprised family has found an important trove of Tudor coins, some of which shed light on the story of the marriage of Henry VIII, who was weeding in his garden.
The British Museum revealed details Wednesday of the discoveries recorded in its Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), most of which are made by the nation’s army of metal detecting enthusiasts.
This year there has been a surge in garden finds, including two major coin deposits: Tudor coins in the New Forest and the discovery of 50 apartheid-era South African gold coins unearthed in a back garden in the Milton Keynes area. .
More than 47,000 finds have been recorded with the scheme in 2020, with 6,251 reported during the March-May full shutdown, when metal detection was banned.
Ian Richardson, the museum’s treasure recorder, said people had obviously been spending more time in his garden, “resulting in completely unexpected archaeological discoveries.”
That was certainly the case for the unidentified New Forest family, who unearthed 63 gold coins and one silver coin dating from the 15th and 16th centuries.
“They were stirring the ground and all of a sudden these coins came out of the ground … miraculously,” Richardson said. “It is a very shocking find for them and very interesting for us.”
Probably hidden around 1540, they include coins from the reign of Henry VIII, which are unusual in that they also separately feature the initials of three of his wives: Catherine of Aragon (K), Ana Bolena (A) and Jane Seymour (I) .
Barrie Cook, the museum’s curator of medieval and modern coins, said putting his wife’s initial in gold crowns was “a very strange decision” and, numismatically, very interesting.
Whoever buried the coins was well off because the total value was £ 24, which is equivalent to £ 14,000 today. “That was a lot of money, certainly more than the average person’s annual salary,” Cook said.
John Naylor, a coin expert at the Ashmolean museum, said the treasure was likely buried by a wealthy merchant or member of the clergy. “You have this period in the late 1530s and 1540s where you have the dissolution of the monasteries and we know that some churches tried to hide their wealth in the hope that they could preserve it for the long term.
“It is an important treasure … you don’t get these great gold treasures very often from this period.”
Milton Keynes’s discovery is less interesting historically, but it is still somewhat surprising. In all, 50 1 oz South African Krugerrand gold coins, minted in the 1970s, were discovered in the back garden. How they ended up there remains a mystery, the museum said.
Other finds listed in the report include unique Roman furniture that matches the “remarkably” well-preserved face of the god Ocean; and a medieval forgery of a bishop’s seal matrix.
The museum also released its annual PAS report for 2019, which reveals 81,602 archaeological finds were recorded, an increase of 10,000 from the previous year.
