London auctioneers Morton & Eden expect bids of £30,000 for coins found in field

In the summer of 1465, as the Wars of the Roses raged, an unknown person hid his worldly wealth in a secret location in a Northamptonshire field and went into hiding. He never returned to claim his money.

In 2005 – 540 years later – a metal detectorist stumbled across the hoard of 324 silver coins and alerted the authorities. The British Museum, where the coins were researched and identified as silver groats, purchased 14 of them to be put on show to the public, while the remainder were returned to the metal detectorist who unearthed them and the land-owner on whose land they were found.

The two men have decided to keep 12 coins apiece as mementos, while the remainder will be sold by specialist London auctioneers Morton & Eden on Wednesday, December 2. The 186 coins, which were found in the Brackley area of Northamptonshire, are expected to raise a total of around £30,000, the money to be split equally between them.

After asking permission from the landowner to search the field, the detectorist was thrilled to find five coins on his very first attempt. “I was amazed,” the man said. “They were lying there about a foot below the surface. I couldn’t believe my eyes but I was convinced there were more, so I went back the next day and discovered the rest. There was no sign of a container, so I assume the coins were hidden originally in a cloth bag which obviously had rotted away over the centuries.”

The coins date mostly from the reigns of Henry V (1413-22) and Henry VI (1422-60). They are all silver groats (fourpenny pieces) and are relatively free from corrosion, although clearly, they had been in circulation for some time before they were hidden and had thus received some wear.

Said auctioneer Jeremy Cheek: “When they were in circulation, a silver groat would have been enough to buy a sheep. Thus, the hoard represents the value of a flock of a sheep, perhaps a man’s main asset. As there are no gold coins in the hoard, it does not appear to have been the property of a particularly wealthy person. The gold coin of the time, known as a noble, was worth 6s 8d (1/3 of a pound) which would have represented a lot of wealth for a poor person to hold in one coin. A new type of gold coin, the ‘ryal’ or ‘rose noble’ valued at 10s (1/2 of a pound), was introduced the same year the hoard was deposited. The hoard included two contemporary Scottish groats.”
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Discovered by chance, these coins are an important find, being of great historic significance. NGC was pleased to evaluate and provide protection for these great treasures.

NGC recently graded a number of gold Unites of the British monarch James I (1603–1625) from the Chipping Norton Hoard, discovered in the 1980s in an undisclosed location near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, England.

The cache contained 59 gold Unites, 54 of which were struck in England and the remaining five from Scotland. It was discovered by chance in an old cellar as workmen excavated a foundation for a new building. Unaware of the significance or value of the find, the coins were given to a builder’s 10-year-old grandson, who kept them in a shoebox for years.

In 2005 the grandson took the coins to an appraisal event where the coins were examined by auctioneers Morton and Eden and the hoard was reported to the British Museum. Since the coins were found before the Treasure Act of 1996, two of the 59 coins were kept by the British Museum and the remaining 57 coins were returned to the owner, who subsequently sold them at a Morton and Eden auction held in London on June 9, 2009.

The hoard is significant because of the large sum of money it comprised at the time the coins were struck. Each of the 59 gold coins had the value of 20 shillings until 1612, and later that value was adjusted to 22 shillings. Records of salaries from the period are scant, but a church clerk might earn the equivalent of two gold Unites during an entire year. In other words, the hoard represented nearly 30 years of earnings. Even the gold bullion value of the hoard — which weighed about 15.5 ounces — is approximately $15,000 in today’s market.
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