A beautiful country house in the Hoxne Hoard village….

      Anyone who watched the brilliant BBC series The Detectorists will know what to hope of a home in Hoxne, Suffolk.   The village is the location of The Hoxne Hoard, the largest collection of late-Roman gold and silver ever found in Britain, today worth almost £4 million. And now the Old Vicarage in Hoxne is for…

Digging for Treasure

There are several interesting archaeology series on television and Channel Five has now joined in with an ensemble programme, headed by two familiar personalities (Dan Walker and Michaela Strachan) and a similarly ubiquitous chief archaeologist (Raksha Dave), but with more of an emphasis on metal detecting for the British Museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme, including Roman…

More coins found in Suffolk

Gaius Julius Caesar (left) may not have spent much time in Britain during his invasions of 55-54 BC, but his troops and their followers left rather a lot of evidence. Here, the East Anglian Daily Times details a hoard found in Ashbocking during 2019, consisting of 180 silver denarii and provisionally valued at £65,000.

Found in Devon …

We often feature very old coins unearthed. This one was found by metal detecting in a field somewhere in Devon and dates from Henry III‘s reign. It was part of a special consignment of pennies, minted by William of Gloucester with African gold. It features the Great Pavement of Westminster Abbey, which he updated, and…

Lucy Worsley “proves” Richard III murdered his nephews….!

  Episode 3 of Lucy Worsley‘s latest TV series is about The Princes in the Tower, and from the outset it’s clear that Lucy is Lady Dracula, because she goes for Richard III’s jugular at every opportunity. The thought that he might be innocent doesn’t seem to occur to her because she’s utterly convinced of…

TWO ANGELS, TWO BUCKINGHAMS

A nice little pre-Christmas break took me to two towns of interest, Buckingham and Grantham. I wanted to see Buckingham museum which is currently hosting a Richard III display featuring the gold Half Angel found in the fields nearby. It was a nice little collection and the info panels were mercifully free of too many…

The house where a 14th-century hoard was found in the 18th century….

  Well, another hoard. OK, it was a while ago, but it’s still a hoard. I’m so jealous. I want to find something important from the past, especially the medieval past. However, I have to be satisfied with my bits of clap pipe and Victorian pottery, This article tells of gold coins of Edward III…

Who gave up on the Royal Touch….?

According to this article, “….The Royal Touch and King Edward the Confessor’s healing powers were so well known that, during the reign of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare referenced them in his play Macbeth. This is unsurprising however, as Elizabeth’s grandfather, Henry VII, had reintroduced the concept in the late 15th century….” So, if the Royal Touch was known to have…

This Union: The Ghost Kingdoms of England

This is an excellent series on BBC4 about the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that eventually evolved to fill the vacuum left by departure of the Roman legions. In the first episode, Ian Hislop visits East Anglia, particularly Colchester, Ipswich and Sutton Hoo, viewing some coins with Philip Wise and hearing about the Wuffingas, apparently descended from a…

The White Lion of Mortimer….

  It isn’t often that I like a new coin, but the addition of the White Lion of Mortimer to the Queen’s Beasts series is an exception. It’s beautiful. To read about it go here.