And it wasn't even found at the home of one of our members... https://www.theweek.co.uk/105495/iron-age-coins-how-record-breaking-10m-hoard-was-discovered
In Merrie Olde England sometimes one finds something nice and sometimes not so nice. Recently a construction crew in London found a large German bomb. https://abcnews.go.com/Internationa...-bomb-sparks-evacuation-londons-soho-68723325
The Germans find a fair number of American & British bombs too. Over the course of the war, the Allies dropped 3.4 million tons of ordinance on the Axis powers. The majority of that was on urban areas: https://brilliantmaps.com/uk-us-bombs-ww2/ I heard that the defect rate was as high as 20% at some points in the war. If you do the math, that's a truly mind boggling amount of as-yet unexploded ordinance. After 75 years, most of that has got to be less potent than it once was... but it's also a bit trickier to defuse (or so I've heard). Personally, I'd rather find 500 pounds of Roman coinage than a blockbuster bomb.
For a while I was in the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal unit here in the UK, and had to deal with some of the German UXBs that turned up. As @GeorgeM suggests, some things get better and some worse. The German fuses were mostly Electrical, using a capacitor charged up in the plane to detonate the main charge. With these it was fairly safe to assume that the capacitor had discharged over the years, although it was only in the 1980s that this was formally accepted. You still had to keep an eye out for the mechanical anti-removal mechanisms, designed specifically to catch the Bomb Disposal team. With German bombs the bigger challenge was the use of Picric acid as a booster charge. In moist conditions over time this reacts with the metals around it to form copper and iron picrate - both of which are extremely sensitive detonator material, and so an unwary attempt to unscrew a fuse could prove terminal! I can't speak much for British made bombs - the Germans are the experts on those!
Do you think any of the hoard will come on the market? Or do you think it'll end up in a museum's holdings instead? Has anyone on the board ever been compensated by the British government for a metal detector find? I'd love to hear more about the process and how it worked (or didn't).
I do not metal detect, so I have not been through the process, but I am familiar with how it operates. "Compensation" is really the wrong term. If the coroner decides a find is "treasure" it is then independently valued by experts. As they use the best publications and auction house results, this generally means that the value assigned is top market/retail value. The find is then offered at this price to the museums and other historical institutions in the UK. If they buy, the finders and landowners get this full amount. If not the find is returned for them to sell or keep as they see fit. So declaring your find usually means you get more for it than if you sold it privately and there should be no incentive to hide from the coroner. When people have tried to avoid the reporting process, it has usually been because they had no agreement with the landowner, or they did not want to share their win with him or her. If caught, the punishment can be severe - this from the last few months: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-50478708 where the ringleader got 10 years gaol. Here is the sentencing report: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-50516329 The fourth member, who was ill at the time, got a suspended sentence as he has cancer and was less involved in the fraud.
If you're curious to see some of the coins, this is the place managing the excavation and they have some more pictures. They also have a blog taking notes as they go through the process, including things like testing Coca Cola to clean the coins. They didn't say what they're actually using to clean them, but mentioned processing 120 a day! Here's a representative pic:
