Nowadays almost every hoard findings are either recorded and kept in museums, or auctioned legally or at least sold in black markets, as anyone who stumbles on a hoard know that they are worth more than the face value to not just melt them for their metal. But did the same idea prevail in the olden days, I mean as recent as the 19th century when archaeology was just getting mainstream? Do we have the historical records of any such hoards of ancient coins being found around the time of the middle ages/renaissance/enlightenment period?
I have coins from Roman hoards found from the 1860s onwards. They didn't keep great records, although if someone knowledgeable was involved they might've recorded the different emperors included. Constantius I, 305-306 Bronze, 27mm, 9.50g (RIC VI 52a). This Constantius I was part of the Falmouth Hoard, found on 18th April 1865 by labourers ploughing a field. They found 600-1000 Roman bronze coins (3-4th centuries AD). The coins were exhibited at the Polytechnic Exhibition in 1867, which included 110 Constantius coins. Then the coins disappear until 1970, when Christie’s sold 584 of the coins as ‘The Property of Mrs Janet M.K. Fox of Falmouth’...‘all in a rather corroded state’ and ‘said to have been stacked in neat rows’. A small parcel from the hoard came into the possession of the late Lord Stewartby (MP) who studied the find (and who had this coin). Lord Stewartby was born in 1935, so this was a long time after the discovery. Tetricus I imitation, 274-280 Bronze, 13mm. This Tetricus barbarous radiate was in the 'Whitchurch Hoard'. But it isn't clear which Whitchurch hoard. Either: In 1869 3 skeletons were found in the railway cutting near Whitchurch in Somerset, with ceramics, coin moulds and numerous coins (from Faustina to Constantine II). Or, also in 1869, 2 miles north of Whitchurch, a labourer levelling the bank of a watercourse cut into a ceramic urn. Over the next few months, more than five hundred heavily worn large coins (25mm+) of the early Emperors (Claudius, Hadrian), many oxidised into solid masses, and thousands of irregularly-shaped ‘minims’ (4-10mm) were unearthed. The Bristol librarian studied the find. They thought these minims were Carausius and Allectus, but knowledge of barbarous radiates was not strong at the time. It seems they actually included Tetricus, Claudius II etc. The conclusion was that the people that buried the coins were melting down the older coins to make the minims. But no-one recorded much about the site, so we will never know. Either way, my coin is too large to be one of the minims, but is from the same time. So although some attempt to study these hoards was made, it was not exactly immediate or systematic and often seems to have depended on acquiring coins privately - so certainly not a study of the whole hoard. They didn't record much about the find site, which would be crucial now. At the Whitchurch Hoard site, locals were finding and taking home coins for months afterwards. Presumably, this is why Britain now has a system where you have to declare your find!
Ancient hoards are huge compared to what we see for U.S. coins. Like being in the 1940's or 1950's collecting Saints or Morgans with all the future inventory about to hit.
Hoards are super interesting to me, I wrote about an unpublished hoard of Arabic silver dirhams that had been discovered in North Sumatra, present-day Indonesia. I've heard that in the colonial period ships would fill up with mud/gravel in Europe and then dump it in the Americas to load up on New World goods to take back to Europe. I forget the name of the process or its exact function, I don't know much about boating. But anyways I've read that the process was credited for dumping the few and far between Roman coins that have been discovered in the Americas. In Indonesia, when the Dutch (and British) were starting to get involved they were reporting large finds of native coinage (from around 800-1300 AD) but little attention was paid in most cases, I don't know of any hoard from the region that was discovered prior to 1900 that stayed in tact or was even researched thoroughly. Usually the Dutch notes just say "800 silver coins found at X", and the provenance of the hoard was lost there.
All bought singularly from the same hoard sold by L**Z on ebay in the good ol' days about 7 years ago and obviously from the same hoard. What was interesting was almost all the hoard was early New Styles but what was missing was just as interesting. No Thompson #2 Kernos & Bakhos , #4 No Cornucopia and #5 2 Palms. There were plenty of the rest, some of which I should have bought. Around that time G&M had a hoard for sale and I wonder if they were related that contained a #4 No symbol ,which I bought (below), and an imitation #5 2 Palms which I didn't. Certainly without Mr L**Z My NewStyle collection would be the sadder. I have now completed with #2 and #5 with an outside possibility that #2, (below, below) came from the hoard linked by the corrosion.
Apparently, a large amount of gold aurei from Boscoreale were melted down when discovered in the 18fh century.
Bought from G&M hoard G&M 208 2012 same as the two above, same hoard as L**Z e bay just a few months later?
What happens to hoards very much depends on the region where they are found and on who finds them. This has always been the case and discrepancies are extreme. If for instance you have hoards found in the 1860s and kept safe from then on (even if the coins are billon or base metal) in Western Europe, in the East things were rather brutal for such finds -- Lord Grantley (I think) notes that Nicaean and Palaiologan hyperpera were sold for melting in Constantinople as late as the 1920s. And it's not hard to imagine that in places like Eastern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran this practice is still in use.
To @JayAg47's initial question, sadly, regarding hoards found in the middle ages, other people's posts here give you resonant, if implicit evidence of where things are with the documentation. As in, there isn't any. They had to be only thicker on (/in) the ground than they are now, but, ...well, no one had more than the vaguest idea of what they were looking at. Regarding hoards found during the period, the most documentation I'm aware of involves the death of Richard I, while besieging a castle in France, held by a viscount who had transferred allegiance back to Philippe II. Gillingham continues an English chronicler's account: "Moreover there are some people who say that a treasure of incalculable value was "found on the Viscount's lands; that the King ordered it to be handed over to him; "and that [...] the Viscount refused." (Richard I, 1999 /2002, p. 323 and n. 8.) ...But, as you might expect, very few details about the hoard are forthcoming, from this or other primary sources. In the context of medieval Europe, the amount of incredible stuff which was found, and summarily melted down --notably by kings like Richard, with interminable war budgets-- is staggering to consider. ...Just one more instance of how vital archeological evidence remains, specifically for the Medieval period. It's heartening that over the last few decades, more academic historians have gotten on board with this, and interdisciplinary approaches more broadly, to supplement often fragmentary and conflicting primary sources. One instance of AEthelred II of England (978-1016) resonantly demonstrates that hoards were likely being found all the time. You're referred to @ancient coin hunter's thread: https://www.cointalk.com/threads/aethelred-reflection-of-probus.377382/#post-7063590 AEthelred's 'helmet' pennies are unmistable imitations of antoniniani of Probus.
