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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;John Conduitt, post: 7020007, member: 109923&quot;]I have coins from Roman hoards found from the 1860s onwards. They didn&#039;t keep great records, although if someone knowledgeable was involved they might&#039;ve recorded the different emperors included.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Constantius I, 305-306</b></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1273946[/ATTACH]</p><p><b>Bronze, 27mm, 9.50g (RIC VI 52a).</b></p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Tetricus I imitation, 274-280</b></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1273951[/ATTACH]</p><p><b>Bronze, 13mm.</b></p><p><br /></p><p>This Tetricus barbarous radiate was in the &#039;Whitchurch Hoard&#039;. But it isn&#039;t clear which Whitchurch hoard. Either:</p><p><br /></p><p>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).</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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&#039;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![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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