LONDON (AP) – Adam Staples knew he’d found something when his metal detector let out a beep. And then another. And another.
Soon “it was just ‘beep beep, beep beep, beep beep,’” Staples said.
In a farmer’s field in southwest England, Staples and six friends had found a hoard of more than 2,500 silver coins that had lain in the ground for almost 1,000 years.
Valued at GBP4.3 million (USD5.6 million) and now bound for a museum, they will help shed light on the turbulent aftermath of the Norman conquest of England.
“The first one was a William the Conqueror coin – GBP1,000, GBP1,500 value,” Staples said on Tuesday at the British Museum, where the hoard will go on display in November.
“It’s a really good find. It’s a find-of-the-year sort of discovery. And then we got another one, (we thought) there might be five, there might be 10.
“And it just got bigger and bigger,” he said – the biggest find in his 30 years of searching the fields and furrows of Britain as an amateur detectorist.
The hoard, discovered in 2019 and recently acquired by the South West Heritage Trust, totalled 2,584 silver pennies minted between 1066 and 1068, some showing conquering King William I and others his defeated Anglo-Saxon predecessor Harold II.
Head of the Portable Antiquities Scheme Michael Lewis, a government-funded project that records archaeological discoveries made by the public, said it is “one of the most spectacular discoveries” of recent years, especially because “its story is yet to be fully unravelled”.
Lewis said the coin hoard will help deepen understanding of the most famous date in English history: 1066, the year William, Duke of Normandy, defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, replacing England’s Saxon monarchs with Norman French rulers.
“Most of us are taught about the Norman Conquest of England at school, probably because it was the last time that England was successfully conquered,” Lewis said. “But it a story based on certain myths,” such as the notion that the battle pitted “English versus French,” or “good” Saxons against “bad” Normans.
