“It is a wonderful and truly unexpected discovery from so unassuming a find location,” said Mr Edmund. Source: Spink and Son.
A UK couple have uncovered a treasure trove of gold coins while renovating their kitchen with the find considered to be very rare.
260 gold coins were found by a North Yorkshire couple who were digging up their kitchen floor.
At first they thought they hit an electrical cable underneath the concrete floor but on closer inspection found a cup filled with gold coins.
The discovery was made in 2019 and has been valued by Spink auction house for £250,000 (A$427,825).
ITV said that the couple were allowed to keep the coins because the youngest coin was 292 years old. According to British law, any treasure found to be older than 300 years is automatically property of the crown.
Auctioneers studied the money and found the coins come from different time periods that span the reign of James I, the Stuart period, and the days of George I or from around 1610 to 1727.
Gregory Edmund of Spink and Son said that he’s never come across a find like this, saying that historians have been able to trace back to the original owners of the coins.
The collection belonged to Joseph and Sarah Fernley-Maisters, a couple from an influential mercantile family who made their fortune from trading iron ore, coal, and timber.
They married in 1694 and died in 1725 and 1745 with Mr Edmund astounded that the collection had never been found before.
“Joseph and Sarah clearly distrusted the newly-formed Bank of England, the ‘banknote’ and even the gold coinage of their day because they [chose] to hold onto so many coins dating to the English Civil War and beforehand,” he said.
“Why they never recovered the coins when they were really easy to find just beneath original 18th-century floorboards is an even bigger mystery, but it is one hell of a piggy bank.”
Spink and Son has deemed the coin fined to be one of the biggest in British archaeological history with the collection to be put up for auction on October 7.
