The Lenham Hoard of Iron Age Coins

Foreword

The Lenham Stater Hoard was found on the 26th August 2022 at the Joan Allen Rally. The finder, who wishes to remain anonymous, recalls that ‘on the Friday morning, the opening day of the Rally, my first find was just a short piece of string with some wire at each end; the second was a shotgun percussion cap; and the third was a bit of “can slaw”. Finally, something of interest came up; an odd brown disk. As I looked at this thing I noticed down on the ground close by what looked like chocolate buttons, all laid together. This seemed very odd, so I put on my glasses and looked again. I was looking at a pile of dirty, brownish, Celtic staters! It was bloody amazing!’.

The coins lay on the surface in a neat little parcel, looking to the world as if they had just been
dropped onto the field. Interspersed amongst the Celtic horses were fragments of flint and, as the finder carefully looked through the pile, a coin was found to be embedded onto the inside of a fragment of freshly broken flint nodule. As the attending archaeologist reports, ‘careful searching and recovery of the rest of the fragments allowed the flint to be pieced back together and revealed the coins to have been deliberately stashed into a hollow spherical flint with a natural opening in one side.’ We might imagine that the coins presented here sat undisturbed in their flint nodule for over two millennia; recent agricultural activity pulled the flint sphere up to the surface, it cracked, and the contents spilled out. It is a happy coincidence that the hoard was found when it was, before it could be disturbed and dispersed by further agricultural work.

In his volume Coins Hoards in Iron Age Britain, Philip de Jersey notes ten hoards which were contained in such flint nodules; the phenomenon, then, is unusual but not rare. The distribution of these hoards is informed by ‘underlying geography’ and in this sense the Lenham hoard follows the same pattern. It is notable that of these ten other flint nodule hoards, all but one have been acquired (at least in large part) by museums. The exception to this rule, the Chute III Hoard (PdJ 277.3), was dispersed through various different venues, while the accompanying flint nodule was acquired by Devizes Museum. We are delighted to be able to offer the Lenham Hoard in its entirety, including the flint nodule, in a single session; in doing so we present a unique opportunity for collectors to acquire items of considerable numismatic and archaeological interest.