FROM SOIL TO ROSTRUM – THE JOURNEY OF THE VALE OF PEWSEY HOARD

When Noonans hammered down a total of £81,160 in a sell-out auction of the Vale of Pewsey Hoard on 17 May it was the culmination of an extraordinary adventure for the team who had discovered it.

When Noonans hammered down a total of £81,160 in a sell-out auction of the Vale of Pewsey Hoard on 17 May it was the culmination of an extraordinary adventure for the team who had discovered it.

Mick Rae, a 63-year-old herds manager, had been carrying out relief milking for farms in the area including at one farm where the local herds manager had been injured.
A keen metal detectorist and amateur historian, Mick asked the landowner if he and his experienced fellow detectorists could search one of the fields. Having gained official permission, in September 2020 Mick, Robert Abbott (53) and Dave Allen (59) set up camp and prepared to search under the regulations of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS).

As Rob explained: “I finished my breakfast first, walked around six or seven paces from the tent, and I found the first coin just under the surface (around two inches). I showed Mick and Dave, then beside it a few moments later I found another one!

“We all have our own find pots. I put the first one in that, walked back over and put the soil back in the hole. As I put the headphones back on, I swung the machine and it sounded again. I didn’t really dig, I just put the spade in and the coin just flipped out onto the soil.

“To get two coins in that condition out from the top two inches of soil within two inches of each other, you know you are onto something special.”
Mick and Dave grabbed their detectors and joined the search.

Over the course of the next hour or so they found several tent pegs and realised they had been camping directly over the find spot on their previous sanctioned search just two weeks before.

“My friends call me the oracle because I can tell you about pretty much any coin you find in the field,” explains Rob.

“When I saw the Miliarense and the exceptional condition they were in, I realised we had found something significant.

As is his habit, Rob immediately took a photograph of the finds and their exact find spot, recording it on Google Maps with a GPS position, which is accurate to 3 metres.
“The great thing is that you can also add a description to where you drop the Google pin on the map, and that is automatically dated, while the photographs have a time stamp.”

The three of them then continued the search, observing and recording the coin scatter across the field, recording each coin on discovery and preserving them either in a find pouch or, as with particularly important coins, sealing them in a find pot, which is a bit like a pill box, lined with cotton wool and tissue.

Over the course of the weekend they found 161 coins in total, comprising silver Siliquae and Miliarense dating from AD 340–402.

“We then called the landowner straight away, but he had gone out for lunch and didn’t really take in what we were saying. He told us he’d come and see us the next day. When he realised what we had found, he was shocked, but also deeply moved because his father had farmed the land before him for decades and he realised that right under his feet where they had been ploughing there had been this hoard of silver coins waiting to be discovered.

“The find showed that someone had been living in that field 1700 years ago.”

Making the discovery and preserving the find spot were just the beginning of a complex process to ensure that both the coins and the context of their recovery was preserved for posterity and study.

Under normal circumstances, the team would have brought in the Local Finds Officer and deposited the coins with them, following the PAS guidance on handling, care and storage. But this was in the middle of the pandemic when all the offices and museums were closed.

Instead Rob, who knows experts at the British Museum, contacted Dr Ian Richardson, the Treasure Registrar there.

“I sent him a couple of pictures of the coins and the context, location and setting, including GPS position.”

To help matters further, Rob and the team took high definition macro images of each coin and weighed and measured them individually.

“That meant that the British Museum were able to catalogue and record the coins accurately, and start the Treasure process,” he explains.

It took another nine months before Covid restrictions were eased sufficiently to allow Rob, Mick and Dave to meet with the curators and deposit the coins with the British Museum for physical assessment.

Once the coroner ruled that they were Treasure and the provisional valuation was complete, the British Museum emailed both the excavation team and the landowner its catalogue of all the coins, details of the provisional Treasure valuation and recent sale prices for comparable coins, plus a letter from the coroner with instructions and the circumstances of the find and the conclusion.

This last included details of the main scatter, the depth of the coins, a formal description of the find, as put together by the British Museum curators, and the date of the coins, as well as the cities they were minted in.

“The process is detailed and thorough,” explains Rob. “It is important to put any find in context and to preserve as much detail as you can about that.”
It was announced that Devizes Museum was interested in acquiring the hoard, but it later withdrew.

Meanwhile the British Museum decided to acquire two Miliarensia from the group for the Nation’s collection, disclaiming the remaining coins and returning them to Rob and the team for sale.

“We collected the coins and arranged to go to Noonans immediately to arrange the sale,” says Rob. “I have been going to them for about 18 years and have always been impressed by their knowledge, which is unparalleled, and their willingness to help. They have always been very upfront with everything. I use their catalogues as reference. Plus they are interested and really easy to talk to.”

Rob, Mick and Dave would have liked the hoard to have ended up in a museum collection as a group. “But when it was clear that that was not going to happen, it gave us a great opportunity to disperse them via auction to private scholars and numismatists for important collections,” says Rob.

The independent valuer acting for the coroner had put a value of £39,360 on the entire hoard, but Noonans and the excavation team were delighted when the sale made a hammer total of £81,160 – and that did not include to the two outstanding coins claimed by the British Museum.

“One of the most important factors in the sale’s success was the conservation work carried out by Nigel Mills of Noonans. It is second to none,” explains Rob.

“For example, we had two or three Eugenius Siliqua on which you could see little or no detail because of the encrustation. Nigel’s painstaking work restored them to their former glory and effectively turned them from £100 coins to £1,000 coins.”

In all, the hoard contained 15 Eugenius Siliqua, which the Treasure Valuation Committee had valued together at £7,200, but just two alone went on to sell for £4,400, with all 15 going for a total of £14,370.

After the auction, Rob commented: “Wow, I am gobsmacked, this is the first auction that I have ever been to, so to see my own items sell so well was amazing. Dave and I sat there watching the prices go up and up! We will obviously share the sale proceeds with the landowner, but I know Mick will spend his money on his new micro dairy, while I will buy a new camera. For the first time, I am lost for words…”.

The first thing he did when the result emerged was to email the landowner, who declared himself “ecstatic”.   

As Nigel Mills, Consultant (Artefacts and Antiquities) at Noonans, explains: “Virtually all of the coins were in mint condition and have not even needed to be cleaned since their discovery. The hoard was buried at a time when Roman rule in Britain under the Emperor Honorius was no longer viable with the army being recalled to protect other provinces. In AD 410 Britain was told to protect itself by Honorius.” 

He went on to say: “As a result, Britain has become a treasure island of late 4th century and early 5th century gold and silver Roman coin and jewellery hoards as the local population buried their valuables and then fell victim to Saxon raids. Detector finds in recent years include the Thetford and Hoxne hoards.”

After the sale, he said: “The sale was really well supported and made double its high estimate, it was amazing! We had buyers from the USA, Germany, Malaysia and the UK, and everyone is very happy with the outcome – it just shows what can be achieved if you do all the right things.”

The two highest prices of the sale were for two Miliarensis coins. An extremely fine example from the reign of Valens (364-378) realised £4,200 against an estimate of £1,200-1,500 [lot 17], while an extremely rare example from the reign of Constantius II (337-361) fetched £4,000 against an estimate of £2,000-2,600 [lot 2].  

The success of the sale also means that the two coins claimed by the British Museum are likely to be upgraded in value. In fact, the British Museum has decided to disclaim one of them, which had been valued at £1,000 but is now likely to be seen as worth up to five times that amount.

“It is probably the best condition coin of the entire hoard,” says Rob.

In all the years he has been searching and researching, Rob declares that this is his best ever find. “I’ve been really lucky and had a lot of finds, including a gold ring and a Bronze Age axe head, but this is the stand-out.”

In 2014 Dave found another hoard of bronze vessels in the same place.

“We worked with archaeologists on its excavation,” explains Rob.

Now the team are going back to the field after the harvest this year for a nine-day search.

“We are going to sieve the ground to see if we can find the remaining fragments of the four broken Miliarense we have just sold. If we do, we will give them to the buyers free of charge so they will have the complete coins.”