Noonans Sell Civil War Hoard of 14 Gold Coins Discovered in Wiltshire

It was August 2020 and Steve Simmons was using his C-scope CS2MX metal detector on a rocky and rough field near Box in Wiltshire. After detecting for just two months, he had not yet found a single coin. Then at a depth of six inches he uncovered two coins, putting them into his pocket Steve had no idea what he had found. Looking online later he then realised he had two Charles I gold Unites.

Steve then decided to upgrade his detector for an Equinox 600 and a few days later went back to the spot where he had found the Unites and close by found another 12 coins buried in a stack 18 inches down. The hoard of 14 gold coins is being sold by Noonans in a sale of Coins and Historical Medals on Tuesday, April 4, 2023 and is estimated to fetch around £24,000.

As Nigel Mills, Consultant (coins and artefacts) at Noonans commented: “We can imagine that on the 4th of July 1643 at a Royalist encampment near Box in Wiltshire, an army Officer knelt and started digging in the dirt. He took off the gold half laurel that hung around his neck and added it to the leather pouch that contained a further 13 gold coins and concealed them in the small pit. Serving under Lord Hopton he would be facing the Parliamentary forces at Lansdowne Hill the next day, a battle they would lose with heavy casualties including his own.”

He continued: “The coins had a face value of £10 which would have been enough to buy a horse and equates to more than £2,000 today. The coins show portraits of James I and Charles I and date from 1606 with the latest coin dating to 1641-1643 from the mintmark ‘triangle in a circle’ that appears above the bust of Charles.”

Steve, who is 63 years old, used to run a restaurant in Exeter with his wife and they now look after the current landowner. He is hoping to put the money from the sale towards his own retirement and invest in another detector called a Manticore which he hopes will yield him more discoveries!