The 15,000 Coins A Roman Family Buried In A Field And Never Came Back For — Hoxne Hoard

On the sixteenth of November, 1992, a retired gardener named Eric Lawes walked into a field in the English county of Suffolk with a metal detector, looking for a hammer. The hammer belonged to his friend, a tenant farmer named Peter Whatling. Eric never found the hammer. Instead, he found fifteen thousand Roman coins, two hundred pieces of silver tableware, gold body-chains, bracelets and rings — all buried, sixteen hundred years earlier, in a wooden chest, by a family who was afraid, who intended to come back for it, and who never did. That chest is in the British Museum now. Every coin in it was once in someone's hand. Every coin was earned, spent, saved, worried about, dropped, picked up, counted, given, taken, hidden, and finally lost. Coins are, by an enormous margin, the most abundant material object that has come down to us from the ordinary past — more than buildings, more than writing, more than clothing. Millions of them survive. And yet almost nobody looks at them closely. In this feature-length documentary, we spend one full hour with the single most ordinary object in the entire recorded history of the human species, and ask what it can actually tell us about the ordinary people who used it. We look at: The Hoxne Hoard — how it was found, what was in it, and why a family buried an entire fortune in a Suffolk field in the last years of Roman Britain What a Roman silver denarius actually bought: a day's labour, eight loaves of bread, one-third of a pair of shoes, and the cost of a human being How Roman coins were made — from the murderous mines of Spain and Egypt to the moneyer's hammer-blow in a specific workshop The face on the coin: how the emperor's portrait, seen by every ordinary person ten times a day, was the mass medium of the pre-modern state The Roman soldier's pay and the coins dropped at Vindolanda seventeen centuries ago The coin in the hand of the merchant, the woman, the widow, and the enslaved household servant Roman coin debasement: the collapse of the silver denarius from 98% pure to almost pure copper, and what ordinary people did when the state broke the promise The medieval silver penny and the shape of the village economy The billions of coins that circulated across the ancient world — and what casual losses tell us about ordinary daily life Every claim in this video is drawn from documented archaeological and historical sources listed below. CHAPTERS 00:00 Eric Lawes and the field in Suffolk 03:11 Why the coin, and not anything else 06:41 What a coin actually bought 10:50 How a coin was made 14:59 The faces on the coin 18:47 The coin in the hand of the soldier 22:56 First peak: a day, a wage, a loaf, a life 26:44 The coin in the hand of the merchant 30:32 The coin in the hand of the woman 34:20 Second peak: the hoard 38:08 The coin as promise, and the breaking of it 42:17 The medieval penny and the village economy 46:26 The coins that never returned 50:14 Third peak: the hammer and the hoard 54:03 What the coin misses 57:33 The coin in the grave 61:01 The coin, the state, and the ordinary person 64:52 What to look at next time you see a coin 68:23 Fourth peak: the coin is an ancestor 72:14 The ordinary past speaking through an ordinary object PRIMARY SOURCES AND FURTHER READING The Hoxne Hoard — British Museum collection page: britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG161018 The Hoxne Hoard — Wikipedia (full excavation and finds catalogue): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoxne_Hoard Peter Guest, "The Late Roman Gold and Silver Coins from the Hoxne Treasure" (British Museum Press): britishmuseum.org/research/publications/the-late-roman-gold-and-silver-coins-from-the-hoxne-treasure Portable Antiquities Scheme (UK) — treasure and coin finds: finds.org.uk/ Roman currency (denarius, sestertius, as) — overview and purchasing power: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_currency Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_on_Maximum_Prices Roman coin debasement — silver content over time: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_currency#Debasement Vindolanda coin finds — Roman Britain frontier fort archaeology:vindolanda.com/ Charon's obol — burial coins in ancient graves: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon%27s_obol Diodorus Siculus on the Egyptian gold mines (Bibliotheca Historica, Book III): penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/3B*.html Anglo-Saxon Chronicle — the end of Roman Britain: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Chronicle Medieval English silver penny — currency and daily wages: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_silver_coinage Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge University Press): cambridge.org/core/books/money-and-its-use-in-medieval-europe/6E8EC96D2BAA7C0EAB9C0A2BB40A0FC5 Thomas Ashcroft is a narrative persona voiced through AI. All historical content is drawn from documented primary sources listed above. Some information from public sources may not be fully verified.