A couple in northern England – Yorkshire were instantly known as “treasure hunters” when they found an 18th century treasure trove of gold coins estimated to be worth £250,000 under the floorboards of their home.
“This is a wonderful and truly unexpected find,” said Gregory Edmund of the auction house Spink & Son, where the gold coins found will go up for auction on October 7. “It is one of the largest in the archaeological record for the sixteenth-century period.”
The gold coins were found in a salt-covered clay pot no larger than a coke can and were almost certainly hidden by Joseph and Sarah Fernley-Maisters, a couple who married in 1694 (the year the Bank of England was founded).
Edmund says the couple were skeptical of the institution and therefore preferred to keep the gold coins at home: “Joseph and Sarah clearly distrusted the newly formed Bank of England, the ‘notes’, or even the gold coins of their time. That’s why they chose to hold a large number of gold coins from the English Civil War and before.”
As members of the influential Maisters family, Joseph and Sarah had plenty of money to hide. There were £50 and £100 coins in the treasury and their total value in today’s currency is reported to be around £100,000. The history of these gold coins spans from 1610 to 1727 and covers the reigns of James I, Charles I, the Commonwealth of the Republic, Charles II, James II, William and Mary, Anne, and George I.
The family was at its most successful between the 16th and 18th centuries. As traders trading from the Baltic ports, they made a fortune in iron ore, timber, and coal, and many entered politics in the early 1700s. Shortly after the deaths of Joseph and Sarah, however, the family’s power waned, the last Maisters living in Maister House died childless, and the family business fell into obscurity at the end of the 19th century.
Considering the value of the treasure, we can say that it is strange that it took so long to find it. “While they were really easy to find right under the original 18th-century floorboards, it’s an even bigger mystery why they never got the coins back,” Edmund says.
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