A lucky couple recently revealed that they discovered 400-year-old coins under the floorboard. The coins are far more precious than the pair had anticipated. The couple is set to get a quarter-million-pound payday. There are 264 coins in total, all of which are made of gold and have been waiting for new owners for nearly 400 years. The stack was discovered during a floor restoration in a North Yorkshire home.
The couple was intrigued by a ceramic cup around the size of a Coke can they saw when they lifted the flooring of the 18th-century house. They didn’t realize they had been living over a cache worth $250,000 for the previous ten years until experts examined its contents. The coins were found by the homeowners in July 2019, and now that they have been formally disclaimed, they can be sold at auction, said MSN.
Auctioneer Gregory Edmund said: ‘This is a fascinating and highly important discovery. ‘It is extraordinarily rare for hoards of English gold coins to ever come onto the marketplace. This find of over 260 coins is also one of the largest on archaeological record from Britain.
‘They’re not mint perfect coins, they are coins that have had a hard life. However the number of coins and unique method of burial presents an extraordinary opportunity to appreciate the complicated English economy in the first decades of the Bank of England and significant distrust of its new-fangled invention the “banknote”.
‘It is a wonderful and truly unexpected discovery from so unassuming a find location. As a coin specialist of many years experience, I cannot recall a similar discovery in living memory, and it is therefore an enormous privilege to be able to properly document and explore this hoard for the benefit of future generations.’
