The Harkirke Hoard

In 1611 William Blundell, a Catholic squire of Little Crosby north of Liverpool, set aside a plot on his land called the Harkirke as a burial ground for local Catholics who were refused burial in the parish churchyard. On 8 April, the day after the first burial there, a servant boy named Thomas, driving the cattle out to a field near the graves, noticed old coins thrown up by the digging. More were found, about eighty by Blundell's own count, 'none bigger than a groate, and none less than a twoe pence'.

Blundell, educated on the continent and well read in history, set about identifying them. He drew thirty-five of the best-preserved coins and had a copper plate engraved from his drawing, arranging the coins in the shape of a cross. Prints were run off, perhaps two hundred of them, and in his words they 'flew abroad in ye country'. One copy reached an Oxford antiquary, another the heralds' visitation of Lancashire in 1613, and the plate was later reproduced in John Spelman's life of King Alfred, published in 1678. The find is one of the earliest coin hoards in Britain to be recorded in any detail.

That engraving is now almost the only evidence. Modern numismatists have identified the coins on it as a mixture of Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Continental pennies, together with what Blundell called 'uncoyned silver', the classic make-up of a Viking-age hoard from northern England. They point to a burial around 910-915, when Lancashire was under Viking control, within a few years of the far larger Cuerdale Hoard buried beside the Ribble to the north-east.

The coins themselves did not survive the 17th century. During the Civil War Blundell's grandson sent most of them to relatives in Wrexham for safekeeping, and they were never seen again. The rest had already been melted down and made into a chalice and a pyx, a small box for the consecrated host, for the family's own Catholic worship. The chalice is lost. The pyx survives, engraved on the back: 'This was made of silver found in the burial place W Bl'.

The Harkirke Hoard is unusual in being remembered more for what its finder did with it than for its contents. Blundell, a recusant who had been imprisoned for his faith, read the coins as evidence of England's Christian past, and turned the silver into objects for a forbidden form of worship. The pyx and the family's documents about the hoard are now on loan to the British Museum.