The Tutbury Hoard

In June 1831 workmen employed by a Tutbury cotton mill were cutting away a bank of gravel and sand that choked the River Dove a short way below the bridge. Their spades turned up silver pennies, then more, then a seam of coins so dense that the news brought crowds from miles around. At the height of the rush hundreds of people were digging in the riverbed at once.

Nobody ever counted the find. Local estimates reported in 1831 put it at no fewer than 200,000 coins, and later writers give figures up to 360,000, which would make it the largest coin hoard ever found in Britain. Most of it vanished at once into the pockets of local collectors or the melting pots of silver dealers.

The land belonged to the Honour of Tutbury, part of the Duchy of Lancaster, so the coins counted as treasure trove belonging to the king. The Duchy issued a commission claiming the hoard, banning unauthorised digging and appointing officers to search, while promising that nobody would be prosecuted for coins taken before then. The official search produced about 1,500 silver pennies and a single gold ring, a small fraction of the whole.

Those 1,500 coins went to Edward Hawkins, Keeper of Antiquities at the British Museum, who described them to the Society of Antiquaries in December 1831. They were almost all pennies of Edward I and Edward II from a dozen English mints, with a few Scottish pennies of Alexander III and John Balliol and some Continental imitations of English sterlings. The latest pieces, including Durham pennies of Bishop Beaumont and imitations in the name of John of Bohemia, showed that the hoard was put together after 1321, while the absence of anything of David II of Scotland suggested it was lost before 1329.

Hawkins argued that so vast a sum was no private nest egg but a military chest, and he pointed to Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, the king's cousin and leader of the baronial opposition. In March 1322 Lancaster held the bridge at Burton upon Trent against Edward II. When the king's forces crossed the Trent upstream and outflanked him, Lancaster fell back through Tutbury, where his castle stood, and fled north. He was captured at Boroughbridge days later and executed. The Dove had to be crossed in that retreat, swollen by recent rains and with no bridge at the time; Hawkins suggested the treasure was lost at the ford in the confusion. Others have proposed it was hidden deliberately. Either way, the date and place fit Lancaster's flight closely.

The episode is also a lesson in what is lost when a hoard is dug for its metal: the container, the exact findspot and the composition of the whole deposit went unrecorded, and a sample of perhaps one coin in a hundred survives to tell the story.