Medieval hoards

In 1998 archaeologists working in the old Jewish quarter of Erfurt found a cache under the wall of a cellar entrance: about 24 kg of silver coins and ingots, including 3,141 silver tournois groats, with more than 700 pieces of goldsmiths' work, eight finger-rings among them. One is a gold Jewish wedding ring crowned by a tiny Gothic building with mazal tov engraved on its roof. Its owner is thought to have been a moneychanger who hid his stock before the massacre of Erfurt's Jews in March 1349, during the Black Death. The Erfurt Treasure is now shown in the town's restored Old Synagogue. Smaller treasures hidden in the same terror have come from Colmar, Weißenfels, Lingenfeld, Münster and Środa Śląska; at Colmar the cache was found in 1863 inside the wall of a house in the rue des Juifs.

In this period the safekeeping reading is usually the right one, and the law said so. Under the English common law of treasure trove, buried gold or silver belonged to the Crown only if it had been hidden with the intention of recovering it, the animus revocandi; objects simply lost or deliberately abandoned went to the finder or the landowner. Medieval lawyers assumed, in other words, that people hid money in order to come back for it. The great medieval hoards fit: they turn up in walls, cellars and under floors, and they date to wars, plagues and persecutions that killed or scattered their owners.

Coin had replaced bullion almost everywhere. In England the silver penny was struck by weight from the Tower pound of about 350 g, 240 pence to the pound at first and 243 by 1279, so a penny of around 1300 weighed roughly 1.44 g. Edward III cut it to 18 grains (about 1.17 g) in 1351, when the Statute of Labourers set a master carpenter's wage at 3d a day. Gold returned to Western coinage in the thirteenth century: Florence struck its florin of about 3.5 g from 1252, and Edward III's gold nobles, struck to a new standard in 1351, were the first English gold coins made in quantity. The Fishpool Hoard, found by building workers in Nottinghamshire in 1966, holds 1,237 fifteenth-century gold coins with rings, jewels and chain, a face value of about £400 when it was buried in 1463-64, perhaps by someone fleeing after the Battle of Hexham. It is the largest hoard of medieval coins found in Britain.

Medieval hoards therefore cluster in time as much as in space: around 1348-50 in the Jewish communities of the Rhineland, Alsace, Thuringia and Silesia, and around England's civil wars of the fifteenth century. The weight explorer sets their silver against what a labourer earned or a cow cost in England around 1300.