Roman hoards

More coin hoards have been recorded from Roman Britain than from any other province of the empire. A survey published in 2018 counted over 3,260 Iron Age and Roman coin hoards from England and Wales, with a peak of more than 700 from the four decades between AD 253 and 296, and new ones still surface at around fifty a year. The biggest are staggering. The Cunetio Hoard, found in 1978 at a small Roman town in Wiltshire, held 54,951 coins struck between about 250 and 275. The Frome Hoard, dug out of a single pot in Somerset in 2010, held 52,503 coins dating from 253 to 305 and weighed about 160 kg, including the largest group ever found of the usurper Carausius, who ruled Britain on his own account from 286 to 293.

Those numbers flatter the money. The Roman system ran on gold, silver and bronze coins whose metal content the state kept changing. Under Augustus the silver denarius was struck at 84 to the Roman pound, about 3.9 g, and a legionary was paid 225 of them a year; the gold aureus weighed about 8 g and was worth 25 denarii. Through the third century the silver coinage was debased until the 'radiates' that fill Cunetio and Frome were mostly copper with a thin trace of silver. Constantine's gold solidus, struck at 72 to the pound (about 4.5 g) from around 312, then held its weight for centuries. A pot of 50,000 late radiates is a heavy thing but not a fortune; a few dozen solidi might be. The weight explorer sets hoard weights against Roman pay.

The textbook explanation is safekeeping: an owner buried savings, meant to come back, and did not. That reading underlies the old habit of matching hoard peaks to invasions and civil wars, a link that recent work on the British data finds increasingly hard to sustain. Frome is the awkward case. The pot was too big and too fragile to lift out full without breaking, and Sam Moorhead of the Portable Antiquities Scheme has suggested that the coins may be communal offerings poured into it in place rather than a purse to be recovered. Both kinds of hoard surely existed side by side, and the evidence of how a pot was filled and where it was placed matters as much as its contents.

Silver plate tells a different story. The Hoxne Hoard, found in Suffolk in 1992, was packed into an oak chest with smaller boxes and bags inside: 14,865 gold, silver and bronze coins and about 200 pieces of silver tableware and gold jewellery. The latest coins put its burial after AD 407, at the very end of Roman Britain. Outside the frontier, at Hildesheim in northern Germany, soldiers preparing a shooting range in 1868 found about seventy silver vessels of the first century AD, the largest Roman silver find from beyond the empire's borders; whether it was a commander's dinner service or loot is still argued. Britain has the densest record, but not the biggest single finds: a coin hoard from Misrata in Libya is larger than Cunetio, and finds reported from Evreux in France and Komin in Croatia are said to have run to 100,000 and 300,000 coins.