A fortunate couple who discovered an astounding cache of 264 gold coins hidden under their home’s floor are preparing to sell it for £250,000.
While metal detectorists often spend years hunting for such a gold trove, the anonymous couple discovered a cup packed with coins up to 400 years old while refinishing their kitchen floor.
The extraordinary find was uncovered only six inches under the concrete of a separate 18th-century home in Ellerby, North Yorkshire.
The property’s owners, who had been there for over a decade, originally mistook their treasure for an electricity wire.
When they pulled it from under the floor, however, they discovered the money in a salt-glazed ceramic cup about the size of a Coke can.
On closer study, they discovered gold coins dating from 1610 to 1727, spanning the reigns of James I, Charles I, and George I.
The couple called the London auctioneers Spink & Son, who sent an expert to their home to appraise the cache.
The coins were traced back to the rich and important Hull merchant family Fernley-Maisters.
In the early 1700s, the Maister family imported and exported iron ore, lumber, and coal, and later generations served as Whig politicians and Members of Parliament.
During their lifetimes, Joseph Fernley and Sarah Maister amassed the coins. Fernley passed away in 1725, and his widow stayed at Ellerby until her death at age 80 in 1745.
The coins were identified in July of 2019, and they have been formally disclaimed and are now eligible for sale. They are estimated to cost a total of $250,000.
The centrepiece of the auction is a 1720 George I guinea with a mint mistake. The coin, which lacks a king’s head and has two ‘tail’ sides, is anticipated to bring £4,000.
A Charles II guinea dated 1675, with the king’s Latin name misspelt as CRAOLVS as opposed to CAROLVS, is estimated to be worth £1,500.
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.
‘It was an entirely serendipitous discovery. The owners were relaying the floor of their house and found a pot about the size of a Diet Coke can, full of gold.
‘They’ve never picked up a metal detector in their life. They were just relaying a floor and thought it was an electrical cable at first.
‘I rushed up to see them in North Yorkshire a few days after and there were 264 gold coins in this cup – it is unfathomable, I have no idea how they managed to fit so many in that pot.
‘The coins date from 1610 to 1727, which is an usually long period for a hoard.
‘It also raises the question why has someone decided to bury a lot of coins at the beginning of the 18th century, when they had banks and bank notes – all the things that meant hoarding shouldn’t have happened any more.
‘Its contents are hardly ‘mindblowing’ – they simply reflect the £50 and £100 coins of day-to-day exchange buried and mysteriously never recovered by their wealthy owner.
‘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.’
The Ellerby Hoard will be sold in October.