Seaton Down Hoard

Tom Cadbury: There's something magical about buried treasure. In RAMM, we're lucky to have some real buried treasure in the form of the Seaton Down Hoard: 22,888 buried Roman coins, by far the biggest hoard ever found in Devon, and the third biggest to have ever been found in Britain.

On a cold winter day in November 2013, I got a call from the county archaeologist. He said a large Roman coin hoard had been found in East Devon. A few days earlier, a metal detectorist called Laurence Egerton, who'd been walking across these fields for about 20 years, got an extra loud beep on his detector and that told him he'd found something interesting. He started to dig and found just a few Roman coins on the surface.

Now, if they'd just been buried in a Devon field, these coins would've corroded away. Devon soils are very acidic and corrosive. Normally, Roman coins are just green blobs. You can see all the detail on the Seaton Down coins and that's just because of the geology of the bank that they were buried in.

So these coins are quite small. They're about the size of a modern penny, but they would've been the equivalent of about a pound in Roman money. You could have bought a loaf of bread with two of these or a flagon of pretty poor-quality wine. Good wine might cost you up to eight nummi.

The only thing that everyone across the empire used all the time was coinage. So if you wanted to get your political or propaganda message out there, put it on a coin. So there are coins that show there's a new capital city or the army will protect you. You need to get that propaganda message out there.

For me, sometimes it's the things that we don't know that gives it real value. So, it's the human story, in this case. What were those one or two people doing when they crept out in the night to bury all those coins? Were they scared? Were they nervous? Were they excited? We won't know. But, for me, that's the real value of the Seaton Down Hoard.

Watch RAMM staff and volunteers tell us why they love each of the 16 objects, and hear the fascinating stories that make these items so special.

Laurence Egerton:

I used to do a lot of fishing; quite often see guys metal detecting on the beach and was quite interested in what they had found. Did a bit of research, found out that you could actually find stuff in fields, which never really occurred to me, so I just started trying to get permission to go in some fields and started from there really.

It's got the same appeal. It's the same with fishing: you never quite know what size fish is around the corner. It's the same with the hobby of detecting: you never quite know what you're going to find next. Most of the time it's rubbish and ring pulls, but every now and again you find something quite special.

We've got thousands of years of history, the last 2,000 years with metalwork, of course. We, you know, we've had invaders, we've had Vikings, we've had Saxons, Normans, etc. and each little piece of metalwork is part of this country's history really, and it's just fascinating.

It's a field like any other big field. There's a little bit of luck involved. You know, with a metal detector you've actually got to walk over the object to find it. And I did a bit of research beforehand, just fancied the look of the field. It just seemed like it was the sort of place that people may have used for hundreds of years, and off I went.

It's rare in this country, but even rarer in Devon; to find a Roman coin in Devon, it's pretty unusual. And to find so many in such good condition. The British Museum described it as one of the biggest fourth-century collections of coins found in the entire Roman Empire, which is absolutely fantastic, especially for Devon.

Could I find something more important? I'm not sure I could, really – I think it's as good as it gets.

Tom Cadbury:

For me, the significance of this hoard is that it's a brilliant object to tell stories with and that, as I see it, is one of the main jobs of the curator.

We take these objects that are stored in the museum, and then we try and research what stories they can tell, and then communicate those to as wide a public as we can. This hoard is, in a way, a dream for doing that. 22,888 coins: it's by far the biggest to ever have been found in Devon, and it's the third biggest in Britain.

So, it is, you know, it’s a really significant archaeological find. It's got the human story, a mystery of who buried it and why, and then it's got big geopolitical stories. You know, what was going on in the Roman world? How big was the Roman world at that time?

RAMM is in Exeter. Exeter is the local big city for this part of the world, and that was the case in, in Roman times as well. So, you know, almost certainly the coins were in some way connected to Roman Exeter. They're now connected to modern Exeter.

Sarah Klopf:

I think it's very lovely that we found something that important in this area here. And it's also really great that we can keep it in the area, so we can show it the people of East Devon where it was found.

It's really interesting because it's a challenge of how do you conserve it? There's a lot of coins fused together. You have to be quite careful moving it around because it is quite possible that some of the coins will, kind of, fall off the big clump. And also it is quite tricky cleaning it because you've got a lot more undercuts and little corners that you need to get into.

Keeping these clumps together is sometimes quite interesting because it either can indicate this was one bag of coins, so they kind of are one unit that was buried. For example, the clump that I've been working on, you can see quite nicely that some are little stacks that have just slided across. So it might tell you something about how it was, kind of, buried and in what kind of units.

On a personal level, it's really interesting getting the experience of doing these kind of public engagement workshops. We will clean those coins with the help of a lot of volunteers: A-level students, metal detectorists, members of the public here in RAMM. So that's going to be really interesting. It's also kind of me getting out a little bit of my lab because normally I work behind the scenes and people rarely see me, so I'm looking forward to that.

Filmed and edited by Joshua Gaunt.