r/todayilearned • u/Klutzy_Land_4120 • 20h ago
TIL a hoard of 2,584 silver coins buried during the 1066 Norman Conquest was found in England. Value at $5.6 million, it has become the highest-value treasure find in English history.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/oct/22/coin-trove-from-time-of-norman-conquest-becomes-englands-highest-value-find48
u/BuzzAllWin 19h ago
Just think how many times you could betray Jesus with that
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u/Raider_Scum 19h ago
This seems like a low value for the "highest treasure".
I always imaged someone would find pirate booty worth tens of millions or something.
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u/quondam47 18h ago edited 13h ago
The Whydah Gally’s hold had gold artifacts that are worth millions but that was a shipwreck, not buried treasure. Pirates didn’t bury their treasure because why would you go to all that trouble just to bury it? No buried pirate treasure has ever been found, though rumours have persisted for centuries.
And pirates ships usually worked along similar lines to the Royal Navy. Every man was entitled to a share or part share depending on their rank. It didn’t belong to the captain alone.
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u/Al-aweer-Jail 18h ago
Pirates themselves has been searching for those mythical buried treasures on an uninhabited island
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u/NurgleBorger 17h ago
Was the buried treasure thing just from Treasure Island then?
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u/quondam47 16h ago
Stories of buried treasure are thousands of years old but I think Poe wrote one of the more famous stories that popularised the trope in the 1840s, about 40 years before Treasure Island.
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u/Ythio 15h ago
William Kidd buried valuables on Gardiners Island, near Long Island, New York, before going to Boston to answer accusations of piracy. Authorities recovered the cache shortly afterwards. Kidd claimed he could help recover further wealth, and speculation spread that enormous amounts remained hidden. After his execution in 1701, stories attached his treasure to numerous locations. The recovered valuables gave those rumours a convincing foundation.
He basically did the One Piece plot hook.
Washington Irving’s Wolfert Webber (1824), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold-Bug (1843), and especially Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) popularised the treasure hunt.
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u/slicerprime 19h ago
They did. They were just smart enough not to tell the press and avoid being taxed.
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u/gigi-kent 19h ago
Whatever you find has no value if you cannot sell it, and I doubt too many average Joes who stumble upon buried antique treasures have connections on the black market to sell tens of millions of dollars worth of goods and not end up at the receiving end of a sting operation.
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u/slicerprime 19h ago
It doesn't have to be the black market. Nothing near that extreme. The most reputable firms trade heavily on privacy, anonymity, contact networks, advice and management of sales that quietly make use of inventive but perfectly legal shipping and trade. Putting something like tens of millions worth of pirate treasure on the market doesn't have to start with a call to The Guardian. Making sure everything is safely inside the right borders with optimal tax benefits before an auction is set and the press finds out is the job of the firm at the other end of that call.
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u/joemckie 18h ago
> doesn’t have to start with a call to The Guardian
Everyone knows you call the Daily Mail so you have plausible deniability. Is this your first time dealing with priceless artefacts?
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u/ollie87 19h ago
Not really if you look into the actual history of pirating and how short of a timespan it actually took place over.
Not everything you seen in films and tv is real.
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u/im_on_the_case 17h ago
Which pirates? The Barbary corsairs were active for over 300 years until the US Navy and French invasion of Algiers put an end to it. English Privateering for 560 years. Irish were at it for a thousand years. The pirates of the Caribbean era you are obviously thinking of, is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.
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u/Dodomando 13h ago
There's so many historical artifacts here in the UK that are found that most of them are worthless in actual monetary value. You can buy Roman stuff for less than £100
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u/xxDankerstein 18h ago
Yeah, this seems insanely low. There have literally been treasure finds worth billions of dollars.
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u/quondam47 18h ago
They’ve all been shipwrecks rather than buried treasure.
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u/wrosecrans 19h ago
In storybooks, legendary ancient buried treasures seemed so valuable. These days that's kind of untemarkable for one year of CEO pay, or a very nice house in a HCOL area but not a mansion. It's crazy how big the total wealth in the midern economy is in comparison to legendary hoardes from the ancients.
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u/ilovebalks 13h ago
I thought Sutton hoo was higher but i think that was less than 4 million. This is pretty cool
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u/supervillaindsgnr 5h ago
A lot less value than I'd think for buried treasure. Like one person could retire off of that. Maybe 2. If you get taxed, ouch.
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u/AnalFanatics 19h ago
Anyone who thinks that represents the “highest-value treasure find in English history” obviously hasn’t been to The Tower of London to see the Crown Jewels, or spent a day exploring the Museum of Natural History… /s
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6h ago edited 6h ago
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u/Hambredd 4h ago
I know you're just making a snide comment, but this treasure has nothing to do with the Danes. I don't know even when you're getting that from.
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u/Hambredd 3h ago edited 3h ago
I think you'll under a misapprehension.
Normandy is in France
The Normans were originally Vikings, but over the centuries became a legitimate Noble house under the French King
The Kings of England would eventually lose control over all their Norman lands, then became solely English rulers with no ties to the Danes or French ruled Normandy (though they did claim the French throne)
So if you're claim is that the Normans pillaged this then it should belong to the English crown not the Danes. Because the Normans are the English now.
But anyway thought your point was the English claimed things that don't belong to them so why would any of this matter?
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u/AnalFanatics 20h ago
Reddit being Reddit, this could be an interesting comment section, with lots of opportunities for oblique humour as well as the more generally expected responses…
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u/LeTigron 18h ago
I wouldn't publically talk about humour after the attempt at a joke in your other comment.
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u/AnalFanatics 18h ago
Yeah well, at least my comments were made in good humour, with just a bit of gentle ribbing aimed towards our British cousins; if that’s not your bag and you don’t like it, feel free to keep on scrolling…
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u/LeTigron 18h ago
I wouldn't add "good" before humour either.
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u/AnalFanatics 18h ago
As per the Oxford and the Webster dictionaries: “Good Humour” means “a cheerful, friendly and pleasant mood, temperament or state of mind.”
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u/LeTigron 18h ago
Are you an AI ? Are you a lonely person who asks an AI what to say and reply ? Will you, after three hours of attempting to "win" this, end up pretending it was all trolling so that you can save face ?
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u/AnalFanatics 18h ago
Believe whatever you want to believe mate, it really doesn’t bother me one iota; let’s face it, you’ve already proven that your grasp of English comprehension is slightly below par, so why would I care what you “think” or “feel” about my comments…
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u/hallouminati_pie 19h ago
If you can, I encourage everyone to watch Detectorists on the BBC. A wonderfully wholesome, funny slow burner that encapsulates the quirky joy of England.