CORRECTIONS: GROUVILLE HOARD DETAILS

Neil Mahrer of Jersey Heritage with the hoard

A couple of corrections to the piece on the Grouville hoard – these PR type things seem to develop more errors as they get recirculated. At 69,347 coins this is far bigger than any other Iron Age hoard from the British Isles – probably 10 times or more bigger.

Of course one could argue about the relevance of the ‘British Isles’ to this distinction, since Jersey’s status as one of the British isles defies all geographical logic – at the time this hoard was buried it was politically and culturally closely linked to the continent, just a few kilometres away. Interestingly the next biggest ‘continental’ Iron Age hoard – also from Jersey – comes in at about 12,000 coins, so this one is still many times larger.

The hoard of 54,951 coins found more than 40 years ago in Wiltshire is the Cunetio or Mildenhall hoard mostly of late Roman low value bronze, and thus quite different in content to the Grouville hoard.

To say it was discovered ‘at a depth of only 3ft’ implies that it was shallowly buried, but it was not; it was only a very faint signal on the finders’ metal detectors that led them to discover it. And it wasn’t under a hedge, nor did it contain any Roman coins!

One final point – the total is an estimate, since a small block of the hoard has been preserved intact for future research, and although we can make a pretty good guess at the total number of coins in the block, it is still an estimate.

To read earlier E-Sylum articles, see:
https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v17n35a32.html (https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v17n35a32.html)
JERSEY GROUVILLE HOARD WAS TWO COLLECTIONS (https://www.coinbooks.org/v22/esylum_v22n12a24.html)
GROUVILLE HOARD SETS WORLD RECORD (https://www.coinbooks.org/v23/esylum_v23n06a24.html)

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