[HN Gopher] Metal Detectorist Discovers One of England's Earlies...
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Metal Detectorist Discovers One of England's Earliest Gold Coins in
a Farm Field
Author : pepys
Score : 76 points
Date : 2022-01-22 16:57 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| blunte wrote:
| Are there any folks here doing metal detecting in the
| Netherlands?
|
| I've been tempted to start, since I live in a village that dates
| from the 1200s (but likely had Romans passing through long
| before) surrounded by farmland. There's bound to be something
| interesting buried here and there.
| rsfayez wrote:
| As an American, I remain humbled by how far back England is able
| to trace back its history. Visiting
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_London was such a
| highlight of a trip many years ago
| soperj wrote:
| America has a similarly long history, there's just been a
| subset of people there who've been busy trying to erase it.
| madengr wrote:
| unknown_apostle wrote:
| Not as an investment vehicle but as a savings vehicle: it did
| better than the average 800-year old bond or 800-year old company
| share. Numismatic premium aside; the gold maintained its value
| throughout war, tyranny and pestilence. It would presumably also
| survive a G8 summit ordering major internet providers to block
| port 8333.
| beefman wrote:
| In England 800 years ago, an ounce of gold was worth about 6
| months unskilled labor.[1][2] Today, it's worth about 3.5
| weeks.
|
| In the past century, gold has underperformed U.S. equities and
| has not, in any case, held its value very well. It's been quite
| volatile, e.g. falling 30% in 2013.
|
| The article doesn't say how much gold this coin contains, but
| its value is essentially 100% numismatic.
|
| [1] https://www.thebalance.com/gold-price-history-3305646
|
| [2] https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval-
| prices-a...
| labrador wrote:
| Imagining a digital arms race where crypto transactions are
| hidden in images using steganography
| noneeeed wrote:
| > "It was bought by an anonymous private collector in the United
| Kingdom who intends to place the coin on loan to a public
| institution or museum.
|
| Well that's nice. Feels like the ultimate win-win all-round. Nice
| that's it's not disappearing into someone's private collection,
| never to be seen again.
| philk10 wrote:
| Proceeds from selling it will fund his kids education -
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/24/devon-detect...
| jnsie wrote:
| I wonder if he owned the land it was found in, or if some portion
| of the proceeds go to the landowner.
| matt_mb wrote:
| " _He will split the proceeds of the find with the landowner_ "
| zevv wrote:
| Until a few weeks ago I would not have cared to click this link,
| let alone read all of the article. But that has changed: I
| recently watched the BBC television series "Detectorists"; not
| everybody's cup of cake, as it is pretty slow going, but "It's
| good-natured and charming, and there's really something admirable
| about a series so singularly dedicated to making you feel good"
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/jan/28/detectorists...
| atombender wrote:
| It's such a superb show.
|
| Something I realized watching Detectorists is that there aren't
| many realistic _adult_ drama shows (or American movies) these
| days that aren 't about crime or similarly extreme subjects, or
| that aren't historical dramas.
|
| Detectorists is technically a "dramedy", of course, but it's
| basically a realistic, truthful depiction of everyday life,
| with some observational humour thrown in here and there.
|
| For some reason Hollywood has indoctrinated the world into
| thinking that fiction can't be true to life, because life is
| somehow boring.
|
| A similar American drama that comes to mind is Lodge 49, which
| is absolutely fantastic. On Becoming a God in Central Florida
| has a similar vibe, and is also excellent.
|
| Off the top of my head, I'm struggling to think of many other
| shows. Better Things, Transparent, Togetherness, Succession,
| Mozart in the Jungle... any other good ones?
| munificent wrote:
| Ted Lasso.
| atombender wrote:
| Ted Lasso is good, but it's a saccharine, deeply
| unrealistic fantasy bordering on self-parody. So I can't
| really agree with you there.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| It got even more cartoony in S2, had to stop watching. S1
| struck a chord that was going to be really hard to
| replicate.
| munificent wrote:
| Yeah, season two definitely wandered towards more typical
| high drama heroes and villains fare, unfortunately.
| munificent wrote:
| _> a saccharine, deeply unrealistic fantasy bordering on
| self-parody_
|
| I personally found it to be none of those things.
|
| Often, we experience a piece of art as _being_ something
| when really much of our experience is defined by what we
| brought of ourselves to it.
| atombender wrote:
| Well, it's objectively unrealistic in terms of dialogue (
| _nobody_ talks that way in real life!), plot, and so on.
| Its depiction of real life and relationships is
| cartoonish and hardly any more true to life than other
| escapist fare like Sex and the City.
|
| It's an urban feel-good fantasy, clearly not intended to
| be realistic. There are tons of shows like this, though
| Ted Lasso does it better than many of them.
|
| There are a lot fewer shows like, say, Togetherness,
| which shows the raw, unpolished reality of ordinary
| middle-class people living very ordinary, albeit
| dramatically interesting, lives. I would argue that
| _everything_ in Togetherness not only happens in real
| life (and the characters also talk like adults do in real
| life), it also has. Whereas pretty much nothing in Ted
| Lasso has ever happened, at any time, anywhere.
| munificent wrote:
| _> it 's objectively unrealistic in terms of dialogue
| (nobody talks that way in real life!)_
|
| There are different levels of realism in art. _Guernica_
| is not a realistic real life portrayal or what a war
| scene would look like if photographed.
|
| The more interesting question to me is whether it conveys
| the _subjective_ experience of war in a meaningful way to
| the viewer? In other words, say person A has a first-hand
| experience with war and comes away from it with belief X.
| Then person B looks at a work of art and also comes away
| from it with belief X. Then in some sense, the art is a
| realistic portrayal of war because it caused the same
| change in the viewer that experiencing war does. The fact
| that it doesn 't _aesthetically look like it_ is not
| particularly relevant. It 's an artifact.
|
| _Togetherness_ is _profoundly_ unrealistic because it is
| a series of two-dimensional images shown at a fixed frame
| rate from a viewpoint that spontaneously and instantly
| jumps from place to play with wildly varying focal
| points. It is very far removed from what it would be like
| to be in the room with the actors. Not to mention short
| pieces of music spontaneously being heard from no
| appreciable source in the scene.
|
| But you accept that those kinds of unreality are not
| important for your appreciation of the work.
|
| The kinds of unreality that bother you about _Ted Lasso_
| are in the set of things that I don 't consider
| important. The behavior of the characters (especially in
| the first season) rang true to me.
| atombender wrote:
| If I tell you that I want less flying superheroes and
| alien monsters, but rather more serious stories about
| real-life people, the right counterpoint is not "well,
| for me, Marvel movies is more meaningful as art".
|
| _Obviously_ all art is "unreal" in terms of being
| separate from our own subjective reality, yada yada yada,
| but that's neither here nor there. Within the realm of
| "things that are filmed and projected within the medium
| of TV", which is what we are talking about, there are
| degrees of naturalism which we can describe and compare,
| irrespective of what kind of artistic "truth" you think
| is conveyed.
| jl6 wrote:
| _Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing_ perhaps? Although I
| can never tell if it's some kind of obtuse absurdist parody
| or sincere.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| Detectorists is like the TV equivalent of having a nice cuppa
| on a cool, late summer's morning, while looking out the window
| at the long, brown grass swaying gently in the breeze.
|
| Mackenzie Crook's recent Worzel Gummidge adaptation has a
| similar vibe, although obviously more geared towards families.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _equivalent of having a nice cuppa on a cool, late summer
| 's morning, while looking out the window at the long, brown
| grass swaying gently in the breeze_
|
| Obligatory BBC Shipping Forecast, because it seems right up
| this crowd's alley: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CxHa5KaMBcM
|
| Recent:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qfvv/episodes/player
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It depends on where you are in the world. The UK has a couple
| millennia of metal object to find. I'm reminded of that Bob's
| Burgers joke about using a metal detector only to find the
| metal detector discarded by the last guy who tried to find gold
| coins on a US beach.
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| All historical dramas are just prequals to The Detectorists.
| adolph wrote:
| I wonder what a future version of The Dectorists would be?
| Maybe "The Isotopists" that find materials with isotopes from
| exotic places.
|
| https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/tracking-movements-
| isoto...
| kingcharles wrote:
| I've been in tech too long.. my first thought is that you
| meant they would be finding .iso files.
| dageshi wrote:
| Tangentially related, time team and hugely popular archaeology
| program that ran in the 90's-2000's in the UK has many of their
| episodes legally up on youtube.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/TimeTeamClassics/videos
|
| If you want an absolute banger of an episode to evaluate, try
| this one...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW3UQEDQ0zQ
| danesparza wrote:
| Without the detectorists, I wouldn't know that University
| Challenge is a real-life show that I absolutely love.
|
| Also: Did you see University Challenge last night?
| onion2k wrote:
| I like University Challenge but it makes me feel like I'm an
| idiot. Or maybe it just reveals the fact that I am actually
| an idiot. I get 4 or 5 answers per show at most. My partner
| sits and answers about 20% of the questions correctly. She's
| far cleverer than me. But I'm better at video games so it all
| evens out.
| jnsie wrote:
| I feel the same about hacker news, to be honest.
| lebski88 wrote:
| I found that when I watched it a lot I got much better at
| it. The style of the questions needs to be learnt. There
| are also a bunch of writers, composers and painters that
| come up a lot. If in doubt guessing one of these from
| roughly the correct period works pretty well!
| cschmidt wrote:
| Without the show, we wouldn't understand that a "detectorist"
| is a person and metal detector is the machine they use.
| onion2k wrote:
| The Detectorists is one of the best TV shows made in the past
| decade. I loved it. It was a tonic to the everything-must-be-
| about-crime-and-death shows that fill Netflix and Prime.
| abeppu wrote:
| The images, attributed to the auction house, are a little funny.
| It seems like they cleaned it up, but perhaps the 'found in a
| field' story is so cute, they hope it might actually contribute
| value and chose to photograph it back in dirt?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| There's a sentiment in Britain that 'detectorists' are pillaging
| the history of England. But I'm on the side of this detectorist.
| He saved this piece of history from the plow. It's a win-win.
| irrational wrote:
| With all these stories coming out of Britain of people finding
| ancient gold coins, I'm surprised everyone isn't out there
| searching in their own neighborhoods with metal detectors.
| Decent detectors are not that expensive.
| notahacker wrote:
| You don't just need the detector though, you need the
| landowner's permission and the time. And the already tiny
| chance of finding anything of non-trivial value gets smaller
| if everybody else is doing it. If you think we have a lot of
| people finding ancient gold coins, you'll be even more amazed
| how many lottery winners we have!
| philk10 wrote:
| There are a small minority called 'Nighthawks' that are doing
| damage -
| https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jun/02/theres-a-rom...
| johng wrote:
| There is a whole site dedicated to detectorists at
| https://www.treasurenet.com
| vanattab wrote:
| Didn't the Roman's bring gold coins 1200 years earlier? Seems a
| stretch to call it one of England's earliest gold coins.
| tokai wrote:
| Roman Britan is not England now is it?
| egberts1 wrote:
| Isn't that called being a history revisionist?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| The coin has a picture of King Henry III _of England_ on
| it.
|
| A coin used earlier in the Roman province of Britain, even
| in the same location, would have a picture of the Emperor
| in Rome on it.
|
| That's what makes it "one of England's earliest gold
| coins". One of the earliest coins of "England as a state".
| adolph wrote:
| This site also claims that Roman's minted coin in the territory
| now known as England.
|
| http://www.kenelks.co.uk/coins/roman/roman.htm
|
| I think the significance of this coin to English people is that
| Henry III is king when the Magna Carta is negotiated and the
| royal domain across the channel is severed. This places the
| coin in a context of when what was to become modern England
| became identifiable.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_III_of_England
| dhosek wrote:
| I imagine even at the time the coin was in use it was a
| significant amount of money. I imagine some poor merchant in
| incredible distress trying to find the coin that fell out of his
| pocket on the way home from the market and never succeeding.
| robk wrote:
| I like to think the merchant had it hidden somewhere and died
| without telling anyone.
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