The mudlarker Regis Curson spends his days as head pastry chef at an exclusive London restaurant, but his real passion lies elsewhere. Whenever he gets a break, he heads down to the Thames foreshore in Putney, where he happily digs through the mud in search of whatever history has left behind. As one of the few members of the famous Mudlark Society, he’s used to finding bottles, tiles, and bones, but one day he picked up something far more interesting. At first he thought it was a Roman coin.
Then he noticed the image on the back: a couple clearly having a good time. A quick internet search for Roman coins and something a little more explicit confirmed what he had. It was a brothel token, a small piece of metal used in Roman times to pay for the services of a prostitute. The token, which featured a rather unusual Roman numeral for fourteen on one side and the erotic image on the other, was probably used like a menu.
A customer would hand over the token with the number and the image, and the transaction was done. Regis took his find to Kath Creed at the Museum of London, who confirmed its significance. While some experts now believe these tokens might have been used as gaming pieces, the saucy decoration made it clear that the Romans had a sense of humor. Regis generously donated the rare token to the museum, amazed that something so old had been sloshing about in the mud, just waiting to be found.
We like to think we live in a rational age, but people still avoid walking under ladders and dread Friday the thirteenth. I’m not particularly superstitious myself, but I do wear a little amulet that once belonged to a Roman woman who believed it would bring her luck. This amulet, along with our next item, comes from an age when magicians were as respected as doctors. Myleene Klass went to the Castle Museum in her hometown of Norwich to investigate a Roman magical charm inscribed with a secret message.
The tiny piece of gold leaf, called the Billingford Amulet, was found in turf by the Norfolk Broads. It was covered in strange shapes and symbols, and only Dr. Roger Tomlin of Oxford University could crack the code. He discovered that someone had used a sharp stylus to write fluently in Latin and Greek on the gold, and that it had been done by a professional magician.
The writing revealed a spell for well-being, health, and victory, and it also named the owner: Tiberius Claudius Simileis. Tiberius was probably a Roman soldier who brought the charm to Britain for protection. He wore it in a gold amulet case around his neck until he lost it. He would have been devastated, never knowing that thousands of years later, someone else would find it and write his name into the history books.
In 2010, retired chef Dave Crisp was wandering in a field in Somerset when he made a world-first discovery. He found the largest collection of Roman coins ever discovered in a single container, more than 52,000 coins. When he first saw the sheer amount of metal coming out of the ground, he sat back on his heels and looked around, realizing he had found a hoard. It’s exciting to find one coin, but multiplying that by 52,000 was incredible.
The Museum of Somerset acquired the coins, paying Dave and the landowner the princely sum of 320,000 pounds. Two years later, the coins were still being cleaned, and experts believed the pot was possibly an early form of corporate banking. In 1976, John Lewis was plowing a field in Northamptonshire when he found a stunning Roman bust. For years, he and his wife Joan kept it in a cupboard under the stairs, only fetching it out to use as an ornament in the hearth.
They called it Blue Eyes because of its striking blue eyes. It sat there for years until they took it to a British Museum finds day event, where experts were staggered to discover that old Blue Eyes was no ordinary bust. The bust now lives at the Ashmolean Museum, and I went to see it for myself. The experts identified it by comparing it to Roman coins from the time.
It was Marcus Aurelius, one of the Roman Empire’s greatest emperors, who ruled from 161 to 180 AD. But there was one big difference between the bust and the coin. The beard on the bust had twisted tufts that weren’t Roman at all. They were very British.
The head was a British take on a Roman emperor, almost certainly made in Britain. To achieve those tufts back then, they would have used animal fat, though my hairdresser thankfully used wax. I must admit, I did feel a bit like a Roman emperor myself after I tried it out. In a field just outside Abergavenny in Wales, finder Gary Map unearthed an incredibly rare and valuable object over 2,000 years old.
I went to the National Museum Wales in Cardiff to see the leopard cup up close. It’s made from leaded bronze with the leopard’s spots inlaid with silver and eyes probably made from amber. The leopard was a draft beast of Bacchus, the god of wine, and the cup would have belonged to a Roman general or someone of high status. It was found in a Roman cemetery, suggesting it was buried with its owner to take into the afterlife.
It was so loved and so important that the owner wanted it buried with them. Number 42 was an amazingly well-preserved figurine found in a field in Tadcaster in Yorkshire. His name is Countes, and he was a servant of the Roman sun god Mithras. He was probably brought here around 2,000 years ago by a Roman soldier carrying him as a lucky charm, perhaps wishing for good weather.
In May 2010, a young man metal detecting in a field in Cumbria uncovered a bronze figure of a griffin. He carried on digging and found no less than 68 metal fragments, all from the same object. Because it was made of bronze, not gold or silver, it was up to him what he did with it. He instructed London auctioneers Christie’s to reconstruct and sell it.
Within six months, they transformed the box of broken fragments into a unique and magnificent Roman parade helmet with a face plate designed to shock and awe. The Tullie House Museum in Carlisle wanted the helmet as the centerpiece of a new gallery. With only three weeks to the auction, they started a fundraising campaign. Donations came from Canada, Brazil, and Bulgaria, but what surprised me most was the local response.
A local school decided to do a car wash and bake cakes, emptying piggy banks to help. In just three weeks, they raised 1. 7 million pounds to bid on the helmet. On the day of the auction, the bidding went incredibly fast.
It started at 100,000 and quickly shot past a million. There was a pause at 1. 5 million, and I thought maybe, just maybe, we could get it. Then it took off again, hitting 1.
6 million, and we pulled out at 1. 7. The hammer price was 2 million pounds. That was the last time I saw it.
The helmet never came to the Tullie House Museum, and today no one knows where it is or which private collector owns it. Its disappearance has left a hole in history. In 2003, two metal detectorists were searching fields in the Staffordshire Moorlands when they saw something in the ground they thought was a coke can. When Kevin Blackburn dug it out, he and his colleague Julian Lee found an extraordinarily rare and beautifully decorated Roman copper bowl.
What’s exceptional about this bowl is that it’s one of only a few objects that refer directly to the time when Hadrian’s Wall was a manned fortification. The bowl lists the names of the forts at the western end of Hadrian’s Wall, including the earliest reference to Hadrian building the wall. It probably belonged to Draco, a draconarius, a standard bearer. Draco isn’t a Roman name, but Greek.
Greeks, like many conquered by the Romans, were enslaved and forced to work or become soldiers. Draco may have been brought to be stationed on Hadrian’s Wall. The bowl would have been like a memento of where he served, and after 25 years of service, soldiers conscripted from all over the empire were given citizenship and became free men. This beautiful object could represent an enslaved man’s freedom, a moment when Draco could choose his own destiny.
Maybe he married a local girl and settled down in Staffordshire, which is why the bowl was found 140 miles from the wall. When someone finds a hoard of coins, they’re brought to the British Museum’s conservation department to be cleaned. When the Chalgrove hoard of 5,000 coins from Oxford was being treated, an eagle-eyed conservator spotted one little coin that was completely unexpected. It dated from the third century AD, and it would rewrite the history books.
Brian Malin, a plastics engineer, was metal detecting near Chalgrove, Oxfordshire, when he found 5,000 coins in a pot. Amongst the thousands of coins, curator Richard Abdy spotted something mysterious and unique. The coin featured a name above the head that Richard had never heard of: Domitianus. The coin bible listed another Domitianus coin found in 1907 in France, but it had been dismissed as a forgery because no one had ever heard of him.
Richard asked his French colleague Michelle Amandry to track down the 1907 coin, which had been locked away in a drawer for a hundred years. An Italian scholar had written an article without even seeing the coin, claiming it was a forgery. Domitianus had been considered as mythical as King Arthur. If both coins could be proven to come from the same Roman mint, cast from the same die, they could prove the existence of a previously unknown Roman emperor.
For the first time ever, the two coins were brought together and compared side by side at the Ashmolean Museum. The experts agreed, it was very clear that these two coins definitely came from the same die. This was history in the making. The fact that these two coins were definitely not forgeries meant a new Roman emperor had been discovered.
Domitianus had power in Britain as well as France. The Ashmolean Museum acquired the hoard for 40,000 pounds, and I couldn’t help thinking it wouldn’t be the last we heard of Domitianus. In 2010, recycling plant worker Steve Allen made a discovery in a field near Lincoln unlike anything he’d ever seen before. He found pieces of copper alloy and thought he was definitely onto something.
The field was next to RAF Scampton, home to the World War II heroes who flew the Dambuster raids. Could the lumps of metal be shrapnel from a Second World War bomber? He took them to archaeologist Adam Daubney, who at first thought they were an unimpressive group of exploded munitions. But after research, they discovered the scraps were part of a 2,000-year-old statue of a horse.
The fragments had gilding all over them, meaning it would have had glowing golden hair. They were pretty certain an emperor would have sat on this horse. In the late first century AD, the emperor Domitian ruled much of Europe and Northern Africa. He was a tyrant known for cruelty and extravagance.
A golden statue of him would have been built in Lincoln at the center of the town to demonstrate the reach of his power. But Domitian’s thirst for power was his downfall. He asked people to call him master and god, which made him unpopular with the Senate. The Senate had him killed by one of his own bodyguards.
After his assassination, the Senate declared damnatio memoriae, the damnation of his memory, and wanted to erase every trace of him, including his statue. But little did the Romans know that nearly 2,000 years later, we would be able to piece back together the statue they tried to destroy. Even though the Romans tried to erase him, thanks to these fragments, we haven’t forgotten him. I’m an absolute history geek, and I keep a metal detector in the back of my car at all times.
For me, happiness is snuffling around in a muddy field. I have never found anything exciting, but recently I heard about an intriguing treasure dug up near my home in Kent. Retired plumber Trevor was out with his metal detector near Canterbury when he got a signal that sounded like a tin can. When he moved the loose dirt away, he could see a green outline in a circle, and when he disturbed it, there was a bit of bone inside.
He knew there was something serious there. Trevor took it to Andrew Richardson of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, who identified it as a bronze helmet dated to about the first century BC. It was probably made in Gaul, and it was possible it was acquired in Kent when Julius Caesar raided the area in 55 or 54 BC. A chief warrior could have fought a Roman, slain him, and taken his helmet as a trophy.
When the helmet was excavated, there was another discovery, a small bronze brooch that was an English Iron Age brooch. This was odd, because at such a turbulent time in British history, a Roman helmet was buried in England in what experts say was a traditional Iron Age burial site. Daniel Antoine, curator of human remains at the British Museum, examined the fragments of bone found inside. The hints from the skull suggested it was most likely a female individual.
Contemporary classical records show that Celtic Iron Age women were just as fierce and respected as their male counterparts. Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe, led 100,000 British warriors to attack London and other Roman cities, killing over 70,000. So our Roman helmet may well have been the war trophy of a fierce British woman who encountered the Romans in Kent. Julius Caesar said the people of Kent were the most civilized in Britain.
Having lived here for a couple of decades, I can confirm he was perfectly right. In 2007, local man Barry Seager was out with his metal detector for the very first time near Hadrian’s Wall when he made a sensational discovery. It was his first ever find, and it felt like winning the lottery. He had found eight Roman copper coins.
Their value lay in the story they had to tell. Philip Farnhill, an expert, explained that nearly 1,600 years before the introduction of the euro, these coins were used pretty much everywhere in the Roman Empire. The Romans had created their own single currency, the nummus, to unite a hodgepodge of local currencies across the empire from Scotland to Arabia. Like the euro today, they had a standardized design on one side and a representation of the country of origin on the other.
The euro has lasted for just over a decade, but Roman coinage was used for centuries. One of the reasons it lasted so long was that unlike today’s EU, the currency was administered by a single government. But by AD 400, the Roman government was fragmenting, and as the Romans left, they took the nummus with them. Britain was plunged into the Dark Ages.
This coin may not look much, but it represents what a real financial crisis looks like. We’re not talking about a currency collapse, but the end of currency in Britain, full stop. With no money, trade collapsed, cities were abandoned, and the whole of civilization fell apart, leaving Britain as the prey of violent warlords. It was the most devastating economic meltdown Britain has ever gone through.
In 2008, buried under a farmer’s field in Syston, Lincolnshire, David Barker chanced upon a very odd find. It was about six centimeters long, made of bronze, with what looked like three sculpted figures. It was dated to the fourth century AD. On taking a closer look, experts were surprised to see some rather rude goings on.
I went to the Collection Museum in Lincoln, where the find was on display, to find out what it was. It was a Roman knife handle with three figures: a male, a female in the center with her legs straddling him, and a smaller male figure she had her arms wrapped around. The particularly unusual part was the severed head the younger male was holding in his hand. Erotic imagery was common in everyday Roman life, but I was mystified as to why this knife showed such a provocative scene.
A similar find by an old Roman amphitheater may hold the key. Just as we buy t-shirts and souvenir magazines after leaving a theater today, this might have been a little token souvenir from a theatrical scene or play. My view is that it represents a well-understood fertility scene, more to do with ideas of rebirth and renewal than erotic art. There’s no Roman or classical myth that involves three people and a severed head, so experts think this is evidence of a Celtic Iron Age story.
Celtic warriors would cut off and display the heads of their enemies, and three figures often feature in Celtic mythology. This little treasure represents a merging of two great cultures, the Romans and the Celts. One day over 2,000 years ago, a teenager went to have his horoscope read. He was told he would become the most powerful leader the world had ever known.
In 2011, Peter and Elizabeth Andrews were walking on the Mendip Hills in Somerset when they found a small figure made of bronze, perfectly preserved. One end depicted a goat, the other a fish’s tail. I went to the Museum of Somerset to have a look. It was immaculate, with nothing broken.
The cloven feet, the scales on the fish part, and the fur down its neck. As an astrologer, I recognized the goat and fish combination immediately. It was Capricorn, the sign of rulers and politicians. Perhaps the greatest of them all was the first emperor of Rome, Augustus.
Augustus founded the Roman Empire and ruled for almost forty years. He believed strongly in his horoscope and put the sign of Capricorn on his coins and jewelry. The sign traveled throughout Roman art, and other people used it as an auspicious symbol. But there was one slight problem.
Augustus was not a Capricorn at all. His actual sun sign was Libra, known for balance and harmony, qualities not exactly in keeping with being a ruthless Roman emperor. So Augustus had done what every dictator could do. He simply swapped signs.
But how did our figurine end up in Britain? Expert Dave Richardson thinks he has the answer. Every legion formed or reformed by Augustus had a Capricorn somewhere in its iconography. The emblems were revered almost as religious icons, and the legion followed the standards to the very death.
That’s probably how our Capricorn figurine got here. It’s now a star exhibit at the Museum of Somerset, which raised the 16,000 pounds needed to acquire it. Next time you read your horoscope and hope for good news, remember that your Roman ancestors were doing exactly the same thing over 2,000 years ago. In 1998, treasure hunter Colin Roberts was searching a field near the M4 when he made one of the most significant finds in Welsh history.
It was the first of over 3,800 Roman coins. He couldn’t believe his eyes as thousands of coins came out of the ground. The valuation committee set a figure of 40,000 pounds, which was lovely, but for Colin, it was the finding of the object that mattered, not its worth. The hoard included the heads of numerous emperors, but one coin in particular caught the eye of the curators.
It displayed three heads, making it a unique find. I went to the National Museum of Wales to find out why. The coin showed two emperors, Maximian and Diocletian, who governed the Roman Empire in tandem. But the character on the far left shouldn’t have been there.
His name is Carausius, the Roman governor of Britain, who had ideas above his station. He started referring to there being three emperors, trying to get recognized as a third legitimate ruler. He was able to make this bold move with the help of his finance minister, Allectus. But the temptation to rule was too much for the finance minister, and he stabbed Carausius to death.
Carausius was lost to history, but the coin he created remains as a lasting legacy. I talked to Jude England, a specialist on propaganda, about the coin’s significance. We started with the coin, which was mass media in its time, an everyday item that followed you home. From there, propaganda evolved into radio, film, television, and now social media.
It seems extraordinary that a tiny Roman coin could have grown into Facebook, Google, and Twitter. In 2007, animal handler David Booth bought himself a metal detector for his birthday. On his very first outing, he got a bit of a surprise. He walked about seven paces from his car and got his first ever signal.
The first thing that came up was a ribbon torc, and then he dug all around it and the rest of the hoard came out. It was gold, and it came out of the ground almost pristine. David had unearthed the greatest hoard of gold recently found in Scotland, four gorgeous torcs over 2,000 years old, symbols of great power and wealth worn by someone super important. Deep in the bowels of the museum, Stuart Campbell admitted that the treasure trove gets so many emails about gold that David’s had almost been overlooked.
At first, he almost dismissed it, thinking it was just another gold jewelry email. But when he opened it, there was a bit of swearing in the office that morning. David’s find was valued at 462,000 pounds, which he received in its entirety. But he wasn’t finished yet.
Just a few months ago, lightning struck twice when he found something else, a seal matrix. It was about 900 years old, made of silver, with an intriguing gemstone at its heart. When dipped in molten wax, it was used to form a seal on a document, a bit like a pin number. Losing something like this would be like losing a credit card.
The most intriguing part of the matrix was the seal stone. It wasn’t made in medieval times like the rest of the badge, but was actually Roman, depicting the goddess Juno. The owner had taken a piece of original Roman art and incorporated it into the fashions of the time. To have something like this was to show you were a cultured and learned person.
The seal matrix was valued at 6,000 pounds. For David, the seal was his favorite because he had an idea what it was when he dug it up, and he just loved the detail. It was a medieval credit card. This is a stone from the Antonine Wall, which once cut Scotland in two.
It shows the Romans dominating the Scots who cower under their weapons and horses. It wasn’t always that way, otherwise they wouldn’t have needed the wall. But what’s interesting about the seal is the Scots embracing and reusing Roman style, even though the Romans never really got to grips with their country. Hamish Stewart was metal detecting in a field in Birnie when he found something really unexpected.
Once he had four or five Roman coins, he knew there was a hoard somewhere. They started to strip the field, working late into the night with tractor headlights. When they had finished, they had two hoards of Roman silver coins dating to the late second century AD. But something simply didn’t add up.
The people of Birnie didn’t use coins. They bartered goods and animals, and the Romans had never settled this far north. The answer lies in bribery and corruption. After years of battling with the locals, the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall, marking the boundary of their empire.
They had given up their attempts at conquest, but not their political aims. These coins came straight from the Roman authorities as a bribe to encourage good behavior. For the locals, the silver was exotic and important, a way to show off. For the Romans, it was a tool of control, building up some groups, creating haves and have-nots, interfering and manipulating far beyond the frontier.
It’s a strategy empires still use today. The silver bought an uneasy peace until a new emperor, Septimius Severus, came to power and decided to stop the bribes. When the silver stopped flowing, it caused chaos. The powerful folk had become dependent, almost addicted.
Without Roman objects, they were nothing. Their world was in turmoil. For the Romans, this seemed like great news, but they were wrong. Out of the wreckage of these groups developed another much more warlike enemy, the Picts, creators of amazing art and one of the building blocks of modern Scotland.
These coins represent the beginnings of a new people in Scotland’s history. In 2005, Brian Gibbinson, a French polisher, was walking in fields near Cardiff when he stumbled across some strange hoops of metal in the ground. He took them to his local finds liaison officer and was stunned to discover they were part of a 2,000-year-old set of jewelry, but a section of one was missing. Years later, in an incredible coincidence, the missing link was found by another man, Peter Halford.
Together, the two finders had discovered the most important ancient jewelry ever found in Wales. I went to the National Museum in Cardiff to meet them both. The Boverton Hoard consists of a necklace and two bangles made by Welsh craftsmen 2,000 years ago during the Iron Age. It was decorated with red glass enamel squares and yellow enamel in between, with mirror plates of tinned bronze that would have been quite shiny.
The jewelry hid a secret of Welsh history within its design. The form of the neck collar was associated with Iron Age Celtic people before the Romans, but the decoration and some of the technology was very Romanized. It was a fusion of two cultures, the result of one of the most major events in Welsh history, the invasion of Wales by the Romans. In 48 AD, the Roman governor of Britannia ordered his troops west.
For thirty years, they battled the spirited Welsh tribes before finally completing their conquest. The jewelry would have been worn by someone with immense power and wealth, perhaps a Welsh princess or a warlord’s wife, as a symbol of her status. It was effectively like driving around in a Porsche would be today. The Welsh tribes cooperated with the Romans, sharing ideas as well as technology.
Perhaps it took a woman’s intuition to know that there are more ways than war to impress and resist, to maintain their Welsh identity in the face of occupation. It may come as a surprise that an item on a program about Britain’s greatest treasures isn’t silver or gold or anything bling, but this, a slave shackle. It’s part of a pair that once chained someone’s feet together. This thing really affects me because I know how devastating it is to lose your freedom.
In 1986, I was working as a journalist in Beirut when I was kidnapped by a militant group calling themselves Islamic Jihad. They held me captive for five years, and for most of that time, I was chained up like an animal. The weight of the chain pulling on my ankle was a constant reminder that my life was in their hands. The Roman Empire was built on the back of slavery, and this 2,000-year-old slave shackle is rare evidence that it occurred in Britain.
It was found by landscape gardener Jeremy D. Entwhistle near the old Roman road that runs between Winchester and Silchester. The location of the find may provide a clue as to why this man or woman was enslaved. Maybe they were marched along that road towards an uncertain fate.
Silchester still has the remains of a Roman amphitheater. I went there to meet Dr. John Pearce, an expert in all things Roman. The amphitheater was the O2 arena of its time, where thousands of people gathered for big events.
If what happened here is like what happened in Italy, then gladiators were the culminating part of the day. Part of the lead-up was public execution. People would be beheaded or quite often mauled to death by wild animals let loose. The shackle found by the Roman road could have been worn by a slave who was brought here, probably to their death.
So my slave who may have walked from Silchester wearing this horrible thing could have been brought into the arena, surrounded by thousands of people, hearing the animals roaring, everyone begging for blood. Then wolves or bears would be released, and there was nowhere to run. It’s amazing to think that some 2,000 years ago a man or a woman was chained up using this shackle, probably going through many of the same emotions I experienced in Beirut. I think it’s very important that it is on the list of Britain’s greatest treasures.
It’s a chilling reminder of just how precious our freedom is and how easily it can be taken away. In 2002, ex-Fleet Street photographer Alan Meeks found a unique figurine along with 27 gold and silver plaques in a field in Ashwell, Hertfordshire. Expert Ralph Jackson showed me the collection at the British Museum. It was the largest number of gold plaques of this kind from anywhere in the Roman Empire.
The figurine showed a goddess nobody had ever known anything about before. She was a new goddess for Roman Britain, and she had no face, which was very appropriate because we knew very little about her. But we did know her name: Senuna. It’s just possible that some friction between pagans and Christians made a priest hide these objects in the ground at a time of stress.
Discovering a new goddess isn’t a bad life’s work.
