Residents Unearth 18th Century Gold Coins Worth Almost a Million Dollars During Kitchen Renovation

A couple found a large stash of gold coins while renovating their house. The gold coins were unearthed from the couple's kitchen floor. The treasure trove was found at a home located in Ellerby, East Yorkshire back in 2019, according to BBC. While renovating the house, the couple discovered a pot hidden underneath layers of concrete and 18th-century floorboards that made up the kitchen floor. The coins reportedly belonged to the Fernley-Maisters, a Hull family involved in Baltic trading.

The collection of 260 gold coins dating back to 1610-1727 was eventually sold at an auction hosted by Spink & Son in Bloomsbury, London for a whopping $938,768. The auction house initially thought that the provisional estimate of the coins would be somewhere between $249,010 and $311,262 but the price hiked after the story of the coins got global attention and more than dozens of buyers purchased the coins at the auction. Spink & Sons deduced that the collection was equivalent to $124,440 in modern currency, calling it one of the largest hoards of 18th-century English coins ever found in Britain.

Private collectors from America, Europe, Australia, China, and Japan took an interest in the medieval coins. "120 years of English history hidden in a pot the same size as a soda can," auctioneer Gregory Edmund remarked, per the news outlet. "Picture the scene. You're choosing to re-lay your uneven kitchen floor, you put a pick-axe through the concrete, and just beneath you see a tiny sliver of gold. At the time, you think it must just be a bit of electrical cable but you find it's a gold round disc and beneath it, there are hundreds more. I will never see an auction like this again." The identity of the couple who found the stash was not disclosed to the public. 

Other than that, an imperfectly minted coin from 1720 fetched the highest individual price at £62,400, as reported by the auction house. "It is a wonderful and truly unexpected discovery from so unassuming a find location," Edmund added in the press release, stated CNN. "This find of over 260 coins is also one of the largest on archaeological record from Britain, and certainly for the 18th century period," he added. The press release also shared that the coins "almost certainly" belonged to Joseph Fernley and Sarah Maister who married in 1694 and lived in Ellerby, with Joseph dying in 1725, aged 76. Sarah died aged 80 in 1745 and their family line died soon after.

The auction house revealed how the Maisters were an influential mercantile family from the 16th century to the 18th century. They traded iron ore, timber, and coal from the Baltic states and several generations took up posts as lawmakers in the early 1700s. "Joseph and Sarah clearly distrusted the newly-formed Bank of England, the ‘banknote’ and even the gold coinage of their day because they (chose) to hold onto so many coins dating to the English Civil War and beforehand," Edmund disclosed. "Why they never recovered the coins when they were easy to find just beneath original 18th-century floorboards, is an even bigger mystery. But it is one hell of a piggy bank."