The Hoxne Hoard: the lost hammer that found Britain’s largest Roman treasure
In November 1992 a man went into a Suffolk field to find a friend’s hammer. He found fifteen thousand Roman coins instead.
The hammer
On 16 November 1992, Eric Lawes — a retired gardener and amateur metal detectorist — went into a field in the village of Hoxne, Suffolk, to help his friend Peter Whatling, the tenant farmer, find a hammer he had lost there. Lawes found the hammer. He also found, in the same field, the largest hoard of late Roman gold and silver ever discovered in Britain.
He did the thing that made everything that followed possible: he stopped digging and reported it. The site was excavated by archaeologists rather than by the man with the detector, which is why the hoard’s arrangement in the ground was recorded, and why the wooden chest it lay in — oak, roughly 60 by 45 by 30 centimetres, with smaller boxes of yew and cherry inside — is known at all.
The hammer was recovered too. Whatling donated it to the British Museum, where it is displayed alongside the treasure it led to.
What was in the chest
| Item | Count |
|---|---|
| Gold solidi | 569 |
| Silver siliquae | 14,212 |
| Silver miliarenses | 60 |
| Bronze nummi | 24 |
| Coins in total | 14,865 |
| Silver spoons and ladles | 98 |
| Gold jewellery | 29 pieces |
| Pepper pots | 4 |
| Other silver tableware and objects | around 200 items in all |
The objects people go to see are the silver “Empress” pepper pot, cast as a figure of a woman; a silver tigress that was once a handle, 480 grams and nearly 16 centimetres long; a gold body chain; and a bracelet inscribed “VTERE FELIX DOMINA IVLIANE” — use this happily, Lady Juliane — which is as close as the hoard comes to telling us who owned it.
Why it matters
The latest coins are of Honorius and Constantine III, which puts the burial no earlier than 408 — the last years of Roman Britain, when the legions had gone and whoever owned this wealth had reason to put it in the ground. Nobody came back for it. It is not only the largest late Roman hoard from Britain; it is the largest collection of fourth- and fifth-century gold and silver coins found anywhere in the former Roman Empire.
It was declared treasure trove and valued at £1.75 million, which the Crown paid and which was split between Lawes and Whatling — finder and landowner. The British Museum acquired the hoard in April 1994. It is in Room 49.
How Buried Worlds VR retells it
Hoxne is the fourth destination in the game, and the one that never tells you anything. There are no tutorial prompts. Four clue signs lead from a broken goat enclosure out to a dead oak; you detect and dig up a hammer that is worth nothing; you carry a fallen fence panel back and drive the nail with real blows. Then a field opens that was sealed before, and a single signal brings up not a coin but a block of soil, lifted to chest height, that you brush down stroke by stroke until nineteen pieces come out of it: ten siliquae, six solidi and three silver spoons.
The place is real and the history is real. Eric Lawes and Peter Whatling were real. The farmer you meet in the game, and the note he leaves you, are invented — and the game says so, because a documented find with living people in it deserves that line drawn clearly.
- Hoxne in the gameThe lost hammer, the fence, the block of soil.
- Roman Britain, Room 49The British Museum gallery where the hoard and the hammer are displayed.
Read next
- The gameA VR metal detecting game built around the signal.
- CarcassonneAnother real place — fished with a magnet rather than dug.