How do people keep finding treasure in British fields that is hundreds of years old and why is it scattered there in the first place?
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Lots of historical reasons for finding treasure sometimes its as simple as a person in the past crossing a field a losing a broach or piece of jewellery and it gets buried with rain and sits there for hundreds of years till someone finds it either by turning the soil over with a tractor ploughing or with a metal detector.
I do know one reason people keep finding hordes of coins in British fields its from time of the fall of the Roman empire.
You see when the Roman empire started to fail it was not over night it took hundreds of years, but the start of it was at the edges of the empire which also included Britain.
Support and man power was taken away from these areas and brought back into the centre of the empire to prop it up.
One aspect of this was the lack of faith in the Roman currency and its value dropped. People back then thought it was only a temporary thing there is no way an empire as big as the Roman Empire could collapse so they took all there Roman coins and buried them, you see there where no banks back then so if you had a lot of wealth the ground is best place to keep it if you hide it good enough and it hid well enough that it was not found till hundreds of years later.
Funny thing is that when the people stopped using the Roman coins they went back to bartering thinking its only going to be a few years and they could dig up there coins again. I think it was like 800 years later coins started to be used again.
The British attempt at conquering the world and manifest destiny and whatnot. They started wars and stole treasures and valuables from all cultures across the world. When they were retaliated against by many different nations, they folded under military might and in an act of spite, the British tried to destroy the treasures or toss them in many battlefields
This happens all the time in Mexico, mainly in the main areas of Veracruz, Puebla, Mexico City. They were the very populated areas during the Spanish migration and Spanish-American wars. I remember my relatives in central Mexico talking about digging holes in random areas and hiding all their gold and silver in case of attacks or thieves. To this day you always hear people finding treasures in tin cans or wrapped in cloth in properties they inherited or purchased.
Because in the old days humans were alive too and they had houses and towns and stuff, and then they died and it got buried. Commonly known as “history”
Ancient Britons loved to throw valuable things away, it was part of their religion. (Hence things like putting a sword in a lake.)
you can keep what you find in UK so many things found in other countries are registered as found there
As well as what the others said about burying things for safekeeping the British had a habit of dumping items in rivers and streams for unknown ‘ritual’ purposes thousands of years ago. Like coins and broken swords and random objects maybe worshipping some kind of god related to rivers.
Those items might end up elsewhere if the river moves or dries up over time or they just get washed up some place.
For one thing, length and continuity of habitation as others have mentioned, and that comes with call the caches and valuables stashed over a thousand years of conflict.
Additionally, consider litter. You have a busted axe head, your miles from town or anyone whoncan repair it and it’s weighing you down. It’s junk. Toss it way.
After a few centuries that path through a wooded grove gets swallowed up by a modern town, they excavate for a basement and find the remnant of an axe.
Maybe a traveller died in the wilderness off the beaten path, nature reclaims the body, gradually it gets pulled down into the soil, sediment buries it, etc…
When we’ve been living and dying on the same land for a century we leave a mark.
What do you think our landfills are going to look like a thousand years from now?
It was super common for Vikings to bury hoards of gold in secret places. It would act as a safety deposit box for them while alive and the believed they would have access to it in Valhalla. They literally believed you could take it with you.
We live in very old place, the original house is mentioned in the Doomsday book. We’ve found all kinds of stuff oer the years but still waiting to find anything of huge value.
Gardening found us a sword which was considered to be friom the English civil war and which we have loaned to our local museum for the last 15 odd years.
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