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?
In: 590
Fun fact. The English diarist Samuel Pepys buried a Parmesan cheese in his garden, during the Great Fire of London in 1666. It was incredibly valuable at that time.
His house and his valuables survived.
The fate of the cheese is unknown.
A piece of the explanation is that before centralized banks existed and became widely trusted by the public, average people buried their valuables in their yards as a way of keeping them safe. People become forgetful, lose track of where they buried their stuff after weather changes the landscape (ie. Marker tree gets blown down in a storm), family member who knows the location dies, they move, any number of things happens, and the valuables remain buried until decades later when archeologists and treasure hunters stumble across it.
An example of this is Jewish and German families who buried money in pots at the beging of wwii believing they would return in short time and reclaim their valuables, only to forget about them or becoming unable to return to the burial location.
wars and maurading gangs of pillagers. when danger was near a wealthy family, or a village would bundle their stuff up and hide/bury it. Travelers were particularly vulnerable and so would hide their cash/gold before going to bed at night.
well sometimes they didn’t get back. murderous aholes upset at not getting any loot would kill the lot of them (or more likely kill the men, rape the women and take the children for slaves)
I’m fairly certain that every cache found is evidence of barbarity and evil.
Another important reaaon ia that the British Treasury is quite generous with treasure inventors.
Contrast it with France, where archeological looting is rampant
So this is gonna blow your mind but England has had four separate human habitations the earliest being about 900k years ago with what they think was homo erected or hidlebergensis. Hippopotamus is the only animal bones they have found without signs of human butchering.
So starting after the last ice age the British isle have been pretty well covered with modern humans ever since and people drop shit all the time or hide stuff and die, or never make it back or a village 6000 years ago used to be where a field is now. The top 2 or 3 archeological schools in the world are in England because there is just literally so much stuff, all the time, everywhere.
Edit : Ive been listening to a lot of history hit podcasts The ancients with Tristan Hughes and Gone Medieval with Cat Jarmin and Matt Lewis
because magnitcant happenings did thus occur back in the olden times,
not poor broke bums fightin, layden with gold vikings battlin tha brits slayn there and burried by time
now farmer John Smith with his deteector in some old field or other gets tha thrill find of his life, in the ritch ritch soil of great britain
gosh, i can only image wats burried in Norway, but they dont allow that kinda stuff, their phylosophy is, leave the burried burried in the ground so all that anchient mana and magic stays in the soil and blesses Norway
It’s really hard to hide things without leaving some sort of evidence.
Sure, you could pack it in the wall, drywall, spackle and paint over it but now the house smells like fresh paint and one wall has clearly been freshly painted.
Also, what’s to say you will still have access to the house in a decade anyway?
Bury it, use landmarks like how a rock, tree and mountain lineup and you can go back anytime to retrieve, if you’re still alive.
If not, someone on Reddit posts it.
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Britain has a lot of history, Julius Caesar even popped over for a few weeks.
You’ll get a bit of bias from English languages and media, but this sort of stuff is found all over Europe too.
Sometimes its graves and burials, other times it might be hoards, essentially buried treasure.
Because England has been relatively heavily populated for a long time.
If you mention to someone in America that your house was built in 1909 they’ll probably comment on how OLD that house is. In England they’d likely not bat an eye. Our war of Independence was fought a little over a couple hundred years ago. England as a united country has existed for well over a thousand years (Athelstan was crowned King of the English in the early 10th century). Before that it was colonized by Rome.
People drop/lose stuff. People get in wars. People bury stuff to protect it and then die without telling people. Over time things happen.
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