Gold coins go from Tudor treasury to Hampshire garden Hoard to Zurich auction

A trove of coins found in an English back garden will be auctioned in Switzerland in November when they are expected to make more than £230,000.

The gold coins were discovered in April 2020 in a garden in Milford on Sea on the south coast of the New Forest.

A couple, who have asked to remain anonymous, were working on fence posts in their garden when they uncovered metal discs.

With the help of their son, they soon realised they have a treasure trove.

The 70 coins are mostly from the 1530s. Most were minted for Henry VIII.

The oldest coins date back to the 1420s, and the reign of Henry VI. Henry’s mother (the widow of Henry V) married Owen Tudor, and their grandson, Henry VII founded the Tudor dynasty.

The coins in the New Forest Hoard includes the principal coin of each period in which they were struck. No container has ever been found, but experts believe the coins were buried deliberately rather than lost. Image courtesy of NAC.

The coins were designated as treasure, an official status that allows museums to save historically significant finds from leaving the country. But no museum has been able to buy them, and they will sell on November 6 at Numismatica Ars Classica (NAC) in Zurich on November 6 as the New Forest Hoard.

With a face value of around £26, five shillings, five pence and one half pence, the coins were a considerable sum when they were lost or buried. In monetary terms their modern value may be as little as £23,000, but they probably had a purchasing power of over £500,000.

David Guest of David Guest Numismatics, who are handling the sale with NAC, said: “It’s been a wonderful treasure to handle and work with as there haven’t been many hoards that have gone this far back, so there’s a lot of history there.”

The coins are in excellent condition, and expert opinion is that they were probably assembled as savings, and deliberately buried to save them, possibly from the disruption accompanying the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s.

In 2024, the Chew Valley Hoard, or 2,584 Norman Conquest-era silver pennies was sold for £4.3 million. It is the most valuable British coin hoard and was saved for the nation with Heritage Lottery Fund money.