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The Frome Hoard, the second-largest coin hoard ever discovered in Britain, was found in 2010.The 52,503 third- and early fourth-century C.E. coins, struck in debased silver and bronze, weighed a combined 350 pounds.The Roman-era find included a few surprises and a pot that wouldn’t have been able to bear the weight of the haul.
It’s hardly surprising that the clay pot at the center of Britain’s second-largest coin hoard was cracked when archaeologists found it. Buried in a field near Frome, in Somerset, England, the vessel held 52,503 coins—350 pounds of debased silver and bronze depicting 21 Roman emperors and three emperors’ wives. A metal detectorist discovered the haul in 2010, and the arithmetic was immediately obvious: the hoard was far too heavy for the pot that contained it.
Experts with the British Museum believe the Frome Hoard, the largest ever found in a single pot, was buried 1,700 years ago as a communal religious act—the best available explanation for why so many coins ended up in one place.
Dave Crips of Wiltshire discovered the haul in April 2010 while using a metal detector to search a field. From just a foot below the surface, he first pulled out a little bronze radiate Roman coin. He immediately reported the find to authorities. “I’ve been metal detecting since 1988 and it’s the most exciting and important find I’ve made,” he told the BBC soon after the discovery.
Archaeologists swooped onto the site, uncovering a clay pot 18 inches across. The coins were all held within the complete, yet cracked, black burnished ware vessel decorated with a crude pattern of crossed grooves. A small, upside-down, dish-like vessel was placed on top, appearing to fit perfectly.
The team pulled out the coins layer by layer, finding the sheer weight of the coins would have broken the pot had it not been buried empty and then filled in place, further supporting the idea that the site near a bog on high ground served as the location of a communal religious offering.
“I don’t believe myself that this is a hoard of coins intended for recovery,” Sam Moorhead of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, who co-authored a book on the find, said in 2010. “I think what you could see is a community of people who are actually making offerings, and they are each pouring in their own contribution to a communal ritual votive offering to the gods.”
The 52,498 Roman radiates and five silver denarii range in date from 253 to 305 C.E., spanning the central Roman Empire, the Gallic Empire, and the Britannic Empire. During this chaotic period of Roman history, the empire temporarily fractured into rival breakaway states, each minting its own currency to assert independence from Rome. Despite this political upheaval—and the fact that there is no evidence of a major Roman-occupied community in Frome other than a few scattered villas—this massive hoard was buried here, preserving the largest collection of coins from the rebel Britannic Empire ever found.
While more than 8,200 of the coins were too corroded to read, over 44,000 were successfully identified. The coins minted by the central Roman Empire represent 18 different emperors and imperial family members. This group is dominated by more than 6,000 coins from the sole reign of Gallienus, along with 404 depicting his wife, Salonina. By contrast, other figures are barely represented at all—such as Magnia Urbica, wife of the emperor Carinus, who appears on just two of the coins.
The hoard also features a massive sub-collection from the breakaway Gallic Empire, representing eight different rulers and totaling over 28,000 coins—nearly half of which depict the emperor Tetricus I. But the true prize of the find is a group of 766 coins minted under Carausius, a Roman general who rebelled and established his own independent empire in Britain. It remains the largest single find of Carausian coins in history.
Because Carausius ruled from 286 to 293 C.E., his coins are the newest in the entire collection. This chronological detail proved useful during the excavation: when archaeologists retrieved the coins layer by layer, they discovered that these newest coins were actually mixed halfway down the pot. This unusual layering proved that the entire hoard was buried all at once as a single, massive event, rather than accumulated slowly over decades.
Whether buried for safekeeping or as a communal religious offering, the treasure was of immense worth. With an ancient metal value equivalent to about four years of pay for a Roman legionary, the hoard was legally declared treasure and acquired for £320,250 by the Museum of Somerset in Taunton, where it remains on display today.
Dave Crisp, the metal detectorist who first unearthed the pot in a Somerset field, was proud of his historic find but knew it might not be the last. “There are,” he said, “a lot more pots out there.”
Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.