ABSTRACT
The circumstances of their discovery made the Colton’s-Field coins worthy of particular note; but finds of antiquities, especially coins and medals, were anything but rare in seventeenth-century England.2 An “infinit store of them”, wrote William Camden right at the start of the century, “is every where found among us”. He was right, coins were being uncovered almost daily. Contemporary literature teams with examples. Camden himself noted some “antique pieces of Roman Money,... very lately digged up... neere unto” St. Donat’s Castle. In 1657, Elias Ashmole reported to William Dugdale his discovery of “some small Trenches lately made to draine” a meadow in the valley of the Avon, where, he had been told, “Roman Coyne is often found”. Thirty years later,
at Henedon nigh Clare in Suffolk, the Sexton, as he was digging a Grave in the ChurchYard, met with a Skull; and near it his spade broke a Yellow Earthen Pot, wherein were many Silver pieces of Saxon Mony.
