England: Gold coins found under kitchen floor of house

England
17th century gold coins found under kitchen floor fetch couple £745,000

The Ellerby gold hoard is one of Britain’s largest and most spectacular gold coin finds. For a couple renovating an old house, it can be life-changing.

It was the dream of a couple from the British town of Ellerby near Hull. The two bought an 18th-century house and renovated it bit by bit. When they went to repair the kitchen floor by removing the old floorboards, they made an unexpected discovery. One that will help them continue to finance the renovations…

Because what the couple found under the floorboards was none other than a classic pot of gold. Coins that are hundreds of years old. Evidently someone once hid them here, in a clay jar, for safekeeping for the future, and never retrieved them themselves or told their descendants about their hiding place. And so the treasure remained undisturbed for more than three hundred years, hidden in the kitchen of the old house.

The gold hoard may date from 1745

There are a total of 264 coins dating from 1610 to 1727. Historians have been able to trace the treasure’s history back to a wealthy local business family: the Masters. These amassed a small fortune through intensive trade with port cities on the Baltic Sea. The family headquarters are still in a magnificent town house in Hull, but they were also in Ellerby. A daughter of the family married there: Sarah Master lived there with her husband Joseph Fearnley, and lived there even after she was widowed.

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Sarah, who died in 1745, or her husband before that, once hid the pot of gold under the kitchen floor. In any case, it was a real blessing for the couple who finally found it: the Ellerby treasure is considered one of the largest gold coins ever found in Great Britain and has now been auctioned – experts estimate it at 250,000 British pounds. Hence: Current British Pounds. It sold for £745,000.

proof’s: “Yorkshire Post”, “NBC News”