Gone Medieval - Edward III's Failed Leopard Coin

Episode Date: September 11, 2021

The leopard coin, which is considered the last 'unsuccessful' was re-called shortly after release. But did this coinage make more of an impact than we know? Matt is joined by Dr. Helen Geake, archaeologist and Finds liaison officer in Norfolk for The Portable Antiquities Scheme to discuss the significance of the discovery. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hits. I'm Matt Lewis. In the news recently, a Edward III leopard gold coin was found amongst a hoard of coins, and it turned out to be an incredibly rare piece of treasure. I'm delighted to be joined today by Helen Geek, who is a fines liaison officer in Norfolk for the Portable Antiquities Scheme that deals with all of these great treasure finds to tell me a little bit more about this coin and then more about what the portable antiquity scheme does. So thank you very much for joining us, Helen. It's a pleasure.

So what can you tell us about this gold coin that was discovered fairly recently? Well, it's known as a leopard, but it was worth three shillings, and it's called a leopard because it's got the picture of a leopard on it. So I suppose if you think about our old 10p, it used to have a picture of a lion, a leopard is just another name for a lion. And in a way, our leopard is kind of the forerunner of that 10p piece. But it's made of gold, three shillings, so it's worth 36 pence, and that's at a day rate of one or two pence per day for an unskilled labourer. It was worth quite a lot of money in the Middle Ages. So it's issued by Edward III in 1344. And the kind of interesting thing about it is that it's the last really unsuccessful gold

in England. And why it's unsuccessful is a thing that we might chat about later, I think. But the really interesting thing about this is not just that it's a rare coin. The really interesting thing, and the reason why it came through the treasure process is that it was found together with another gold coin. And this was a noble that belonged to the first successful gold coinage. So about seven or eight years later, it was issued, again, by a gold coinage. And it was issued, again, by Edward III. At this point, times have changed, even though it's only a few years later, times have changed and the gold coinage then caught on. And what we've never known before is what happened to all the leopards. Because it was so unsuccessful, we find very few of them.

And they've never before been found with one of the later gold coins that did kind of work as a coin. So the fact that they seem to have been, well, they're found together, so presumably they were lost together in a purse. It's our first hint to. it might mean that they were both used in the same way, that although the leopard was, in inverted commas, unsuccessful, it was successful enough to end up in a purse with a successful gold coin. These are all nuts ideas, you know, really, the idea of how a gold coin could be successful or not.

The whole field of medieval numismatics is just so arcane and so mad, that it's really nice to be able to learn a bit more about it and talk about it a bit. Yeah, and numismatics are study of coins, is that right? Yes, from the Roman nummus. Yes, yes. The Roman word nummus apparently means coin. So that's where we get numismatics from. Fabulous.

And so why do we think that this gold leopard was unsuccessful? Why do we feel there was unsuccessful gold coinage so closely followed by successful releases of gold coinage? That is a really good question. I personally am not sure. I've been trying to work out whether that's because experts generally aren't sure. or whether I just don't understand it because I'm not really a medieval numismatist, not at all. You know, I work with them. I can just about manage to do that. But I'm not steeped in it in the way that proper numismatists are.

Now, what people say, what you'll see on the Wikipedia page and all sorts of things like that is, oh, the gold was overvalued in terms of the silver. Now, I really don't know what that means. I mean, can't they explain a bit more? If the gold is overvalued, what does that mean about the coin? Does that mean that the coin was worth more in face value than the gold it contained? Or was it worth less? Because at this point, what you've got to think about is that a coin is really just a piece of precious metal of a known weight with an authority stamped on it.

So although you can use it as a kind of token, you know, I've got this leopard and it is worth three shillings. And therefore, if I hand it over to you, I've given you three shillings. You can also use it as a piece of bullion. So I've got this thing that weighs, whatever it weighs, three and a half grams or something. I have now handed you over three and a half grams of gold. In whatever form, it doesn't matter that it's a coin with a leopard on it. It's just a weight of gold. Exactly.

You could argue that all the coin means is that you don't have to get out your coin balance and your coin weight and check it. So that's something that I don't really understand. And it's really important, whether it was overvalued or undervalued. If the face value was more than the gold, then it would have been. been seen as kind of bad money. I mean, do you remember a few years ago when there were all those counterfeit £1 coins going round? And if you got one in your change, you tried to put it into a parking meter, didn't you? Or tried to get rid of it as quickly as you could, because you didn't want to have it. You'd received it in your change in good faith. And you didn't want it to suddenly turn

into not a coin. You didn't want to lose it as a coin. When I was a child, Irish coins were like this. People had come back from Holiday in Ireland and they'd have an Irish Temp, which wasn't worth as much as a British Tempe, and if you've got one in your change, you just quickly tried to pass it off in a big handful of silver. And because of that, bad money, it goes through circulation very, very quickly. It churns around. It gets moved from hand to hand very quickly. And that's why they say bad money drives out good. Because of good money, you're more likely to keep in your piggy bank hang on to. You know that it's reliable. So we really do need to know if this coin is overvalued or undervalued. Now, it's just possible that it wasn't either, because this is another thing about

medieval gold coins. Until now, they hadn't been used in England. And in 1331, which is just 13 years before our leopard is minted, gold coins were actually banned in England. So if you had a foreign one, if you'd sold something to a foreign merchant, say you'd gone to France with your wool and you'd been paid in gold, you had to officially exchange your gold coin at a port for silver pennies. The silver penny was all there was, the only thing that was legal tender in England. So it seems like a lot of people just didn't see gold as money. It was more like bullion. It just wasn't the right kind of thing. So you didn't have confidence in that coin. And that brings in a really interesting thing about numismatics. It's not just hard economic facts.

Well, I suppose economic facts are never just hard facts, are they? It's full of Popular psychology. If you don't see something as being trustworthy in terms of money, it almost stops being money. I mean, that's where we get things like the financial crash of 2008 from. It brings it right up to the present day. You need to believe in money for money to exist, a bit like fairies. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if there's a combination of things going on with this leopard being unsuccessful then that just before it's released, gold is illegal as a tender. So, everyone is a little bit wary of it. If it's worth kind of 36 shillings when people are earning a penny or two a day, you've got coin here that's worth a month's wages to most people. Well, that's unobtainable,

probably not worth having. And as you say, there's just a sense that it's not a believable, the adoption of new technology maybe. It's the equivalent of making the change from a landline to a mobile phone a while ago or people not believing that computers and laptops would take off. It's this new fad that no one's really going to pick up. Yes, gold. How can that work? How could that possibly work. Like my dad saying, how can one computer talk to another computer? Yes, quite. Well, down the phone. Yeah, that's it. I know what a silver penny is. That's my landline. Why do I want a gold coin, which is a mobile phone? It makes no sense. And yet we look back now and think, how did people cope without mobile phones? Even in the space of a few years, suddenly we get a successful release of

gold currency. Yes. And it turns out that there is an event between 1331 and 1344, something happens, which means that Edward III does start to want his own gold coinage. And that is the Hundred Years' War. That kicks off in the late 1330s. And it seems that Edward III spends a lot of money on bribing people to be his allies or possibly subsidising people to be his allies. And he borrows the money to do this. And because the only people that you can borrow this amount of money from in Europe are the Tuscan bankers of Florence,

they mint their coins in gold. So he borrows all this enormous amount of gold and spreads it around Europe, most of which is never paid back, incidentally. I did wonder what had happened to that debt or whether the royal family actually went bankrupt at that stage. So gold coins suddenly does become more familiar in England among the top rank. So maybe that's why he has a go at making his own gold. Okay, that one doesn't work, but then he tries a bit later again. And finally, this new one that our noble, our second coin is part of, that one sticks.

And it might be one of the ways in which I could come back to the kind of overvalue, undervalue, that I have to freely admit I don't understand, is that the noble coinage is a little bit more valuable in terms of face value. It's the same amount of gold, but instead a leopard is worth three shillings. And the equivalent coin in the noble coinage is three shillings and fourpence. So presumably it cost Edward III a bit more to be minting it because he had to pay in inverted commerce. I don't know what it means when you pay for gold. Do you pay for gold in silver? Do you pay for gold in gold? I mean, what's going on? But it was another 4p that was put on each of these coins. So maybe that helped as well. Yeah. I think just take it back to the mobile phones. I'm thinking maybe

the Edward III leopard is something like those brick mobile phones. We had the 80s that all the yuppies walked around with and the noble is more like the arrival of the iPhone that makes it a little bit more accessible and realistic for everybody and it's just the one that's accepted. I think that's a very good analogy because if you're old enough to remember the bricks, back in, say, the 1990s, having a mobile phone was a real status symbol. It wasn't terribly useful, but it was a real status symbol. And these early gold coins, it seems like that was all they were good for. They were good for arms giving. You know, if you gave money to the poor, really ostentatiously say in a big cathedral at Easter, look, here is my enormous gold coin,

which I'll wave around and the light will glint off it. That's what they were used for. They weren't used as coins. Yeah. And can you tell us a bit more broadly why coins are an important part of archaeological study? What kind of things can they tell us when they're found in these big hordes? Oh, yes. Now, that's an interesting question because a lot of archaeologists don't really get coins. So it's interesting you asked me the question, how are they useful for archaeological study? They're incredibly useful for historical study. And quite a lot of numismatists are originally historians, which leads to a little bit of conflict sometimes. Because if you're thinking about coins, especially early coins, you're often dealing with quite high-end stuff.

You're dealing with politics, with kings and queens. Every coin is a little bit of political advertising. So with our leopard, it's the same animal as the lions on the England shirt today. It's the epitome of the king of Royal England. A lion and a leopard are the same animal, in essence, at this time. So the king of England is showing himself. He's putting his brand on this coin. And a lot of archaeologists got into archaeology because they were a bit fed up with the kind of great man theory of history. That history is just one damn thing after another, it's a battle, it's a so on and so forth. And I originally got into archaeology because I was more interested in how people lived. So I wasn't terribly interested in the ebb and flow of

politics. What I was interested in was how do you do the washing up before washing up liquid? How do you wash your hair before shampoo? What did we use before plastic washing up bowls? And then that takes you further back and back and back. And you think, well, without a zip, how do things work without a zip? And then did people always have glue? Did people always have string? This thing I'm using, what was it like 100, 200, 300, 400 years ago? That's what I was always interested in. And coins, I mean, I'm terribly interested in how you work and how you physically work an economy with only silver pennies. So you get people like King John, who has to take 9,000 marks, which is two thirds of a pound, out of Corfe Castle. And it ends up.

He's got 66 sacks of silver pennies, which he has to put on carts. And how difficult is that? How much would they fall through holes in the sack? You know, it's not important this kind of stuff, is it? It's just daily life. But that's what I find fascinating. Now, numismatists, they look at the important stuff. It's not part of daily life necessarily, but it's what king had the power to tax in what way. How do you pay for a war? How do you pay for a war? how do you pay for your castle? What can you do with money? And the reason that we're so obsessed with coins is that although we've got the account, so we know that a certain amount of money

in inverted commerce, so much of this is in inverted commerce, money was spent on things. We don't know how much of that was in the form of coin or how much in the form of debts and so on. coins survive and they're really seductive, bright, shiny, beautiful objects. But things like tally sticks, which were a record of debt, they don't survive. We've got almost no exchequer tally sticks. Do you know the crazy story of what happened to the tally sticks? No, no. Apparently, tally sticks were used right up until the 18th century.

They're willow sticks, literally sticks, and you record on them a debt with a person and the amount and then you split them in two so that you've got half of the information on one and half the information. It's like a duplicate, like a carbon copy. And the grain of these sticks means that you can be absolutely sure which belongs with which. So one half is called the stock, and that's apparently the origin of our idea of stocks and shares. One half is called the stock, and that goes with the person who's got either the credit or the debit. And the other half is called the foil. And that stayed with the exchequer. Now, this went on for hundreds and hundreds of years. And would have made an most immense and incredible historical resource.

But after their use was stopped in the 18th century, they hung around for a bit until 1834, when it was decided that we needed to tidy up. These were of no use anymore, and they should all be burnt. So they shoveled all these centuries-old dry twigs into a stove underneath the houses of Parliament. and the stove set fire to the panelling, and the panelling set fire to the ceiling and the ceiling set fire to the beams. And in the end, we had the fire of the houses of Parliament.

And that's what ended up with us getting the Palace of Westminster that we have today. It's a rebuilt 19th century palace because of the burning of the tally sticks. So there's kind of two awful tragedies. We lost the medieval Palace of Westminster because they were burning historic records, which is just so frustrating. Bad enough trying to destroy one historical record without taking down an entire medieval palace in the process as well as double disaster? Exactly.

So that is one of the reasons that we focus on coins because they survive and they provide a kind of real world calibration to all these account records so where you've got a scribe writing down that the king has agreed that he will borrow or lend a certain amount to a certain person. I wonder whether the gold coin then comes partly out of, as you say, Edward III, having to create these alliances everywhere which he's buying. And as you mentioned, John is lugging around hundreds of bags of silver pennies? And is there a need to make that easier to do? You know, you don't want to carry 20-pound coins around when you can carry a paper 20-pound note.

Is it that kind of consolidating the currency? If it's not in use, I guess the bartering economy is still fairly active. So people every day aren't really, no? Well, no. No, you say that. But barter is a myth, you know. Logically, it makes sense. And Adam Smith thought it up in the 18th century.

But no one's ever managed to find a society that uses barter. What they do instead is they have this system of debt obligations so that someone gives you a chicken and you know that in some way you owe them the equivalent of a chicken. And all these debts, they tend to be not calibrated in chickens. You know that the chicken is worth, I don't know, three farthings or one and a half p or something. therefore you need to get one and a half peas worth of something out of the person who's given you the chicken. And it's like a tab in a bar. You know, you tot it all up until the end of the evening and then you pay it off.

And you tot it all up until often it's a whole year that these medieval debts are over. And then they clear their debts at the end of the year after the harvest has come in, which is a sensible way of doing it. Yeah, fascinating. So there's an ebb and flow in between. Yeah. And then it's all kind of settled at the end. end of the year. Yes, which is something that we know about from things like, I don't know, is it Jane Austen novels or Charles Dickens novels where people are incredibly poor,

they get credit at the corner shop. And the poor shopkeeper is always saying, I do need you to settle your bills. And they say, oh, next month or something. This kind of thing, it's quite recent that we have stopped doing that. And I suppose it's because we've got banks and credit cards and our debts are not to individuals. They're to these faceless giant banks. Yeah, a slightly different process. Hello, I'm James Rogers and over on the history hit warfare podcast, we're marking the 20th anniversary of 9-11. We welcome Joe Dittmar, who was on the 105th floor of Tower 2. He takes us through his personal experience of surviving 9-11 and his escape on that day.

We also welcome Jessica Doulog, who provides a different perspective. She served at Ground Zero, and she tells us about the efforts to fight the raging fires and evacuate thousands of people via boat. We're also joined by world-leading experts on the history of terrorist hijackings and the history of terror attacks on New York City going back to the 1920s. Join us for this special commemorative week on the history hit warfare podcast. The Edward III Leopard, it's part of a coroner's inquisition at the moment to determine its proper ownership. So what is the system behind medieval treasures like this? We mentioned the port about antiquity scheme, kind of what is that and what does it do? That's a very good question.

and in fact takes us back to King John again, would you believe. King John is completely obsessed with money. And it's during his reign that it's first decided that if there's anything valuable kicking about where you can't find the owner, it belongs to the king, which is very feudal and medieval. Very convenient for John. Yes, yes. And this amazingly carries on again right up to the 19th century. And then in the 1880s, there's a series of laws passed which begin to,

to show that a resource that only some people have used, in fact, belongs to all of us. So it's when the first laws are passed for things like you can't just kill wild birds and put their feathers in your hats. There's the first laws passed to protect wildlife because wildlife in a sense belongs to us all. And that's the first kind of tweak to these medieval treasure laws. The valuables don't go to the crown anymore. They go to museums. Well, they do legally go to the crown, but there was a time when they literally went to the crown. And there is a rumour that there was a famous bronze age gold cup that actually did go to George V. And he used it to hold his shaving kit.

It's now in the British Museum. I don't know how true that is. But the system was changed so that objects went to museums instead, which is obviously logical. And at that point, rewards began to be paid because if you found something, what was going to stop you selling it on the black market? well, paying a reward that was equivalent to what you'd get if you sold it legitimately was the thing to do to prevent objects going on to the black market. So rewards began to be paid. And so the system had been tweaked a bit and it staggered on for just over another hundred years. But the medieval law was still in place, even though we'd fixed some of the ways in which it was worked, you know, like the Crown gave everything to museums and we paid rewards.

it still said that you had to prove that things had been buried with the intent of recovery, so kind of lost in inverted commas, and where you couldn't find the person who'd buried it all their heirs. And I'm old enough just to have participated in this system. I would have to go into a court and swear that this person in the Bronze Age had deposited an object with the intention of coming and back and getting it again. And I couldn't say that about intention of somebody in the Bronze Age. age. And people who really knew about the Bronze Age wouldn't do this because they said that if a Bronze Age person had buried it in the ground, it was probably an offering to the gods.

So they didn't intend to come back and get it. So this intent to recover was a real problem. So eventually in the 1990s, we managed finally to get a new Treasure Act, which took away that and redefined treasure into something much more sensible. And there'd been a lot of conversations about whether enough was being offered to museums through the Treasure Act. And of course, enough wasn't. But the idea of trying to make people report everything they found was so difficult that the government also set up the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which is a voluntary scheme.

We will record anything over 300 years old, but it's what's offered to us to record. It's not compulsory. It's not legal. The only things that you have to report by law are the things that are covered by the Treasure Act. and I could at this stage take a deep breath and go on to tell you what is covered by the Treasure Act. There are essentially four things, and if you can stand it, I will tell you those four things. Yeah, absolutely. You know, if I go digging in my garden and I find something interesting, what do I need to legally do here?

What do I need to declare under the Treasure Act? What would you like me to report to the Portable Antiquity Scheme? What happens if I find something? Well, first of all, is it 300 years old or more? Which isn't easy. to work out. So it helps that there's somebody friendly in every county who will tell you if they think it's 300 years old or more. So me or somebody like me. If it's 300 years old or more and it's made of gold or silver, and that's defined as being over 10% gold or silver, then it falls under the Treasure Act, apart from coins. And this is because there are so many silver coins out there. If we tried to put them all into the Treasure Act, then we would cost the State a lot more.

money than we do at the moment. So coins have to be in groups and a group is defined as two or more gold or silver coins. But we also want to be able to catch hordes of coins that aren't gold or silver because the aim of this is not to make money for the king, as it was 800 years ago. The aim is to get important finds into museums and you've got to get a middle way between something as easy to define and something that's important. And a coin hoard is really easy to define. So it's two or more gold or silver coins or ten or more coins

that don't have 10% gold or silver. So that's not coins. They have to be 300 years old, gold or silver. Coins have to be in hordes and 300 years old. Then we have prehistoric base metal hordes. Now, this was a little extension of the Treasure Act. About 20 years ago, it was realised that coin hordes were being captured,

but non-coin hordes weren't. And prehistoric ones are the largest category and the most interesting. So an iron age bronze age metal hoard, that had to be under the Treasure Act as well. So that's two or more. What would that kind of thing be if it's not coins? We're talking belt buckles, you know, worked metals, anything like that, no? Well, that's a conversation for another day. Buckles hadn't been invented.

Okay. So all the things that you think, how could they? anybody live without them, knitting, buckles, hadn't been invented. So it's axes, because in the Bronze Age, a lot of activity is directed to clearing forest for agriculture. So axes have a particular importance and they're buried in groups. In the Iron Age, it's often horse harness. Again, horses are terribly important in the Iron Age world. They've got some kind of spiritual significance. They appear on coins. So it's tools, it's chariots, it's horse harness, it's jewelry.

Sometimes you get a horde of bracelets and neck rings. But the interesting thing about prehistoric hordes is they usually are in some way, probably offerings to the gods. So we can see belief systems there. So they're interesting for all sorts of reasons. And like coin hordes, they're also part of understanding the economy and wealth and politics. So they tick lots of boxes. And then number four category of treasure is a really sensible one.

It's anything that's also found with treasure. Because in the bad old days of treasure trove before our new treasure act, if you found a hoard of gold coins in a pot, the pot wouldn't be part of the treasure trove system. So museums sometimes found they couldn't acquire the container, which meant that they couldn't understand it properly. and they certainly couldn't display it properly. So anything that's found with is also treasure,

so as not to break up the rationale of the group. Yeah, I suppose it keeps all the context. Exactly. With the original find. And there must be instances as well where the container that it's found in might be more valuable than the two or three silver pennies that might be clustered as treasure that are in it.

How do you mean valuable? Do you mean valuable in terms of money or valuable in terms of knowledge? Both. I mean, I meant mainly knowledge, but I guess maybe both. Because the Holy Grail for a museum, of course, is something that's worth an enormous amount in terms of knowledge, but worth almost nothing in terms of money, because the museum that's acquiring the treasure has got to raise the money for the reward.

So sometimes things that we would like to claim under the Trazier Act can't be claimed because raising the money for the reward is just so difficult. Yeah, yeah. I'm remembering there was a Richard the third gold noble coin that was found fairly recently that was purchased by Buckingham Old Jail Museum. I think they had fairly big appeal to try and raise the necessary funds to kind of secure it and get it into the museum. And I think that's due to go on display it sometime fairly soon as well. Yes, it leads to this thing which I call the Mick Aston question. Mick Aston, his major research project during the years he was on Time Team was the full understanding of a medieval village called Shapwick in Somerset. And he had to obviously raise money to pay people to work there and pay for equipment, pay for all the excavation.

costs and the analysis and so on and so forth. And he always found it very difficult to raise this amount of money to keep the thing going, to essentially pay to fund all this amazing increase in knowledge. And there was a treasure case, something, I can't remember exactly what it was, that was found by metal detectors at Shapwick, and it was valued at the same amount that would have kept the excavation going for 10 years. And it was no way. problem to find this money because there's a system in place, but it was really difficult to find the money for Mick's project, which the imbalance in terms of bang for your buck was huge. And Mick kept saying, why can I not get the money to research the whole village where one

tiny aspect is found and the money floods in? So I call that the Mick Astin question. Yeah, an odd imbalance in the amount of knowledge you might gain from some. thing because it's seen to have some kind of intrinsic value that we give it, I guess. Exactly. And the Portable Antiquities Scheme, it's a database that I think it's accessible. Anyone can go and have a poke around in this. What kind of exciting things might we be able to find on there? What's the most interesting thing you've ever come across in your time as a liaison officer?

Oh, well, the most interesting thing, the most extraordinary thing that I still can't really believe that I ever handled and I can still feel a little plop of the heaviness of it in my hand. that's there. And what would you search for? Because one thing I have to say about our database is it's very comprehensive and it's very wonderful and you can get anything out of it that you want, but it's not easy. It was designed in 2003 and although it's been tweaked a bit, it's really showing its age. So every record has a number. And if you have the number, which is a six-digit number with a prefix on it, it's a terrible thing to have to remember, you can find anything you like. But if you don't have the number. You need to know how to search. Where can people find the database?

The database is at finds.org.uk forward slash database or just type portable antiquities scheme database into Google. Other search engines are available. And if you get to the wrong part of our website, you're looking for the black stripe across the top. And the fourth one along is called database. Just click on that. And then you'll find a simple search box, search content, and you type gold seal. Now, scroll down. down the right-hand side, there are all these filters, filter your search. And if you go to early medieval, that in our terms is what we call the period between the Romans and the Norman conquest. There's two of them. And the first one, it starts off this remarkable piece, the record starts,

and it goes on some long time. It's just the most extraordinary thing. It seems to be, I mean, we can't prove it, but it seems very likely to be the seal matrix of an Anglo-Saxical and slave, who, due to her extreme beauty and massive political Nouse, ended up by getting married to the French king. They had three children, and we're talking about in the seventh century here, so some decades after the Sutton Who ship burial, but it's that kind of time. So just at the beginning of kings in Europe, so she marries this French king. She's called Baltild, and he is called Clovis, Clovis the second. So she marries Clovis the second

about the middle of the 7th century. They have three children and he dies very quickly, leaving these three small children and Baltild, the girl who apparently was born a slave. I mean, it's very like Cinderella this story, except Baltild ends up Queen of France,

Queen Regent, because she's the mother of these three small children. And she does this for about 10 years until the eldest one is old enough to take over. But during that time, she's incredibly powerful, incredibly bloodthirsty. She kills masses of bishops and she kind of rampages around France in this amazing way that you're just not used to for early medieval women. And we had this seal matrix that came into Norwich Castle Museum, a seal matrix being an object

of metal usually that you press into wax to seal a document. And it said on the one side, Baldur Hildes, and on the other side it had just a child. It had two people, one with long hair, clearly female. They're both naked. You know, it's a really odd object. And we thought, oh, how interesting. This seal matrix has the name of Balthild. Bauderhildes is the Anglo-Saxon version.

It can't possibly be her, obviously. So one of my colleagues took it down to the British Museum to ask there there was an expert in early medieval seal matrices down there to see what they thought. and I will never forget when she came back the next day. First thing in the morning, I said, so what did they say? What did they say? And she took it out of the bag.

She dropped it into my hand. And that's where I can feel the weight of the drop. And she said, they say it's seventh century. And for a moment, I could not breathe because I thought, in my hand is, I mean, despite the fact that she killed all those bishops, she became a saint. I've got the seal matrix of a saint and a queen sitting in my hand. So unsurprisingly, that is now on display in the Castle Museum, but we have the database record on our database. So that's possibly the most exciting thing that I have ever been involved with in my decades of work for the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

And I think it's extremely unlikely that I'll ever see anything quite so exciting ever again. Yeah, incredible to just have that tangible, like you say, the weight of history in the middle of your hand looking at this thing that, you know, 1300 years ago, 1400 years ago, a queen of France. Ants was using to seal her letters and everything else. It had a practical use back then, and it survives to this day and you can hold it in your hand. Yes. And your imagination just runs right because you think, what's it doing in Norfolk? This particular one was part of a fingering, and rings, because they're so personal, they're a token of you. You know, if you can get someone's ring off their finger, it means they're probably dead or they've given it to you in great, it's a sign of great trouble that you can take somebody's ring and you can say,

I have come on an urgent errand, look, I have her ring. So you do wonder, under what circumstances, her ring turns up in Norfolk. Now, incidentally, it's not the only thing that survives of her. Her shirt, believe it or not, the chemise of St. Balthill is preserved at her monastery, the monastery that she founded and died in at Shell in France. The chemise of St. Balthill is a really iconic object to those of us who study Anglo-Saxon jewellery, which is my first love. Because when she went into the nunnery, presumably she had to give away all her jewelry. And this incredible necklace is embroidered on her shirt. So you can't have the real thing, but you could stitch a picture of it onto your shirt. That's another incredibly evocative thing. So what with her ring and her shirt,

St. Baltild, she has such an amazing story and it's so tangible. The thing that I've never been able to understand is why hasn't a film been made about her? Yeah, she sounds so defiant to the end, you know, even when going into a nunnery, she's determined to get round the rules and keep this bit of jewellery. And perhaps it speaks as well to the, you know, the links between France and Anglo-Saxon England that existed during that time that her seal matrix has ended up back in England to be found, you know, all of those centuries later. Has lockdown been a busy time for you or has it been quiet? Have people been out with metal detectors roaming around the fields a bit more or a lot left? Well, it's been quite variable. At first, people weren't going out. And in fact,

at times, they weren't allowed to go out because it wasn't seen as exercise and it certainly wasn't an essential activity. So at times, people haven't been detecting. And then when they're allowed to, they start detecting more because there isn't anything else to do. And you're out in the open air, often by yourself. So it's quite a COVID-safe activity. What we have found is, to begin with, we cleared the backlog of all the finds that usually we get in far more than we can deal with. So we've always got a huge backlog. So we began to sort that out and clear that out. And because we didn't want to be meeting finders to take in their finds,

as we borrow them to record them, we photograph them, we draw quite a lot of them, and then we give them back. So every time we record something, that's two times that we meet a finder. So we were trying not to take things in just to concentrate on clearing the backlog. We now know that we've got an equally large backlog, but it's in everybody's garage under their bed waiting to be able to bring it in. But the one thing that we carried on doing was treasure because the legal system was never suspended. That has always had to continue because of the legal aspect of the Treasure Act and the fact that coroners get involved, you know, legal officials. So we carried on with Treasure and certainly in Norfolk, there has been no let up in the amount of treasure that has been found.

we're almost at the same number of fines as an ordinary year, which is just incredible. I mean, there is just so much stuff still to be found. That's, I think, the main impression that you get when you first start working for the Portable Antiquities scheme. A lot of people come from doing small studies on small groups of material. I came from doing a PhD on Anglo-Saxon jewellery. And you're dealing with a few graves here and a few graves there. It contain women who've been buried in their clothing with their jewellery. and you make inferences about what's found where and you see patterns and so on. And then you come

and work for the Portable Antiquities scheme and just everything is found everywhere. And there's so much data, you can't make any sense of it to begin with. And this was really my introduction to big data. We were one of the first archaeological places to realise that big data had got to be treated in a different way. And we're still really trying to find the best ways of researching it. And that's another reason why people should go and look at our database. If you feel that you can do something statistically or with distributions or something, all the data is out there on our database and you can download it in spreadsheets and you can fiddle with it and you can do all sorts of things. You can draw distribution maps. It's all there waiting for people to do. And a lot of the

time, we don't commission research. We just wait for people to spot that there's something interesting they could do. And lo and behold, somebody turns up from who we've never met. You know, we still have this amazing volunteer from the Cairngorms, who just does all this research over the internet. And in the end, he was so fantastic that we gave him a little grant so he could come and give us a talk at a conference about his work. And he just came out of nowhere. In essence, he was just a member of the public. So we just like everybody to get involved as much as they can. Fantastic. It sounds like an incredible resource. And I think I'm probably going to spend the rest of my day learning about St. Balthill. It seems like a fascinating story to be had there.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Helen, to tell us. a bit about the work of the portable antiquities scheme and a bit about the background of that Edward III Leopard coin. That's been really great. If you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe to Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. I'd just like to put you on to an episode of not just the Tudor's podcast, also from history hit entitled Treasures of the National Trust Collections. It delves into 12 treasures from Cardinal Walsy's purse to a spangled bed. So if you'd like to learn a little bit more about historical treasures, it's a great place to continue on from this chat.

Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history here.