Coin worth 1 mn euros uncovered by amateur English treasure hunter but sold for 5000 euros.
350 yrs old coin could be worth 1 million euros. |
When it was minted 350 years ago, there wouldn’t have been much change from a slap-up meal and a few of pints of ale.
Today
the silver threepenny coin that amateur treasure-hunter John Stoner dug
up in a farmer’s field would probably buy the entire farm.
The extremely rare New England coin, bearing the date 1652, is expected to sell for up to £1million when it is auctioned.
It
has been hailed as one of the finest examples of a currency produced in
the days of the Pilgrim Fathers in a land that would become the United
States.
How
the 17th century threepenny bit ended up in the village of King’s
Clipstone, Nottinghamshire, is not known but last night coin collectors
from around the world clamoured to buy it.
Mr
Stoner, who temporarily mislaid the coin at one point, found it while
on an outing with the Coil To The Soil metal detector club on Sunday.
The
42-year-old father of two had only just started to sweep an area of the
ploughed field when he picked up two signals from the detector.
The
first was from a random piece of metal; the second was from an uneven,
hand-hammered coin, about the size of a modern 1p but thinner, buried
five inches deep in a clod of earth.
‘I
dug up the soil and out it popped,’ he said of the historic find. ‘At
first I didn’t think it was anything special. I knew it wasn’t English,
but just how important a find it was, I didn’t have a clue.’
The
club immediately posted a picture of the coin on its Facebook page and
invited followers to identify it. Within five minutes, they were
inundated with replies. One enthusiast wrote: ‘Your mate has just won
the lottery!’ That evening Mr Stoner took it to his Worksop home, put it
in a jar and showed it to friends. In the morning, he couldn’t find it.
‘I must have knocked the jar over,’ he said. ‘It rolled on the floor
somewhere but I just left it there when I went out. I had to look around
for it when I came back.’
On
Monday, coin expert Peter Spencer confirmed it was a genuine threepenny
piece from the first authorised colonial coinage, commissioned and
struck in Boston, Massachusetts.
‘I
handed it over to him and I think it’s fair to say he went white as a
ghost,’ Mr Stoner said. ‘He said its condition was like the day it was
struck.’
Coin worth 1 mn euros uncovered by amateur English treasure hunter but sold for 5000 euros.
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