A thin silver siliqua of the emperor Honorius, struck in the first years of the fifth century AD, is smaller than it ought to be. The portrait is intact, the diadem and the profile clear, but the edge has been trimmed all the way round, so close that half the letters of the legend are gone. Someone took the silver from the rim and left the face alone.
This coin is one of nearly fifteen thousand that came out of a field near Hoxne, in Suffolk, in November 1992. They were not looked for. A tenant farmer had lost a hammer, and asked a friend, Eric Lawes, to sweep the ground with his metal detector. The detector found silver spoons and coins instead. Lawes did something that is easy to praise and less common than it should be: he stopped digging, and reported what he had found. The following day archaeologists lifted the rest of the deposit with its arrangement still in place, which is why we know that the coins and objects had been packed inside a wooden chest, long since rotted, with smaller boxes and wrappings inside it. The hammer was found too, and it now travels with the hoard as part of its story.
The gold solidi in the chest number a little over five hundred. The silver, most of it siliquae like this one, numbers in the thousands, and a large share of it is clipped. Clipping of this kind is concentrated in Britain in the decades around 400, and what it meant is still argued over. One reading treats it as simple theft, a quiet shaving of silver by whoever held the coins. Another suggests something closer to necessity: with fresh coin no longer reaching the province from the imperial mints, the clipped silver may have been used to make imitations, keeping some kind of currency in circulation. Neither view has fully displaced the other.
The latest coins in the hoard place its burial after about 407, in the years when Roman authority in Britain was coming apart. Why the owners buried it, and why they never came back, the chest does not say. Fear, flight, death, or simply a plan that failed: every explanation fits the evidence equally well, which is another way of saying the evidence does not reach that far.
What stays with me is the shape of the two losses. Someone in the fifth century lost a chest of silver and gold, and with it, presumably, a future they had been saving for. Someone in the twentieth century lost a hammer. Only the smaller loss was ever recovered on purpose, and it was the one that brought the other back to light.