Dig it

If you've ever been to an ocean beach in the morning or early evening, you've seen people out there with metal detectors and long-handled sieves, going through the sand in search of treasure. The metal detector detects metal, and gives off a ping sound, and the digging begins. Soon enough, the beachcomber comes up with a treasure: either a high school class ring from Mayfield High School (with the inscription "W Cleaver '63") or a nut and bolt that came off a deck chair on the Titanic. 

Well, it's free fun (after you pay for the metal detector) and who knows? There's a lot of metal washing up on the beach.

We here on the coast tend to limit our metal searching to the seashore, but there are muddy fields and yards all over, just teeming with prizes for you, F'rinstance...

Over in Norfolk, England,  Andy Carter, 65, made quite a find a couple of years ago. He and 30 other metalhunters had spent looking for buried treasure on the muddy field of a farm, when all of a sudden, he got that magic ping as most of the others were starting to give up and head for home.

Digging through ten inches of mud,  Andy found a small coin, gold as can be!

 

“When I brushed off the soil, I saw the hind leg of a big cat,” Carter tells the Guardian newspaper’s Harriet Sherwood. “I thought, ‘It can’t be a leopard.’”

But it is! The big cat on the 23-carat coin is certainly a leopard. These coins, from the days of Edward III, were called leopard florins (a florin was an English gold coin worth about two shillings). 

Andy sold the coin for $185,000.  A private coin collector from the United Kingdom ponied up the money for the leopard coin. 

Edward III ruled England from 1327 to 1377, and he had the idea to put out these gold coins, replacing the former silver standard pocket money. France and Italy had gold coins, and Edward was goldarned if he was going to have England left out.

“[A] man with pretensions, ... seeking to unite the thrones of England and France, [he was] acutely aware of the irony of not having his own economically and politically prestigious international currency in gold,” is how the coin and the man were described in the auction listing.

He minted  £32,000 worth of gold coins in 1344, with leopards, double leopards, and helms (an old time helmet) pictured on them.

By August,1344, Edward tired of trying to get people to accept the new gold coins, and everyone in England went back to silver coins and fish-and-chip coupons are currency.

But in 1344, with one of these coins in your pocket, you could have bought a single sheep and a gallon of wine - that's about $2670 in today's money.

So Mr Carter can plan to get a bottle of wine, a pizza, and a tankful of gas!