Did I read that right? If you find an old coin on your land in England you could go to jail for not reporting it? So not only do you not own it, the crown owns it because it is ‘treasure’ and you can go to jail for not reporting the find? Huh… looking at the linked law they give you 1 day to report the finding or else risk jail time… England takes their treasure seriously I guess.
I think that's the right call. A common person can find an old coin and not really think about the historical impact it has. Merely keep it on his or her shelf or bring it to a shop for some extra cash.
But once you're in the realm of finding multiple coins, the onus kinda changes. There may be more, greed sets in and wanting to conceal the find is bad. Also, England doesn't "take their treasure" it buys it off of them if the museum wants to buy it and for a fair price.
That system sounds reasonable, except that if "greed" is at all common in practice, that's good evidence the price is not fair. I followed the wikipedia link to the committee in charge but it didn't say anything about this question.
If it were common, I think the press would have a field day with it, especially the international press. There should be enough pressure on both sides for this not to be a problem, but I'm not an expert in English treasure.
I know some people living in villages in Eastern Poland who regularly dig up historical coins and such on their land. They promptly hide or destroy them due to fear/unwillingness to deal with authorities.
I used to be annoyed/bewildered at it, but ever since the time sitting on a bench in the park got criminalised, I get it. There is no common good in a low trust society.
It's not that ot does not belong to them: if the find is deemed a treasure they are obligated to offer it to museums for purchase at a price set by a valuation committee.
If museums are interested then they keep it and can do whatever they want with it.
If you are obligated to offer something for a purchase price set by a valuation committee, you do not in practice own it. The committee, though ostensibly bounded by some rules or guidelines, nonetheless could set a price different from what the market would actually bear. If they're truly offering competitive prices then the rule requiring a coin-finder to sell at the committee-determined price would be unnecessary.
Apparently the price offered is not cast in stone though ... I was in correspondence with one of the finders of the recent Rauceby (UK) hoard who mentioned there was some negotiation with the British Museum over the price they paid for the portion they chose to keep. Still well below prices the remainder of the hoard, returned to the finders, has been fetching on the open market though.
This is common to most countries, not particular of England. If you find an archeological object it is part of the country patrimony. It is particularly interesting when you are working in a construction and the building is completely halted because it is in a new discovered archeological area.
The spirit of this kind of laws is not only to protect the patrimony but to keep the objects within the boundaries of the country. Without these laws the objects will fly to the best buyer in the globe.
The Netherlands lost a lot of paintings before the government stepped in and funded the Rijksmuseum. Then for a 150 years they bought as many of them back as they could.
Whenever I'm in a museum abroad I always like to visit the Dutch/Flemish masters section. There are good ones in Spain but those are honourable spoils of war. The American museums are wealthy industrialists buying paintings at an auction.
In general, fine art work has a different treatment that archeological artifacts but also has a relationship with the time of ownership and where/how you find/buy it.
There are also more complex cases, for example the recovery of stolen art from the Nazis.
Roald Dahl, of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fame, wrote a non-fiction account about one such unreported find, the Mildenhall Treasure.
The find was made during WWII. No jail time but almost.
Nor do you get rights over human remains on your land. You may even be required to report a dead body if you find one on your land, under threat of fine and jail.
If the human remains are of ancient Native American origin, then there may be other restrictions of what cane be done with the remains and any associated funerary objects.
Nor (in the US) do most people get to use birds, eggs, or even feathers of 1,000+ species of birds, even if found on their land, because of endangered species law (starting with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918).
And someone may have ownership rights to the land, but not mineral rights.
Therefore, land ownership clearly does not mean ownership and control of everything on the land.
Any treasure finds in the UK are usually passed onto archaeologists and/or historians in the first instance for study, and almost certainly end up in a museum thereafter if they have historical worth. They are allowed to be sold for profit if those criteria aren't met.
There is a hobby dedicated to using metal detectors to find treasure and a somewhat recent BBC television series about this https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06l51nr
There are a great many historical artifacts that are privately held but have been available for study. Conversation on disposition of treasures tends to conflate two issues, ownership and accessibility. I seriously doubt that anyone willing to spend six figures on some coins would be reluctant to let scholars examine them (if such ownership was legal).
while the free market generally works, when you have a one-of-a-kind item which could never be replaced and uber-rich people who'd like to lock it up so that no one can see it, the idea of a "fair price" kinda breaks down.
It seems that perhaps the article somewhat overstates the significance of these particular coins. Other "Two Emperor" pennies were discovered as part of the Watlington Hoard in 2015.
> “Together the two kings carried out a major reform of the coinage, introducing high-quality silver coins, with the ‘two emperors’ design symbolizing this alliance.”
I wonder about the nature of this reform.
E.g. were prior coins not made of "high-quality silver"?
* Acquire treasure in dubious circumstances ("jury heard that Pilling, from Rossendale, Lancashire, was in possession of the coins knowing they should have been declared. Pilling has never disclosed the full identity of the person he acquired them from. Pilling recruited Best, of Bishop Auckland, County Durham, to try to sell the coins.")
* Spend years selling the treasure in a manner that makes it clear you understand that it's a crime ("Best, who sent an email which read: “They are a hoard as you know they are this can cause me problems all you had to do was say you didn’t want them and that was the end of it.”)
* Go to jail after remaining uncooperative and failing to provide leads that could recover more of the treasure
The issue is with step 1. What does ownership even mean if the government can force you to do things like this?
It seems like a slippery slope that favours the most powerful entity, the government, over many smaller entities - millions of landowners.
I understand the argument that history is to be preserved, but this seems especially draconian. I recently saw another guy from England post on Twitter that badgers tunnelled out his house foundation and he's not allowed to do anything about it, on pains of six months in prison.
In every society, you need a balance of power. You can't let the Sir Humphreys [1] take over.
I'm not British but even I've heard about the law by watching Time Team on YouTube.
Just because you think X is bad doesn't make Y bad.
In the US the government can prevent you from killing a protected species, picking up the feathers of a protected species, digging up a graveyard without permission, desecrating burial goods on your land, and more.
Possession of land doesn't give absolute untrammeled rights in most countries, e.g.:
* Exceptions exist for subterranean mineral wealth, e.g. mining licenses can be issued against the wishes of a land owner
* Similarly the landowner has no exclusive right to the air above the property beyond some low altitude
* Compulsory acquisition can be invoked by the state
In many cases the landowner is compensated, though they may not like the amount. In the case of treasure in the UK the 1996 Act provides for a reward of "up to the market value". In those case the treasure hunters weren't on their own land and (https://www.herefordshirehoard.co.uk/the-story):
"The judge who sentenced the men said they had cheated not only the landowner, but also the public of ‘exceptionally rare and significant coins’.
Had the metal detectorists stayed on the right side of the law they could have expected to receive, as the judge pointed out to them, a half share or a third share of the hoard’s value."
Hell, landowners don't have an unrestricted right to build things on their property.
Go try to build an unusually tall structure on your residential lot, or two houses on one lot, or a multifamily dwelling in single family zoning, or even just a shed right up next to your property line.
Go try to build something the wrong way; build a vernacular house, with no formal blue prints.
Owning property conveys a number of rights, but it is very easy to run up against the limits of those rights.
> What does ownership even mean if the government can force you to do things like this?
Ownership is always limited in various ways. Property rights are a social arrangement, in which the community agrees to recognize and enforce certain exclusive rights for individuals, but under set conditions.
One of the conditions of land ownership in the UK is that if you find something of great historical importance, you don't get to keep it. That's a perfectly reasonable arrangement, in my opinion. The idea is that ancient objects such as these coins are the heritage of the entire community.
> What does ownership even mean if the government can force you to do things like this?
Have you ever owned land and/or built a house ?
They can force you to do a lot of shit actually, and most of it makes sense because people before you were dumb as fuck and thought they could build their own 4 stories house out of dried cow shit and plywood
Same reasons new cars have seatbelts, airbags, abs. Same reason tall building have to have emergency exits, proper ventilation, fire retardant material, &c.
If you think this "found a coin can't keep it" is a slippery slope you must live in a very weird place because I can come up with hundreds of more restrictive laws that you have to abide by since you're born.
We built communities out of common interests and for safety, not for absolute freedom to do whatever the fuck we want while disregarding everything and everyone else
> You can't let the Sir Humphreys [1] take over.
Would you have an issue if I built a 50m tall tower next to your garden, shading your entire land from the sun ?
Or if I dig a well to tap into our common underground water reserve but drain it in a month to sell bottled water ?
There are many Tudor farm houses built out of dried cow/horse shit and hair where this hoard was found, and school children visit these 500 year old buildings daily to experience the engineering of these dumb people.
It's an intolerable impertinence that these buildings can't be knocked down and replaced with glass and steel boxes that conform to the latest construction regulations.
