Metal Detectorist Discovers One of England’s Earliest Gold Coins in a Farm Field(smithsonianmag.com)
smithsonianmag.com
Metal Detectorist Discovers One of England’s Earliest Gold Coins in a Farm Field
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/800-year-old-gold-penny-found-in-english-field-could-sell-for-half-a-million-180979420/
53 comments
It's such a superb show.
Something I realized watching Detectorists is that there aren't many realistic adult drama shows (or American movies) these days that aren't about crime or similarly extreme subjects, or that aren't historical dramas.
Detectorists is technically a "dramedy", of course, but it's basically a realistic, truthful depiction of everyday life, with some observational humour thrown in here and there.
For some reason Hollywood has indoctrinated the world into thinking that fiction can't be true to life, because life is somehow boring.
A similar American drama that comes to mind is Lodge 49, which is absolutely fantastic. On Becoming a God in Central Florida has a similar vibe, and is also excellent.
Off the top of my head, I'm struggling to think of many other shows. Better Things, Transparent, Togetherness, Succession, Mozart in the Jungle… any other good ones?
Something I realized watching Detectorists is that there aren't many realistic adult drama shows (or American movies) these days that aren't about crime or similarly extreme subjects, or that aren't historical dramas.
Detectorists is technically a "dramedy", of course, but it's basically a realistic, truthful depiction of everyday life, with some observational humour thrown in here and there.
For some reason Hollywood has indoctrinated the world into thinking that fiction can't be true to life, because life is somehow boring.
A similar American drama that comes to mind is Lodge 49, which is absolutely fantastic. On Becoming a God in Central Florida has a similar vibe, and is also excellent.
Off the top of my head, I'm struggling to think of many other shows. Better Things, Transparent, Togetherness, Succession, Mozart in the Jungle… any other good ones?
Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing perhaps? Although I can never tell if it’s some kind of obtuse absurdist parody or sincere.
Ted Lasso.
Ted Lasso is good, but it's a saccharine, deeply unrealistic fantasy bordering on self-parody. So I can't really agree with you there.
It got even more cartoony in S2, had to stop watching. S1 struck a chord that was going to be really hard to replicate.
Yeah, season two definitely wandered towards more typical high drama heroes and villains fare, unfortunately.
> a saccharine, deeply unrealistic fantasy bordering on self-parody
I personally found it to be none of those things.
Often, we experience a piece of art as being something when really much of our experience is defined by what we brought of ourselves to it.
I personally found it to be none of those things.
Often, we experience a piece of art as being something when really much of our experience is defined by what we brought of ourselves to it.
Well, it's objectively unrealistic in terms of dialogue (nobody talks that way in real life!), plot, and so on. Its depiction of real life and relationships is cartoonish and hardly any more true to life than other escapist fare like Sex and the City.
It's an urban feel-good fantasy, clearly not intended to be realistic. There are tons of shows like this, though Ted Lasso does it better than many of them.
There are a lot fewer shows like, say, Togetherness, which shows the raw, unpolished reality of ordinary middle-class people living very ordinary, albeit dramatically interesting, lives. I would argue that everything in Togetherness not only happens in real life (and the characters also talk like adults do in real life), it also has. Whereas pretty much nothing in Ted Lasso has ever happened, at any time, anywhere.
It's an urban feel-good fantasy, clearly not intended to be realistic. There are tons of shows like this, though Ted Lasso does it better than many of them.
There are a lot fewer shows like, say, Togetherness, which shows the raw, unpolished reality of ordinary middle-class people living very ordinary, albeit dramatically interesting, lives. I would argue that everything in Togetherness not only happens in real life (and the characters also talk like adults do in real life), it also has. Whereas pretty much nothing in Ted Lasso has ever happened, at any time, anywhere.
> it's objectively unrealistic in terms of dialogue (nobody talks that way in real life!)
There are different levels of realism in art. Guernica is not a realistic real life portrayal or what a war scene would look like if photographed.
The more interesting question to me is whether it conveys the subjective experience of war in a meaningful way to the viewer? In other words, say person A has a first-hand experience with war and comes away from it with belief X. Then person B looks at a work of art and also comes away from it with belief X. Then in some sense, the art is a realistic portrayal of war because it caused the same change in the viewer that experiencing war does. The fact that it doesn't aesthetically look like it is not particularly relevant. It's an artifact.
Togetherness is profoundly unrealistic because it is a series of two-dimensional images shown at a fixed frame rate from a viewpoint that spontaneously and instantly jumps from place to play with wildly varying focal points. It is very far removed from what it would be like to be in the room with the actors. Not to mention short pieces of music spontaneously being heard from no appreciable source in the scene.
But you accept that those kinds of unreality are not important for your appreciation of the work.
The kinds of unreality that bother you about Ted Lasso are in the set of things that I don't consider important. The behavior of the characters (especially in the first season) rang true to me.
There are different levels of realism in art. Guernica is not a realistic real life portrayal or what a war scene would look like if photographed.
The more interesting question to me is whether it conveys the subjective experience of war in a meaningful way to the viewer? In other words, say person A has a first-hand experience with war and comes away from it with belief X. Then person B looks at a work of art and also comes away from it with belief X. Then in some sense, the art is a realistic portrayal of war because it caused the same change in the viewer that experiencing war does. The fact that it doesn't aesthetically look like it is not particularly relevant. It's an artifact.
Togetherness is profoundly unrealistic because it is a series of two-dimensional images shown at a fixed frame rate from a viewpoint that spontaneously and instantly jumps from place to play with wildly varying focal points. It is very far removed from what it would be like to be in the room with the actors. Not to mention short pieces of music spontaneously being heard from no appreciable source in the scene.
But you accept that those kinds of unreality are not important for your appreciation of the work.
The kinds of unreality that bother you about Ted Lasso are in the set of things that I don't consider important. The behavior of the characters (especially in the first season) rang true to me.
If I tell you that I want less flying superheroes and alien monsters, but rather more serious stories about real-life people, the right counterpoint is not "well, for me, Marvel movies is more meaningful as art".
Obviously all art is "unreal" in terms of being separate from our own subjective reality, yada yada yada, but that's neither here nor there. Within the realm of "things that are filmed and projected within the medium of TV", which is what we are talking about, there are degrees of naturalism which we can describe and compare, irrespective of what kind of artistic "truth" you think is conveyed.
Obviously all art is "unreal" in terms of being separate from our own subjective reality, yada yada yada, but that's neither here nor there. Within the realm of "things that are filmed and projected within the medium of TV", which is what we are talking about, there are degrees of naturalism which we can describe and compare, irrespective of what kind of artistic "truth" you think is conveyed.
> If I tell you that I want less flying superheroes and alien monsters
You didn't say, "I want", you said, "it's a saccharine, deeply unrealistic fantasy bordering on self-parody" and "it's objectively unrealistic".
If you'd said "the level of naturalism Ted Lasso chooses doesn't do anything for me", there'd be no argument. But you clearly claimed that there were intrinsic properties of the show itself that were "objectively" unrealistic.
You didn't say, "I want", you said, "it's a saccharine, deeply unrealistic fantasy bordering on self-parody" and "it's objectively unrealistic".
If you'd said "the level of naturalism Ted Lasso chooses doesn't do anything for me", there'd be no argument. But you clearly claimed that there were intrinsic properties of the show itself that were "objectively" unrealistic.
The Detectorists is one of the best TV shows made in the past decade. I loved it. It was a tonic to the everything-must-be-about-crime-and-death shows that fill Netflix and Prime.
It depends on where you are in the world. The UK has a couple millennia of metal object to find. I'm reminded of that Bob's Burgers joke about using a metal detector only to find the metal detector discarded by the last guy who tried to find gold coins on a US beach.
Detectorists is like the TV equivalent of having a nice cuppa on a cool, late summer's morning, while looking out the window at the long, brown grass swaying gently in the breeze.
Mackenzie Crook's recent Worzel Gummidge adaptation has a similar vibe, although obviously more geared towards families.
Mackenzie Crook's recent Worzel Gummidge adaptation has a similar vibe, although obviously more geared towards families.
> equivalent of having a nice cuppa on a cool, late summer's morning, while looking out the window at the long, brown grass swaying gently in the breeze
Obligatory BBC Shipping Forecast, because it seems right up this crowd's alley: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CxHa5KaMBcM
Recent: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qfvv/episodes/player
Obligatory BBC Shipping Forecast, because it seems right up this crowd's alley: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CxHa5KaMBcM
Recent: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qfvv/episodes/player
Tangentially related, time team and hugely popular archaeology program that ran in the 90's-2000's in the UK has many of their episodes legally up on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/c/TimeTeamClassics/videos
If you want an absolute banger of an episode to evaluate, try this one...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW3UQEDQ0zQ
https://www.youtube.com/c/TimeTeamClassics/videos
If you want an absolute banger of an episode to evaluate, try this one...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW3UQEDQ0zQ
All historical dramas are just prequals to The Detectorists.
I wonder what a future version of The Dectorists would be? Maybe "The Isotopists" that find materials with isotopes from exotic places.
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/tracking-movements-isoto...
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/tracking-movements-isoto...
I've been in tech too long.. my first thought is that you meant they would be finding .iso files.
This was my show during first lockdown when everything seemed strange and it's air of normality and comfort was the balm I needed. Also lovely the way it celebrates the geek and avoids the temptation to mock
Without the detectorists, I wouldn't know that University Challenge is a real-life show that I absolutely love.
Also: Did you see University Challenge last night?
Also: Did you see University Challenge last night?
I like University Challenge but it makes me feel like I'm an idiot. Or maybe it just reveals the fact that I am actually an idiot. I get 4 or 5 answers per show at most. My partner sits and answers about 20% of the questions correctly. She's far cleverer than me. But I'm better at video games so it all evens out.
I found that when I watched it a lot I got much better at it. The style of the questions needs to be learnt. There are also a bunch of writers, composers and painters that come up a lot. If in doubt guessing one of these from roughly the correct period works pretty well!
I feel the same about hacker news, to be honest.
Without the show, we wouldn't understand that a "detectorist" is a person and metal detector is the machine they use.
I imagine even at the time the coin was in use it was a significant amount of money. I imagine some poor merchant in incredible distress trying to find the coin that fell out of his pocket on the way home from the market and never succeeding.
I like to think the merchant had it hidden somewhere and died without telling anyone.
There's a sentiment in Britain that 'detectorists' are pillaging the history of England. But I'm on the side of this detectorist. He saved this piece of history from the plow. It's a win-win.
There are a small minority called 'Nighthawks' that are doing damage - https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jun/02/theres-a-rom...
With all these stories coming out of Britain of people finding ancient gold coins, I’m surprised everyone isn’t out there searching in their own neighborhoods with metal detectors. Decent detectors are not that expensive.
You don't just need the detector though, you need the landowner's permission and the time. And the already tiny chance of finding anything of non-trivial value gets smaller if everybody else is doing it. If you think we have a lot of people finding ancient gold coins, you'll be even more amazed how many lottery winners we have!
> “It was bought by an anonymous private collector in the United Kingdom who intends to place the coin on loan to a public institution or museum.
Well that's nice. Feels like the ultimate win-win all-round. Nice that's it's not disappearing into someone's private collection, never to be seen again.
Well that's nice. Feels like the ultimate win-win all-round. Nice that's it's not disappearing into someone's private collection, never to be seen again.
The images, attributed to the auction house, are a little funny. It seems like they cleaned it up, but perhaps the 'found in a field' story is so cute, they hope it might actually contribute value and chose to photograph it back in dirt?
There's a huge rule in coin collecting: never (aggressively) clean coins. Running it under thew tap to release it from the dirt it was contained in is probably fine, but don't break out anything abrasive or acidic.
In the US, many high-value coins are sent through professional authenticators and graders, and they will mark a coin as, say, "Mint State details, but cleaned". that "but cleaned" can knock hundreds or thousands off the sales price.
In the US, many high-value coins are sent through professional authenticators and graders, and they will mark a coin as, say, "Mint State details, but cleaned". that "but cleaned" can knock hundreds or thousands off the sales price.
Founder of www.redlotustech.com here. We are extending our military metal detector training product (precise tracking and visualization) capability to track over larger areas in more realistic operational scenarios. Curious whether there might be an application in the “detectorist” domain. Would be happy to chat with those interested/involved in the space.
Not as an investment vehicle but as a savings vehicle: it did better than the average 800-year old bond or 800-year old company share. Numismatic premium aside; the gold maintained its value throughout war, tyranny and pestilence. It would presumably also survive a G8 summit ordering major internet providers to block port 8333.
In England 800 years ago, an ounce of gold was worth about 6 months unskilled labor.[1][2] Today, it's worth about 3.5 weeks.
In the past century, gold has underperformed U.S. equities and has not, in any case, held its value very well. It's been quite volatile, e.g. falling 30% in 2013.
The article doesn't say how much gold this coin contains, but its value is essentially 100% numismatic.
[1] https://www.thebalance.com/gold-price-history-3305646
[2] https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval-prices-a...
In the past century, gold has underperformed U.S. equities and has not, in any case, held its value very well. It's been quite volatile, e.g. falling 30% in 2013.
The article doesn't say how much gold this coin contains, but its value is essentially 100% numismatic.
[1] https://www.thebalance.com/gold-price-history-3305646
[2] https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval-prices-a...
Imagining a digital arms race where crypto transactions are hidden in images using steganography
As an American, I remain humbled by how far back England is able to trace back its history. Visiting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_London was such a highlight of a trip many years ago
Proceeds from selling it will fund his kids education - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/24/devon-detect...
Are there any folks here doing metal detecting in the Netherlands?
I've been tempted to start, since I live in a village that dates from the 1200s (but likely had Romans passing through long before) surrounded by farmland. There's bound to be something interesting buried here and there.
I've been tempted to start, since I live in a village that dates from the 1200s (but likely had Romans passing through long before) surrounded by farmland. There's bound to be something interesting buried here and there.
There is a whole site dedicated to detectorists at https://www.treasurenet.com
Didn't the Roman's bring gold coins 1200 years earlier? Seems a stretch to call it one of England's earliest gold coins.
Roman Britan is not England now is it?
Isn’t that called being a history revisionist?
The coin has a picture of King Henry III of England on it.
A coin used earlier in the Roman province of Britain, even in the same location, would have a picture of the Emperor in Rome on it.
That's what makes it "one of England's earliest gold coins". One of the earliest coins of "England as a state".
A coin used earlier in the Roman province of Britain, even in the same location, would have a picture of the Emperor in Rome on it.
That's what makes it "one of England's earliest gold coins". One of the earliest coins of "England as a state".
This site also claims that Roman's minted coin in the territory now known as England.
http://www.kenelks.co.uk/coins/roman/roman.htm
I think the significance of this coin to English people is that Henry III is king when the Magna Carta is negotiated and the royal domain across the channel is severed. This places the coin in a context of when what was to become modern England became identifiable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_III_of_England
http://www.kenelks.co.uk/coins/roman/roman.htm
I think the significance of this coin to English people is that Henry III is king when the Magna Carta is negotiated and the royal domain across the channel is severed. This places the coin in a context of when what was to become modern England became identifiable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_III_of_England
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/jan/28/detectorists...