‘Britain’s Last Roman Hoards’ display case at the British Museum

For the last couple of months, we have been very busy designing a display case about the project and we are excited to announce that you can now view this display for free at the British Museum. The display can be found in the Money and Medals Gallery (G68) from the 26^th February–26^th May 2026.

The display includes objects from two hoards in the British Museum’s collection that we are studying for the project. The Grovely Wood and the Whorlton hoards were acquired by the Museum through Treasure Trove. The common law of Treasure Trove which covered objects comprised primarily of gold and silver which had been hidden with the intention of being recovered where the original owner was unknown. Treasure trove was replaced by the Treasure Act in 1996 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. You can read more about finding treasure in a previous blog post (here).

The Grovely Wood Hoard was found in Wiltshire in 1906. The hoard was found in a small ceramic pot and includes silver coins and finger rings. The hoard includes a silver finger-ring with a clasped hands motif. As mentioned in an earlier post, this motif denotes betrothal and marriage, and similar rings are found in the Bowerchalke hoard which we are also studying. The hoard contained around 300 silver coins and the surviving silver coins display very little signs of wear. Most are either unclipped or very lightly clipped.

The display also includes items from the Whorlton Hoard discovered in 1810 in Yorkshire. This hoard also contains coins and finger rings, but it also contains other items including spoons and silver fragments. Witness accounts describing its discovery indicate that the hoard contained thousands of coins and hundreds of objects, but only a fraction now survive in the British Museum’s collection. Whorlton is considered as a hacksilver hoard since it includes several items that have been deliberately cut, for example, the buckle tongue fragment and ring. Interestingly, a buckle fragment of the same type as the one from Whorlton has been found in another hacksilver hoard, the Traprain Law Treasure from Scotland.

If you are visiting London in the next couple of months, do pop in the museum to check out the display. You can find full details about access to the museum here. For those who are unable to visit, you can look at images of the items on display on the British Museum’s Collection Online webpage.