British Heritage
History Revealed: The 447 Roman coins a digger broke out of the A2 near Gravesend in 1964, hidden around AD 388 and saved by local historians on their knees, as 114 of them sell in Mayfair for £23,240 against a top estimate of £15,000
A digger hit a pot of Roman silver beside the A2 in 1964. Sixty-two years on, 114 of the 447 Springhead coins made a hammer £23,240 at Noonans, Mayfair.
Royals
A vet’s verdict on the foal of her horse Dove left Elizabeth II furious, and in July 1960 she told her Crown Equerry “I’m allergic to vets and I can’t help it”; the letter is at Bonhams until 3 December 2026.
Victoria and Albert were engraved around a candlelit tree on 23 December 1848, and in December 1850 a Philadelphia monthly reprinted the picture with Albert’s moustache and royal star removed The latest
HistoryFather found the Isle of Man’s only pair of Viking women’s brooches in 2018. Now his son has found the second, with a 1,100-year-old sword probably broken in a burial rite, in what may be the island’s earliest known female Viking graveDaniel Crowe left the brooches uncleaned. Declared Treasure at Douglas Courthouse on 9 November, the Viking find went on show at the Manx Museum two days later.
HistoryTired of tourists asking to see Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, the Revd Francis Gastrell is believed to have felled it in 1756; wood said to be from it veneers a table that sold for £10,000 at Toovey’s in West Sussex.A Regency table veneered with 52 panels of mulberry wood, purportedly from Shakespeare's tree at New Place, sold for £10,000 at Toovey's on 5 November.
HistoryIn 1970, George Harrison bought a crumbling Victorian mansion from a group of nuns for £140,000. He spent the rest of his life restoring its caves, grottoes and topiary gardens, and more than 55 years later Friar Park is still owned by his family
HistoryJapan’s first gift of 2,000 cherry trees to Washington arrived diseased in 1910 and had to be destroyed. Tokyo sent 3,020 more in 1912, and after World War II, cuttings from those Washington trees were sent back to help replant Tokyo’s own bombed collection
HistoryIn 1965, Walt Disney used shell companies with names like M.T. Lott to secretly buy 27,000 acres of Florida swampland for about $182 an acre. Once a local reporter exposed who was buying, a single nearby acre sold for $80,000
HistoryNeil Armstrong walked on the Moon and then coughed his way through Buckingham PalaceThe first man on the Moon faced Buckingham Palace in 1969 with a streaming head cold, and the handshake went badly wrong.