Dispersal of the Leominster Hoard Coins

The Viking period Leominster hoard of coins and jewellery dating to the late ninth century found at Eye, near Leominster, Herefordshire in June 2015 by metal detectorists George Powell and Layton Davies while illegally detecting on land owned by Lord Cawley. The finders did not report it and instead sold it to dealers, except a few individual pieces which were reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Some of the items frm the hoard went to antiquities dealers in Cardiff and London before the couple were caught and convicted.

The hoard originally contained an estimated 300 coins, of which 31 have been recovered along with a silver ingot, an heirloom rock-crystal pendant mounted in gold wire, a gold bracelet, and a gold finger ring. Much of the hoard is still missing and is presumed hidden or sold. One collector bought 16 of the coins (this is only mentioned in passing with no details in the NYT article, mirrored at Seattle Times - has something been hushed up here, and why?). The thirty coins which had been recovered were valued at a proceeds of crime hearing at Worcester Crown Court at £501,000. Five of them are examples of the exceptionally rare Two Emperors penny, valued at up to £50,000 apiece The missing 270 coins were also estimated to have a total nominal value of £2.4m. Five of the recovered coins had been hidden in the handle of a magnifying glass by Paul Wells who was, as he later testified, one of the men approached in summer 2015 by metal detectorists Powell and Davies to help release the coins to the market without attracting attention.

In an October 2022 article on a subsequent proceeds of crime hearing after the initial sentencing, we read that:

Powell claimed to have found only 51 coins, and sold the unrecovered 20 for just £10,000 according to the Mirror. He admitted to gambling it all away after telling the court he ‘had a bit of a naughty habit’. Powell, from Newport, South Wales, said he sold 20 coins to crooked antiques dealer Simon Wicks at a service station on the M4 and kept the remaining 31 to himself [...]. Powell, who was jailed for six and a half years, said in the new hearing: ‘We are metal detectorists, you want to become rich to get the payout, it’s a treasure hunting hobby.’

There now seems to be a consensus that the Operation Fantail material that is now being discussed in the court can be related to this case. Detector users Roger Pilling, 74, of Rossendale, Lancashire, and Craig Best, 46, of Bishop Auckland, County Durham, are facing a jury trial at Durham crown court, they deny a joint charge of conspiring to convert criminal property, namely the Anglo-Saxon coins, for money. They also deny separate charges of possessing criminal property. They had acquired these coins from "somewhere" before 2018. The Crown does not allege that either of the defendants, who were both interested in metal detecting, made the find themselves. In 2018, Best and Pilling contacted a prominent US collector from Michigan. When he asked Best where they came from, in an email Best replied, 'near Worcester'. This collector declined to buy these items, but Mr Best was arrested at a Durham hotel in May 2019 (and Mr Pilling was then arrested at home) in an attempt to sell them to another collector (being unaware that this was an undercover police operation to entrap them).

Prosecutor Matthew Donkin told the jury [...] the coins were believed to be part of the Herefordshire Hoard [...] Mr Best took three coins to a meeting at the Royal County Hotel with undercover officers he thought were part of a team brokering a deal with a US-based buyer, the jury heard. The trio of coins included one of the exceptionally two-emperor style Alfred and Ceolwulf examples - which itself was worth £70,000. Uniformed officers then arrested Mr Best and a subsequent raid of Mr Pilling's home recovered a further 41 coins, Mr Donkin said. Jurors heard an image from Mr Pilling's home showed 46 coins in total, meaning two remained missing.

If these items were from the Leominster hoard, that's forty-one coins down, another 226+ still to be recovered. The person buying the coins from Pilling and Best, whether from this find or any other, should come forward.