A German Resident Unearths a Stash of Medieval Coins While Digging a Swimming Pool

A resident of a southwest German town working on a construction project unearthed a stash of medieval coins minted around 1320 AD.

A resident of a southwest German town was working on a construction project when he unearthed a stash of medieval coins that were minted around 1320 AD, according to a statement from the State Office for Monument Preservation from the Stuttgart regional council.

While laying down underground piping near a swimming pool, Völker, a resident of German municipality Glottertal, found “small metal plates” in the earth as he was beginning his work.

On the same day, archaeologists descended on the site and quickly uncovered roughly 1,000 coins. The next day, rain turned the soil into knee-deep mud, but the archaeologists armed themselves with metal detectors and still recovered approximately 600 additional metal coins.

Most of the coins are from the Breisach, Zofingen, and Freiburg mints, all created sometime around 1320 AD. The collection also includes isolated coins minted in Basel, St. Gallen, Zurich, Laufenburg, and Colmar.

Just how valuable was the collection at the time they were presumably lost in the German soil? “You could have bought about 150 sheep with the coins,”

The experts credit Völker’s attentiveness in the “discovery of one of the most extensive medieval coin treasures of the last few decades.” Without it, the coins would still just be a bunch of junk in the dirt.

The region the coins were found may hold additional hidden secrets based on the site’s past. “Glottertal has been one of the most important mining areas for the dukes of Freiburg,”

In 2016, in nearby Switzerland, more than 200 coins from the 1300s were discovered by chance by a mushroom picker in a forest near Zurich.

Those coins were only enough to buy 25 sheep, however. These finds, along with others in the region, help tell a historic tale, sometimes of political instability or payments for mercenary armies.

Not only does the newfound coin stockpile give a jolt of excitement to the region and offer up a new trove to investigate, but it could lead to deeper understanding of the region at the time. “The evaluation of this coin treasure will enable statements to be made about the coin circulation in Breisgau, the minting activity in the mints, the silver trade, but also about the mining in the Glottertal,” Haasis-Berner said.