Find 33: A Storied Sixpence Scraped from Sheep Pen Soil
May 2023. An unseasonably warm and dry morning for mid-May over the Wiltshire downs. The air held no hint of the previous week’s unseasonable frost, nor did it carry the romanticized scents of wild garlic or damp chalk. Instead, the heavy, earthy presence of the surrounding fields of cattle and sheep dominated the atmosphere, grounding the day in the practical realities of working farmland.
This discovery hinged on waiting out the agricultural calendar. While this pasture had been ‘out of bounds’ during the spring lambing season, I was busy detecting on other fields on the permission—I just hadn’t been able to gain access to this particular sheep pasture yet that year.
When the livestock were finally moved and I could get in, I found an unexpected stroke of luck. The landowner had recently scraped away several inches of the topsoil from a wide patch of the pasture to repair a bald, muddy spot elsewhere on the farm. I’ve yet to get access to a ploughed field so this was a welcome change to sod busting. Those missing inches effectively granted my detector extra access into the older, undisturbed historic layers of the earth, allowing me to scan deeper into the past than had been possible anywhere else on the permission.
I didn’t waste any time setting up. Barely 30 minutes into the session I was walking along the raw edge of the scraped ground and my headphones filled with a sharp, beautiful, and highly repeatable high-pitched signal. It was the distinct, sweet whistle of high-purity silver—a sound that immediately sets the heart racing. Kneeling in the exposed earth, I scarcely needed to dig; resting right in the loose soil was a thin, circular disc. As I rubbed away the caked subsoil with my thumb, the bright, metallic lustre of silver winked back at me. It was a worn but undeniably beautiful silver sixpence.
While I was analysing the find, the landowner came by walking her dogs and asked if I’d found anything good? It had been a while since anything shiny had come up on my recent hunts, so I was happy to present her with a newly unearthed sixpence. At that point, of course, I didn’t know it was a William III coin—its face was heavily worn and mostly obscured by dirt—but I could tell it was an old, hard-worked piece of silver.
A formal assessment by the Salisbury Museum (WILT-DC6528) identified the piece as a post-medieval milled silver sixpence of William III, dated to AD 1696. The obverse features the king’s first draped bust, while the reverse shows four crowned cruciform shields with an early Irish harp. Crucially, a worn ‘Y’ mintmark below the bust indicates it was struck at the temporary provincial mint in York. The museum categorized its wear as “Very worn; fair.”
The coin’s warped, wavy surfaces tell a story of physical survival beneath flinty clay and underfoot. The portrait is worn nearly flat—a smooth silhouette leaving only the soft outline of a nose and crown. This image of William without Mary on the obverse speaks to more turmoil and loss than just the Great Recoinage of 1696–1697. Struck alone after Mary’s death in 1694, it depicts a solitary monarch guiding a nation through bitter European wars and economic panic.
This sixpence was a direct survivor of that monumental recoinage, which replaced ruined, clipped, hand-hammered silver with machine-struck milled currency. Yet holding it inspires a personal line of thought. Unlike hoarded gold, a silver sixpence was the money of everyday life, used to pay wages or settle tabs. Its heavy wear suggests it worked hard for decades, changing hands thousands of times through the reigns of Queen Anne and the early Georges. It eventually slipped into this Wiltshire pasture, perhaps dropped by a shepherd tending ancestors of the very sheep that kept me out of the field this spring.
