Willful Ignorance Based Recreational Outrage is a helluva drug…
Probably not what it would be worth on the open market, though.
Kind of hard to accuse the government of stealing when something is found on public land. If you took a sheep, I imagine you would not be particularly surprised when the owner comes and takes it back.
Thanks for the link. I knew there wasn’t something weird about determining whether the treasure was lost or placed there on purpose. It’s nice to see that in either case the finder can expect compensation.
I’m confused about why you started by saying “not quite”. Is there some point on which you disagree with what Northern Piper said?
Even assuming that the local laws would indeed allows the government to step in and keep the treasure, it seems to me it would be up to the individual to check the laws before spending years and thousands of dollars on a treasure hunt.
Am I the only one who finds it rather odd that the local coroner is charged with making the determination of whether a find is “treasure” or not? Other than the fact that treasure is often buried, I don’t see the connection between a stash of gold coins, say, and determining if a death was due to foul play.
Not really. A coroner has traditionally been an investigator. Only in modern times has it come to be associated strictly with corpses. And that’s because the coroner investigates the cause of death.
The guys who found this hoard had been searching for a while–a few small finds had indicated there was something big around. But they appear to be more interested in the big story than in marketing metal; they are working with the archaeologists to excavate the find correctly. It sounds like they bought metal detectors & have had an interesting weekend hobby for years. Now they’ll get a fair sum & their names attached to some museum displays…
This is why if you find ancient treasure…DON’T TELL ANYONE! If it is golden art/coins and you can’t find a buyer, melt it down to base gold and sell that.
I know, I know, terrible but what do you expect of ancient treasures if you are essentially just going to confiscate it from the finder?
A pittance. The guy who found the last hoard of gold got a tiny fraction of its worth after a legal battle. It was in National Geographic last year. Can’t dig it up right now.
If this find is worth 10mil, he’ll be lucky to get 50k.
This recent case suggests that it’s a bit more generous than that:
Initial newspaper reports put the find at £1 million, but that was before the actual valuation was done, and the finder got £462,000, for a hoard of four gold torcs.
A similar situation was covered in Roald Dahl’s The Mildenhall Treaure
Really? In what dialect of English does whored not rhyme with hoard? And how are the two words pronounced in that dialect?
This is not a facetious question, by the by - I really am curious.
I know, right? And what’s with laws against stealing cars? Why should I give this car back if they’re just going to return it to the owner?
Those coins have been in the ground for more than a 1000 years- *along with the owner. *
The treasure trove laws date back to Royal Perogative, and yeah I can kind of see why they seem a bit quaint and antiquated to our Republican cousins.
I understand there being laws to protect the sale of antiquities, but exactly why should the crown automatically own objects dug up on private property?
That being said, why should the property owner get the right to claim them? He didn’t bury them there.
Are you real?
It’s an old common law principle, if anything, as old as the treasure trove thing, Uius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos:
Whoever owns land, it’s his from heaven to hell, which is to say a land owner owns everything above and below his land.