Is it really possible that it had lain in the same muddy spot for the last 640 years or so?
I do find that hard to believe given that said muddy spot is , twice in the course of every day, totally submerged under the River Humber which drains around one fifth of the entire land mass of England out past the city and port of Hull into the North Sea.
Dependant on the speed of the river and conditions upstream that particular stretch of shoreline can be either bright white exposed chalk bedrock or a sticky morass of gloopy alluvial matter.
It was on a muddy deposit day that, following in the tracks of my two dogs, I noticed under my welly-boot toe cap an incongruous, round shaped object.
It was obviously a coin but it was not until I had wiped off the surface grime that I realised that this was quite an old one. The image was well worn but discernible. It showed a head and shoulders image of a figure in a crown and with various flanking symbols and marks.
It was without doubt a Groat, its power and value hammered into the silver and dating from between 1327 and 1377, the reign of Edward the Third.
My first thought on its discovery on the shallow shore was that someone had only just recently lost it. Three scenarios came to mind;
1) A metal detectorist on a practice run may have deposited it there and then in a moment of distraction or depletion of batteries, misplaced it.
2) A panicky burglar may have ditched it fearing that it would be difficult to sell on.
3) A small child, gifted the ancient coin by a doting relative may have used it as a skimmer across the water at high tide in a spiteful act as "even a single shiny pound coin would at least have been legal tender in the local sweetie shop rather than this piece of junk".
A detective instinct that I did not know that I possessed kicked in. It was a case that intrigued me. I went to the internet to try to authenticate the coin.
By way of general background to my investigation I checked up on Edward the Third. His rule of 50 years made him the second longest serving monarch in Middle Ages England.
He was a military man rather than a benevolent statesman and diplomat and in a series of aggressive acts he initiated the Hundred Years War with France and managed a couple of notable victories at Crecy and Poitiers (those names were familiar from some of my school history curriculum).
Academics of the modern age and in retrospect have been critical of him as a bit of an irresponsible adventurer, temperamental and one not to suffer fools gladly.
As for the reasons for the coin to be where I found it?
At that point on the mighty Humber Estuary it was known that successive owners and occupiers of England used it as a foot crossing. The Ermine Street, a major Roman route from the south to York was bisected by the river close by.
A later medieval traveller could have had a hole in his purse or doublet at this very place and one or more Groats and other denominations could have fallen unnoticed into the mud.
Edward the Third did personally visit the city of Kingston Upon Hull, a mere 5 miles along the river to the east in 1332 to be welcomed by its first Mayor, William de la Pole. Such was the kings appreciation of the efforts of de la Pole to maintain a fortified trading port that he was promptly knighted.
Two of Edward's namesaked predecessors had already licenced the construction of a defensive ditch and ramparts using four and a half million locally fired bricks making it the most extensively use of the material in Medieval England.
I am not sure how Edward got to Hull, whether by boat up the coast or across country and taking advantage of the crossing point where I found the coin. That was perhaps too much speculation on my part.
Hull, later preferring to use the short form rather than suggesting any allegiance to the Crown after a major falling-out with King Charles 1st in the run up to the English Civil War, had been allowed by Edward the Third to not only trade with Europe, the exporting of wool, brick and tile being a basis for the wealth of the area but also to mint his coins The Groat now in my possession may have been bashed out locally on this basis.
Many pages in my sleuthing referred to one major event occurring in the original era of the coin- The Black Death.
In 1349 this decimated a large proportion of Hull's population which will have been a significant number given that in the latter part of the 14th Century it was in the top ten of English cities by size.
Having read about the scale of the impact of the Plague on the doorstep I decided it would be best to just put away the coin in a safe place.
I may have been overcautious by doing this but just say, on the off-chance, that its previous owner ,in a desperate attempt to flee the pestilence and terror.had dropped it in the process of dropping dead in that particular riverside spot.
A sobering and sad thought.
Pass me the antiseptic hand wipes- NOW.
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