Posted on 10/29/2025 8:53:17 PM PDT by Red Badger
It won’t catch any fish, but the discovery of as many as 20,000 silver coins and pieces of jewelry dates back to the early Middle Ages.
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
A fisherman digging for worms at his summer home in Sweden instead discovered over 13 pounds of buried silver treasure.
The hoard comes from the early Middle Ages, and includes mostly coins (and some jewelry). The entire cache of silver was tucked inside a copper pot.
A Swedish fisherman searching for gooey, juicy worms to use as bait near his summer home near Stockholm instead struck something far more solid (and much less interesting to fish): a copper cauldron brimming with coins and jewelry. In total, the find comprised 13 pounds of early Middle Ages silver.
“This is probably one of the largest silver treasures from the early Middle Ages that has been found in Sweden,” Sofia Andersson, antiquarian at the Stockholm County Administrative Board, said in a translated statement. “We do not yet know exactly how many coins there are, but I believe it could be upward of 20,000.”
The thousands of silver coins come mainly from the 12th century C.E., and some were embossed with the text “KANUTUS,” which is the name “Knut” in Latin. These coins were minted during Knut Eriksson’s reign as Sweden’s king near the end of the 12th century, from around 1173 to 1195. This period of the region’s history was marked by conflict, and as a result—as Lin Annerbäck, director of Stockholm’s Medieval Museum, told the Swedish-languageDagens Nyheter—the buried treasure may have been an attempt by a wealthy family to hide their valuables during a time of uncertainty.
While the copper cauldron holding the treasure was “unfortunately not as well preserved” as the objects inside, Andersson said, those objects were in impressive condition. In addition to the coins, the discovery included silver rings, silver pendants, and pearls.
Sifting through the many coins, the experts found some unusual pieces, including so-called bishop coins that would have been minted in Europe during the Middle Ages for specific bishops. Andersson said that the new treasure features several such coins, where a bishop is depicted holding a shepherd’s crook in his right hand.
Many of the coins feature uneven cut edges and raised designs on their faces—one particularly eye-catching example features a building, which is likely a church—and some are adorned with decorative dotted borders.
The Stockholm County Administrative Board continues to work with archaeologists to both analyze the treasure and investigate the location of the discovery to see if more buried treasures await them. They are currently keeping the exact site of the find a secret from the public to protect any potential remaining artifacts.
Under Swedish law, anyone that discovers ancient silver (or gold, bronze, or another copper alloy, for that matter) must report it to the state. The state can then offer a payment to redeem the treasure. The board said that once investigations wrap, it will pass along information about the discovery to the National Heritage Board, and the board can then decide if it plans to pay compensation to the fisherman who found the hoard in order to redeem the silver.
Our best guess? He walks away with far more than worms.
I find it funy that they tried to remove Christ from it by denoting it Before the Common Era (BCE) and Common Era (CE) and but they never really say what the thing was that splits those eras. I mean, it’s pretty arbitrary except for one major thing ...
Wow, Alcibiades — he was the ancient Greek model for, I dunno, Shakespeare’s Iago maybe.
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