When Robert and Betty Fooks bought South Poorton Farm in West Dorset in 2019, they knew the 17th-century long house would need extensive work before it felt like home. What they did not expect was to find a piece of English history buried directly beneath their kitchen floor. While digging down nearly two feet one October evening to raise the ceiling height, Robert’s pickaxe struck a glazed pottery bowl hidden in the bare earth. Inside were more than 1,000 gold and silver coins, some dating back to the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, others minted during the turbulent years of the First English Civil War. The discovery, later known as the Poorton Coin Hoard, would go on to sell at auction for tens of thousands of dollars, but its real value lay in the story it told about who buried it, and why, centuries before it was ever found again.
How the Fooks family uncovered a 400-year-old bowl of coins while lowering their kitchen floor to add head height
The Fooks family purchased South Poorton Farm as a long-term renovation project, taking on a cottage whose original stone walls and structure dated back some 400 years. As part of that renovation, they stripped the kitchen back to bare stone and began lowering the ground level to create more head height downstairs. According to Duke’s Auctioneers, the firm that later handled the sale, the couple removed a modern concrete floor and dug down by nearly two feet, uncovering old flagstones in some areas while other sections revealed only bare earth beneath. It was in one of those bare earth patches, working by torchlight one October evening, that Robert struck the buried bowl, revealing more than 1,000 coins packed inside. Once the discovery was reported, the coins were sent to the British Museum for cleaning and formal identification. Specialists there examined the hoard and concluded the coins had most likely all been buried together on a single occasion sometime between 1642 and 1644, placing the burial squarely within the opening years of the First English Civil War. The hoard itself spanned several reigns rather than a single era, containing gold coins minted under James I and Charles I alongside silver half crowns, shillings and sixpences dating back further still to the reigns of Elizabeth I, Philip and Mary, suggesting the coins had been accumulated gradually over decades before finally being hidden away.
Why a family would bury over 1,000 coins during the chaos of England’s Civil War, and what a smashed bowl reveals about how carefully it was hidden
The timing of the burial lines up closely with one of the most turbulent periods in English history, when Parliamentarian and Royalist forces clashed repeatedly across the countryside, and ordinary households faced the very real risk of having their homes searched or their belongings seized by passing troops. Burying valuables underground was a common and practical precaution during this period, offering a way to protect savings from soldiers on either side while war swept through rural areas like Poorton. Betty Fooks has said she believes whoever buried the coins likely intended to return for them once it was safe to do so, a plan that, for reasons lost to history, never came to pass. Adding a small but evocative detail to the find, the pottery bowl that had once held the coins was discovered broken, though it remains unclear whether the damage happened during the digging itself or centuries earlier when the hoard was first buried. Either way, the presence of a dedicated container holding well over 1,000 coins suggests a deliberate, careful act of concealment rather than a hurried or accidental loss, reinforcing the idea that whoever hid the coins meant to protect a genuine store of personal wealth rather than simply misplace it. Betty Fooks described the moment of discovery simply, recalling that her husband called out from the kitchen to say they had found something, before gathering the coins into a bucket. For the Fooks family, a routine kitchen renovation aimed at making their home more comfortable ended up connecting them directly to that history, offering a physical reminder that beneath even the most ordinary corners of an old house, the past, and sometimes a great deal of it, can still be waiting to be uncovered.
