Roman Soldier’s 1,900-Year-Old Paycheck Unearthed in Perfect Condition

Imagine waiting 1,900 years for your paycheck to clear—only to have it plow-scattered across an English turnip field. That’s more or less what happened to one luckless Roman legionary whose 25 silver denarii—a month’s wages—have just resurfaced near the village of Great Ellingham, Norfolk.

The coins, uncovered in 2023 by a metal-detector hobbyist and formally unveiled this week, are so pristine that coin specialist Adrian Marsden jokes they “cannot have seen much circulation before the guy dropped them.” Seven gleaming portraits of Emperor Hadrian lead the pack, flanked by cameos from Vespasian, Trajan, and a two-stage Marcus Aurelius (first as ambitious Caesar, later as full-blown emperor). Flip the disks and you’ll find everything from a sultry personification of Africa to the ominous Judaea Capta commemorative—Rome’s ancient victory tweet over the Second Jewish Temple.

Spread by centuries of tillage, the hoard still totals exactly one stipendium, the monthly salary doled out to citizen soldiers. Marsden shrugs: “We’ve seen it before; Norfolk was prime Roman farmland, basically the Tuscany of Britannia.” Yet every scattered coin is a tiny time capsule, reminding us that payroll anxiety is older than the IRS.

The legions may have marched out of Britain in 410 A.D., but their loose change keeps marching back into the headlines. Somewhere, an accountant in a toga is still yelling, “Who lost the petty cash?”