LifeArtEarth

In 1828 near the village of Crondall in Hampshire ('Crondale" at the time), 18 year old Charles Lefroy while on a shooting trip, noticed a group of small gold coins exposed by turf cutters, initially mistaking them for buttons. The hoard contained 98 gold coins, of which 73 were early English 'thrymsas' and 24 of them 'tremisses' from Merovingian Frankia and Frisia. The coins were bought (from Lord Grantley via Baldwins) for Oxford's Ashmolean Museum in 1944, in memory of Sir Arthur Evans.  The hoard is thought to have been deposited 'perhaps a decade or two' after Sutton Hoo (Abramson 2022, p. 5), in the range of 635 to 650. While the Sutton Hoo purse consisted of Merovingian gold coins, Anglo-Saxon coins are predominant in the Crondall group. The Anglo-Saxon coins in the hoard were mainly struck in Kent and London and three of the coins were unofficial issues made to look like coins. The hoard also contained coin blanks and a contemporary forgery ...

The earliest account of Yorkshire geology was provided by George Young and John Bird (the illustrator) in a large format 1822 book titled ' A   Geological Survey of the Yorkshire Coast' . Their Plates II and III show images of fossil plants, with Plate II (see below) illustrating Middle Jurassic fern-like and cycad-like fossils, five of them from the 'Saltwick ironstone' near Whitby, and two from the 'coal shale' at Fryop (today Fryup on the North York Moors). At first glance, the larger specimen (2) resembles the foliage of a modern cycad. Several others are similar to the foliage of modern ferns and one strange fossil (6) superficially resembles a flower. The authors commented that this last structure was ' apparently the head of the plant No. 2 ', a view that is still supported  today. In the section on 'VEGETABLE REMAINS' in the book, the following account is given: " Figures 2 and 6 of Plate II appear to belong to one plant ; the former...