A coin expert said his eyes lit up when he saw 12 “rare” medieval gold coins, discovered with 616 silver pennies hidden in the wake of the Black Death.

The hoard was found during a metal detecting rally at Hambleden in Buckinghamshire in April 2019.

British Museum curator Barrie Cook said there had been only 12 known examples of the 1346 and 1351 Edward III gold nobles before the 2019 finds.

The coins have been declared treasure by Buckinghamshire Coroner’s Court.

The hoard was unearthed by seven detectorists during Spring Detectival 2019, as first reported by the Bucks Free Press.

Dr Cook said the pandemic delayed identification, while he was also faced by the puzzle of whether he was looking at two separate hoards – one of gold coins and one of silver – and “until I look at them in detail, I couldn’t make that judgement”.

He is now convinced the same “poor bloke or woman – it could have been a woman – put this very large sum of money in a hiding place and couldn’t go back to it, so probably died”.

Historic England is launching a scheme to find overlooked, ordinary places that celebrate England’s working-class heritage.

The public body, which manages the official register of historic listed buildings and nationally protected sites in England, is looking for council estates, factories, mines and other “overlooked historic places” that tell an important story about England’s past.

On Wednesday, it will invite community and heritage organisations to apply for a new Everyday Heritage Grant scheme. Grants of up to £25,000 will be awarded to projects that highlight the hidden histories of local places and buildings, with a particular emphasis on those where “ordinary people” have worked, lived or socialised, such as terraced houses, pubs, clubs, farms, shipyards and railways.

A hungry badger is thought to have unearthed the largest collection of Roman coins ever to have been discovered in northern Spain, reports say.

The treasure trove was discovered close to the den of an animal in the municipality of Grado, Asturias.

The animal is thought to have uncovered the treasure as it desperately searched for food last winter, a harsh one.

Heavy snowfall affected the region when Storm Filomena hit last year.

In a desperate attempt to find some food, it is thought that the animal – which researchers believe could be a badger – inserted its legs into a small crack opening next to its refuge.

But it found no use for the old coins and abandoned some of the pieces in front of its den.

The 209 pieces were then found by two archaeologists when they went to visit the cave of La Cuesta with a local resident, according to a report recently published in an archaeological journal.

The collection of rough coins turned out to be an “exceptional find” dating from between the 3rd and 5th Centuries AD.

The coins are thought to have been forged in places as far away as Constantinople (present day Istanbul, Turkey) and Thessaloniki, Greece, according to one of the researchers who spoke to Spanish newspaper El País.

“Grate the Cheese & add to it one egg, & a teaspoonful of Mustard, & a little Butter,” advises Martha Lloyd, a close friend of Jane Austen, in her recipe for one of the author’s favourite meals, “Toasted Cheese”. “Send it up on a toast or in paper Trays.”

This recipe is part of the “household book” written between 1798 and 1830 by Lloyd, who lived with Austen, her sister Cassandra and their mother (also called Cassandra) for years. The four women lived together in a cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, where Jane wrote, revised and had published all of her novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

Lloyd’s handwritten book, in all its blotched and crumbling glory, is set to be published in a colour facsimile for the first time, giving readers a new glimpse into Austen’s home life. Bodleian Library Publishing is releasing it in June, under the title Martha Lloyd’s Household Book.

History should not be just affirmation, like Michael Gove’s myth of a single “national past”. Nor should it be entertainment: merely something “people enjoy”. It is a critical science for questioning short-term views, complicating simple stories about causes and consequences, and discovering roads not taken. History can upset the established consensus, expand narrow horizons and, in Simon Schama’s words, “keep the powerful awake at night”. In that mission lies the public future of the past.