AN extremely rare Roman gold coin, collected by a Worcester woman in Victorian times, is about to enjoy pride of place at Oxford's prestigious Ashmolean Museum.

The gold aureus of 70AD is being accorded the accolade of Object of the Month for June and will be prominently displayed by the museum whose experts rate the coin as "unique."

It was unearthed in about 1850, by "a poor man" while ploughing a field at Finstock, an Oxfordshire village about three miles from the Roman Villa at Northleigh.

The coin was later acquired by a remarkable Worcester woman, Martha Spriggs, who lived from 1777 to 1866 and who amassed a vast collection of signatures and letters written by famous people, together with an array of other curiosities and antiquities such as the Roman gold aureus.

She was a member of a prosperous Quaker family, her husband William Spriggs being a draper with four-storey shop premises at the corner of The Cross and Broad Street - today, H. Samuel, the jewellers. The family lived over the shop.

I featured Martha Spriggs and her children and grandchildren in Memory Lane about eight years ago.

Her collection of signatures and letters were handwritten by such famous people as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Ruskin, Elizabeth Browning, Lord Tennyson, Goethe, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Tolstoy, Berlioz, Catherine the Great, Napoleon, Lord Nelson, Louis XVI, Queen Anne, George III, George IV, William IV, Queen Victoria, Fox, Pitt, Peel, Wellington, Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Palmerston, John Wesley, Isaac Newton, Constable, Turner, Josuah Reynolds, Landseer, Dickens, Walpole, Victor Hugo and Lord Tennyson.

And among Martha Spriggs' "historic curios" were a rosary blessed by Pope Pius IX, a piece of George III's waistcoat, fragments of Napoleon's tomb at St Helena, the tip of King John's sword from his grave in Worcester Cathedral, a file of King Richard the Lionheart's blood, pottery from Pompeii, Bonnie Prince Charlie's teaspoon, a Bronze Age axe head from Bevere Island at Worcester and a sea shell which fell from the sky during a storm over Gloucester.

Martha Spriggs, some of whose collections are now in museums, also inspired her children and grandchildren to follow in her footsteps as prodigious and sophisticated autograph hunters.

Notable among them were granddaughters, the late Misses Margaret and Gulielma Binyon, who lived for more than 80 years at Henwick Grove off Oldbury Road, Worcester. The grounds of Henwick Grove now form much of the campus of University College Worcester.

I was alerted to the display of Martha Spriggs' Roman gold coin at the Ashmolean by her great-great-great-grandson, Martin Colman of Ledbury, who took it to the museum last September. He did so as a member of the Friends of the Ashmolean and points out that the museum is second only in the UK to the British Museum as a centre for the study of coins. It possesses more than 250,000 coins from all over the world.

The Roman gold aureus is to remain permanently at the Ashmolean for display and study. It bears the name and profile of the Roman Emperor Vespasian with a standing figure of Justitia (Justice) on the reverse. It was probably struck in Syria or Judaea and is described as unique.

Another gold coin of Vespasian, with a seated figure of Justitia on the reverse, is recorded as having once been in the civic collection of the French city of Lyon, but it appears to have been stolen or melted down in 1794.

A gold aureus would even have been valuable in its day, representing a month's pay for a legionary soldier. The one now in the Ashmolean is said to be "the most important single Roman coin ever found in Oxfordshire," and it is clearly of national significance.