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Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery. — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
My topic for Blogathon has been Funny Money. Is there anything funnier than the old (pre-decimal) British monetary system? Is there an American alive that understands it? I’m an avid reader, and my head swims when money is mentioned in Dickens or Austen or Thackeray. The wikipedia article on British coinage features a bewildering array of pre-decimal coins.
No fear! Get Rich Slowly is here to make things clear. Simply print and clip this handy chart of 18th century values and tuck it in your copy of David Copperfield. Refer to it as needed.
| Basic Units | Value | Coin | Paper | Slang |
| 1,000 pounds | 1,000-pound note | |||
| 500 pounds | 500-pound note | |||
| 200 pounds | 200-pound note | |||
| 100 pounds | 100-pound note | |||
| 50 pounds | 50-pound note | |||
| 20 pounds | 20-pound note | |||
| 10 pounds | 10-pound note | tenner | ||
| 5 pounds | 5-pound note | fiver | ||
| 21 shillings | guinea | |||
| One Pound | 20 shillings | sovereign | 1-pound note | quid |
| 10 shillings | half sovereign | ½-pound note | ||
| 5 shillings | crown | bull | ||
| 2½ shillings | half crown | |||
| 2 shillings | florin | |||
| One Shilling< | shilling | shilling | bob, hog | |
| 6 pence | sixpence | tanner, bender | ||
| 4 pence | groat | |||
| 3 pence | threepence | thruppence | ||
| 2 pence | wopence | tuppence | ||
| 1 pence | penny | copper | ||
| ½ pence | half penny | ha’pence | ||
| ¼ pence | farthing | |||
| 1/8 pence | half farthing |
Note: Some of these denominations are no longer in use. Also, the British monetary system has moved to a decimal base. Thank god.
According to the book What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew:
Sovereigns and half sovereigns were gold; crowns, half crowns, florins, shillings, sixpences, and threepences were silver; pence, ha’pence, and farthings were copper until 1860, after which they were bronze.
[...]
To abbreviate their money, Britons used the symbol £ for pound, s. for shilling, and d. for pence, although five pounds, ten shillings, sixpence would be written £5.10.6. “Five and six” meant five shillings and sixpence, and it would have been written “5/6″.
.jpg "The Money Blog Network - Improving your bottom line")
July 30th, 2006 at 6:06 am
[...] The British monetary system, demystified, in which I provide a chart to explain the old system of pounds, groats, and farthings. [...]
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:14 pm
More on the Guinea here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_%28British_coin%29
It was the first gold coin, and the Pound Sovereign officially “replaced” it in the nineteenth century.
September 16th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
You missed a slight trick there in showing how shillings compared to pence - i.e. 12d to the s (no, i have no idea why it was abbreviated ‘d’… can only assume its some french/latin holdover such as pounds using ‘lb’ for weight and the L-like £ for money).
4 farthings = 1 pence
12 pence = 1 shilling (48 farthings)
20 shillings = 1 pound (240 pence, 960 farthings)
1 pound 1 shilling = 1 guinea
It was nothing if not flexible, and has similarities in various ways to binary and the base-60 organisation of time (with a common root in 12, and divisions/factors of it). A lot of old counting systems were divided this way rather than decimally as it made simple divisions by 2, 3, 4, (5,) 6, etc a whole lot easier, and though the multiplication mathematics may seem tricky at first, its a piece of cake when you memorise a few times-tables (same as binary :))
Not sure why the weights and measures system is organised differently though! Something that cost you a pound (or a shilling) for a pound weight would be difficult to pay for with a certain number of shillings (or pence) if you only wanted an ounce (1/16th)… and no word on if there was ever a larger measure of currency than the pound - admittedly a huge sum at the time (1 victorian pound = about £500 today) e.g. the stone
Many of the coinage conventions and slang words carried over for quite a while following decimalisation in the 70s, where things were rationalised for familiarity somewhat, using the 20s = £1 approach, such that an unofficial shilling was now 5p not 12d. I’ve come variously into contact with some old coins recieved accidentally in change, and e.g. the old half penny is a good match for a modern 2p, florins for (old, large) 10p’s, shillings for 5p’s, so on and so forth… these have seemingly only gone out of use in the last 10-15 years, probably because they were being hung onto by people of my grandmother’s age and older.
Strangely, though the 1 + 2p are the only surviving ‘copper’ coins, matching the old scheme, a 50p (eg half sovereign) is silver, not gold, and a pound coin is considerably weightier than the old sovereigns, possibly due to not being made out of gold, but mostly a tin alloy plated with gilt.
September 16th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
(a quick calculation shows that the half farthing, at first sight a tiny worthless coin, would buy at least 26p of similar-value goods in the modern world, taking the famous £20-a-year dickens quote as a basis and comparing it to a roughly £10,000 minimum wage in 2007… so it may still have been a comparitively coarse measure, but I’ll bet things were somewhat more expensive all round at the time, with few luxuries for the lower classes and the primary concern being to earn enough to stay adequately - let alone comfortably - fed, clothed and housed)
September 16th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
or in other words 1 dickensian farthing = 1 dollar at 2007 exchange rates, should that make the sums more meaningful to anyone!
also, my kingdom for an edit button!