Do You Know the Difference? Shilling, Sixpence, Halfpenny?

[Music] when we read in literature and in history we run into all sorts of wonderful terms about money things like farthings and half pennies shillings two bits four bits what's going on with all these strange coinages that we hear about in the 18th century and how do they how do they connect together that's we're going to talk about in this episode today so before we get started let's think about today's money here in the united states we have a stretch of kind of bills and coins that we work with every day the top is the 100 bill there's nothing bigger than that we've got 50s 20s 10s fives ones and then we get down into coinage right so we've got quarters half dollars sometimes we see half dollars quarters dimes nickels and pennies the stretch between the smallest coin or denomination here and the largest is ten thousand to one there are ten thousand pennies in a hundred dollar bill and we really don't have anything bigger than a hundred dollar bill and obviously we don't have anything smaller than a penny but this is what we use for day-to-day transactions uh that's what works for us we don't really need a whole lot of a bigger bill because we use different sorts of means for paying so what do they have in the 18th century what's the biggest coin and what's the smallest coin let's start at the very top so we've got golden guineas at the top of the british monetary system we're going to be talking about great britain first because the 13 colonies are all british colonies and they would have known even if these coins weren't the ones that were constantly in circulation they would have known exactly what these coins were so at the top of the british system here is the golden guinea now it's not the very very top because there's actually a five guinea coin a great big uh golden coin as big as a crown so a five guinea piece a two guinea piece and then i've got something here that is a one guinea piece these would have been gold coinage they would have been the it would have been worth an awful lot in the time period very similar to having something like a 500 bill or a thousand dollar bill so you can imagine a very large uh gold coin of this time period they wouldn't have been you know being used in standard transactions day to day very often certainly but people would have been familiar with the the standard one guinea golden coin it was also a half guinea for a slightly uh smaller golden coin so those are the very top coins they didn't have paper money per se in the british monetary system like we're used to so they used these uh precious metals as sort of the the top end here so now let's move down into the silver coinage now this is the kind of money that would have definitely been in people's pockets they would have recognized the silver coinage uh are the top of the silver coinage here is the crown the british crown here this one is from about 1745 and it's a it's a large silver piece it would be very very similar to a silver dollar back when we had silver dollars almost exactly the same sort of size and weight it's a it's a very very nice piece to have in your pocket really fills it up well and it has a great sound to it you know we're not used to the sound of our coinage nowadays it just doesn't i mean it has kind of has this kind of funky sound boy these uh these silver pieces uh sound wonderful the the crown is the top end if we sort of try to connect our guineas it was easy enough to connect five two and one how many guineas uh works with a crown well there are four crowns plus one shilling there's a little boost we need just a little bit more than four crowns to to uh fit in a uh a guinea here so here's our crown next up underneath that is the shilling now we've all heard of a shilling we don't really sort of we would have a good connection with that do we it is um very very similar to a quarter in its uh size maybe a little bit thinner than a quarter and the reason why it's a little bit smaller than the quarter because it's not a quarter of a crown it's actually a fifth of a crown it takes five of these shillings to be worth one crown now we'll stop here at this shilling and talk about it for a second as we've looked at say a guinea and we see this crown it turns out that they would put the current ruler on these coins so today in our coinage that we see we've got past presidents way past presidents on these coinage we're always using a they're always using the current ruler on here so uh the the 1745 shilling we've got here has george the second on it uh the guinea that we were seeing earlier that's got george iii on it because that's from 1773. another very very interesting thing here is that the front and underneath the bust of the king here there's a little word lima on here and this shows up these these little uh sort of place names show up on multiple british coins in this time frame this particular word denotes that the silver that this coin was made from was money that was captured by the british at lima peru in the 1740s so there was a uh an excursion that went all the way they actually circumnavigated the world went all the way around the world the british were attacking the spanish uh in south america up along the coast there and they went and also attacked treasure ships uh in the pacific they captured a large quantity of silver at lima peru and to show off one way or the other they decided to mark the coins and there were other coins that happened in the time period like vigo it says the same sort of thing that that it was made from the metal that was captured at that that place so this particular coin has the little lima peru uh notification on it there as we move through the shilling we have a six pence which is half a shilling and you can see this coin is almost it looks exactly the same same front and back and it is just half that size as we're working with these silver coins they uh their denominations are directly connected with exactly how much weight of silver they have in them so if you've got a shilling which is worth 12 pence and you've got a six pence piece the six pence is exactly half the size there are still a few more silver pieces to go these uh these shillings and six pence's are pretty thin pretty small we you could easily sort of lose them in your pocket the six pence is getting close to our dime size but incredibly they made even smaller silver coins so here is a four pence piece it's got the little four on one side and the ruler on the other side and we can keep working down there's a three pants and a two pence and then when we finally get down there there's a s there is a golden array a silver penny which look at that it just just just is fits on your fingertip that's all the bigger that little guy is these smaller silver coinage probably did not flow in in the economy all that much in great britain and it's likely you would almost never see anything like this in the colonies uh in the uh in the americas uh definitely not as as common a piece and we do have some nice fun names at least for something like the four pence it was also called the groat in the time period so if you hear a you know i spent a groat you it's four pence and the three penny the two penny or maybe a tuppence i'm not sure whether that's used as much in the uh 18th century as in the 19th century and then we have our single silver penny there that's the end of the silver coinage but then we go down into our copper coinage so we're used to at least silver looking silver dollars half dollars quarters dimes nickels but when we get down to a penny we get into copper coinage and they had copper coinage in the time period but they didn't have copper pennies at least great britain didn't have until the very very late part of the 18th century when they had a large copper they called them cartwheel pennies but all through the earlier part of the 18th century they had half pennies and farthings so a half penny there would be uh let's see what 24 half pennies in one of those shillings and here is a half penny it's a nice big size copper coin it's got britannia on the back there with their shield and then the current ruler on the front there so this one's george ii and here is a farthing half that size and that's a lot closer to our penny isn't it so really really close size just a little bit bigger than maybe our standard penny so when we finally get all these denominations connected together so we go farthing half penny then we go to shilling and crown and guinea and then two guinea and five guinea the stretch between all those is a little bit more than five thousand to one it's very similar to our ten thousand to one now we might think that that would sort of equate in purchasing power right not really uh their coins were actually worth a good bit more so our smallest coin is a penny you can't really buy anything with a penny can you so if we take our half penny it has a buying power of about one dollar so even their their smallest coin is really only uh goes down to about 50 cents they didn't have to deal with this tiny little uh denominations like we do today they didn't have the same sort of issues with sales tax and whatnot the only reason why we probably still have pennies let's dig in and look at these half pennies for just a second this one is a very earlier more early than most of the rest of them here is 17 18 half penny they are very it's it's actually a little thicker than this later one but these weigh the same amount of copper uh this copper in the time period wasn't worth the exactly the same amount as the coin is if we're looking at a silver coin it has exactly the amount of silver that it's worth right so there's a crown's worth of silver in a silver crown not true for the copper currency these are token currencies there's only about half the amount of copper in a half penny a hot pennies worth of copper we have the the ruler on here this is george the first instead of george the second like these other ones and here's an interesting half penny right here this one isn't irish half penny so instead of having britannia on the back it's got the irish harp on the back now some people didn't didn't like this coin as well and so this half penny was more likely to be exported and to be a coin that you would find in the colonies the silver coinage was illegal to export british silver coinage to the colonies the copper coinage was not illegal to export from great britain into the colonies and so these copper pieces which were much more likely to be seen in the colonies in the english colonies during this 18th century time period in north america in the british colonies we have more than just british coinage and there really wasn't a whole lot of that flowing through the colonies but we do have some other ones important coins uh that we need to kind of get a grip on and this is the german tower in the 18th century there was no germany per se there were many many german states they they weren't united as they are today as one germany uh so there are many many different german coins but they tend to be very related and their small coin is the fennig which is similar to a penny right and there's their silver coin like a silver dollar or uh the silver crown is actually the taller and that's that that word is very very similar to the word dollar they're all related to each other there's this ancient silver coin that is sort of copied all through europe and this german tower uh is that this one's from that 18th century refraction the revolutionary war time period um so we've got our our german silver coin some of these might have been seen in the colonies the interesting thing about this particular german coin is the idea that uh this coin when it was originally minted 1778 was likely minted with silver that was paid to this german state for payment of soldiers so this hessen castle tower is sometimes referred to as a blood money coin because it's made from the silver that was used to purchase the services of those hessian soldiers [Music] we also have a lot of french coinage that is going through the economy here in north america and the crown size coin for that here is our french coup and this one is from 1769. and the french coinage is again they do have some coins that are very very similar in sized it's just so just like that dollar just like this crown the aku is almost exactly that same size this one is in a very very good shape so a little bit later in the 18th century in the 1790s we had the french revolution and one of the things that the new government decides to do is to change all not just what the coinage looks like but the actual denominations themselves to discard the idea of what a an aku was or and change the names and the sizes of the coins to get as much distance from that old royal system to their new system so they would while they still had to use some of the coinage from the older uh regimes they defaced them so many of the coins from this time period have scratch marks worn off they defaced the king here there are a few scratches here and even on the back where there are the the royal fleur-de-lis symbols on the back they would wear that off scratch that off on purpose this one still is in very good shape just like it was in the 18th century they had smaller coinage too and you know sort of like the shilling here we again we don't see as many of these moving through our economy here in the british colonies but they are something that we might have seen if we were here in the 18th century now what would we have seen what's the most common coin that if we are in the colonies in the 18th century if someone's gonna pay us with a coin what are we going to have well we are going to have spanish coinage or sort of not even spanish from spain but spanish from south america central america uh mexico those are the coins that are going to be used the most by the colonies and here is the spanish piece of eight this coin is truly the one that's being used all the time in the colonies and this coin continued to be used in the united states after the revolutionary war and continued to be legal tender up until the 1850s and these traded as one for one with our silver dollar and we in fact we get our name from the spanish mild dollar which this is it's another word for that same uh coin it was called a piece of eight because uh it's got a little eight here this is an eight reals coin so it has um it's a it's a much larger uh coin than some of the smaller ones although it's almost exactly the same weight and size as our crown same size as our silver dollar today if it was still silver here is they had smaller versions so like like there was a shilling there's the uh one real coin here and it's again exactly the same size and just like the british coinage this these coins are measured or denominated by exactly the amount of silver in them so there is in this case one dollars worth of silver in this silver dollar now there they did also have smaller coinage of some small copper coinage and some smaller silver coinage we don't see them as much in our economy so if we don't have um uh small coins and again just like i was saying with the british coin this would be worth an awful lot in the time period uh you know maybe it's a hundred dollar bill let's take it as an example uh and we can't purchase you know we can't use a hundred dollar bill to you know purchase a soft drink or something we need to be able to break this money up into smaller pieces what if we don't have smaller money they did chop this money up which we find just very very difficult to understand but that's where this idea if this was an eight p eight real piece of money or a piece of eight we can cut it up into eight pieces and we would get you know smaller pieces like that that's where the bits come from when you hear somebody saying oh that's four bits or two bits they're talking about here is a single bit so our equivalent to 12 and a half cents if that makes any sense at all we can cut it up into quarters so we get two bits and if we cut it up in just halfs we get four bits so when we read about bits we're talking about pieces or pie pieces of these larger chunks of pieces of eight [Music] this idea of cutting the coinage up was fairly early so there are references to cutting this money up in the very very early part of the 18th century and we see the same thing people talking about the same idea in the early 19th century so this idea of needing smaller change and what are we going to do about that is a common problem and cutting these pieces of eight up was something that happened quite regularly you can imagine though that the accuracy of cutting these is very very important because the worth is in the silver itself not in the design or anything else on these coins so somebody needed to be very careful as they cut their coins up because of the issue with the worth being in the coin people did try to cut pieces off of the coins they would clip them they would try to take little chips off the coins because they could extract some wealth and then continue to trade that coin as if it was in full value so that's one of the reasons why we have the special coinage or while this coin is called a milled dollar it means the edges are milled and that's to keep people from taking away some of the silver there's some amazing milling on these some of them have words on them some of them just uh just sort of lines across the coins to make sure that you're getting all your value in the coin and if you were concerned about your bits whether they whether they were truly worth what they uh were supposed to be worth you would have a special little scale and you would be able to weigh your coins to see whether they weighed what they should in the 17th century and early in the 18th century these spanish colonies did not have the equipment to produce a beautiful milled dollar like is used like we have here so the equipment was very very crude to make coins they would have bar bar silver poured out that they smelted and then they would cut it into chunks and mash it with a very crude dyes and hammers and this is a piece of cobb money from that time period this cobb money weighs the same amount as our piece of eight it's much thicker but it's very very crude and you can see the individual hammer marks and then the die that struck here in the center this one's from 1708 and it is uh well you can see it would be very easy to clip off pieces of this cobb money if you wanted to extract some of that silver some of that value and that's one of the reasons why they went ahead and made the much nicer milled dollar so this is still a dollar this is a milled dollar whenever we read stories we dig into history we think about literature and all sorts of things we run into these wonderful monetary terms and sometimes it doesn't make sense unless we understand the monetary system of the time period and exactly what these coins looked like and felt like so we can we can dig in and learn so much more about history and all those wonderful uh pieces of literature when we can see the coins when we can get an idea about how big they are and how they kind of connect with money today if you've enjoyed this episode and you want more on money in the 18th century and it is so wonderful so complicated there's so much to learn you need to check out our 35 minute mini doc on money in the 18th century whether it's coin or paper money trading and barter make sure to dig in and check out that episode

Channel: Townsends

Views: 115,749

Keywords: 18th century, 18th century cooking, 19th century, history, jas townsend and son, jon townsend, reenacting, townsends

Id: mIhZxwYkYtA

Length: 25min 22sec (1522 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021