Pounds, shillings, and pence: a history of English coinage

i want to talk about the history of english coinage in this video which has been sponsored by acorn tv but i'll get to that in good time now i am here to offer you reassurance you see many is the time i have in the past found myself frustrated and frankly confused when reading in a history book that such and such a thing cost so many marks in this part of the medieval period or such a such thing cause so many groats or in some other period or florins or shillings and that what are all these different currencies there seem to be so many different currencies in use in medieval england well what's going on why don't they explain it properly well i've bothered to find out and i've discovered much my relief that it's nowhere near as complicated as i thought ultimately everything relates to the penny so uh be reassured i'm here to be reassuring and if i can achieve just that one thing reassuring you i will consider this to be time well spent but i should admit upfront that i am not a numismatist a numismatist is someone who studies coins and medals and things of that ilk money and so forth um i am not nor have i ever been fascinated by every last detail of this particular coin minted at a particular mint of the particular year oh look you'll notice that this one this 1762 version on the on the reverse has a different number of oak leaves and all that so don't worry i'm not going to be going into that sort of detail instead i'm going to be talking in broader terms and trying to keep it uh trying to trying to keep it interesting for the layman so um i'm going to start actually before there were coins with the celts in britain i know that's a bit of a cheat because i said this was the history of english coinage and england didn't even exist with the celts before the romans invaded but never mind may as well start at the absolute beginning so up until about 150 bc uh the celts who were quite sophisticated they had big towns and big organized societies they could muster really big armies quite quickly and send messages hither and yawn and mine all sorts of metals and make spectacular pieces of metal work and pottery and so forth so they weren't primitive people but they weren't using coins uh in the mediterranean they'd been using uh coins for many centuries but until 150 bc yeah we didn't really need them they go on fine without them so that was all right then but then um they started using coins but not their own coins they were using imported coins from europe and uh about 50 years after that somewhere around the year 100 yeah it's it's a big vague number but around the year 100 bc uh they started minting their own coins and the idea must have caught on reasonably quickly because uh owned by 30 years later one generation later coins were widespread across britain minted in britain and there were quite quite a few different coins uh coin designs being minted as well so they obviously quite took to this coinage idea after a bit but then julius caesar turned up at tea time on the weekend the cad and invaded um but the the the celts saw him off sort of uh but later other romans um claudius and the like came along and they finished the job and so britain was part of the uh the roman empire apart from the wilder woolier bits up in the the north and far west so um the romans then actually at first allowed the celts to carry on minting their own coins until the next emperor uh nero came along and in his time the the the native brits uh started using roman coinage now why was this then um was it because the romans said oy none of your native coinage jew mind you've got to use roman proper stuff now got it that could have happened it could have been uh top down applied by force but also the roman empire was big and you could do a lot of trade with a lot of people in the roman empire and roman coinage was widely accepted and had lots of denominations and it was decent quality so why not use it so it could be that no force was ever required anyway they started using roman coins but i'm not going to talk to you about roman coins because this is a video about english coinage but um it's worth mentioning roman coins because there's a certain legacy that carries over into later english coinage so um when for instance in 1969 vivian lead singer of the bonzo dog duda band sang you've heard of alibaba 40 thieves had he out for what we all want lots of lsd now a lot of people it was 1969 you understand a lot of people thought that he was making some sort of drugs reference there but actually that song was written in 1931 and lsd referred to pounds shillings and pence and this would have been common knowledge still in 1969 because people were still talking about pounds shillings and spen and pence l s d l for pounds s for shillings and d for pence okay why is that then because of the romans you see hence the relevance so the romans they had uh libri and they had solid e and dinari these were roman denominations of coin now libra um was a pound okay so when you abbreviate the weight of something uh you put lb don't you that comes from the roman libra so the pound weight and the pound the value uh 240 denarii the coins weighed one pound and so worth a pound so the pound and the pound there is a reason that the pound the the value of the money and the pound the weight 14 of them to a stone if you're english british i should say sorry sorry scotland sorry wales if you're british um uh they they are not just linguistically that's not a linguistic coincidence is what i'm saying so the pound is an l and that is why the pound sign uh it's like a it's like the pound sign like this that's actually an l with a couple of little extra ticks added you add a couple of extra ticks to show its currency you see a yen is is like a y with a couple of extra ticks a dollar is for no reason that anyone knows for sure an s uh with a couple of lines through it as well and the the u as used in in the in europe uh is an e with a couple of extra ticks on it and then you've got the the one in in korea which is a w and you've got the ruble which is uh okay it looks like a p but it's a greek row so it's an r sound so it's referrable and that's got an extra tick on it and so forth so there's this convention that you you get a letter you stick a couple of action ticks on it and there you go they even did it for bitcoin see b with a couple of ticks on it and there you go so the tradition is still alive so that's an l with a couple of ticks on it libra pound lubes when you uh write it in weight uh so s is is not for shillings actually that is a lewis linguistic coincidence uh that was for the the uh the solidi the solidus and uh then you have the dinari e um literally the the the value of a donkey it seems but anyway never mind that so that is why d was the abbreviation until decimalization for pence lsd pound shillings and pence there you go thank you romans but then the romans in 410 according to traditional history all packed their bags and went back to italy that's not really how it happened but then according to traditional history the roman period ends in england in 410 and then after a bit you get the saxons turning up and we go back to the situation with the celts they don't have coins at first but then uh for about a hundred years or so they're importing frankish coinage and using that but then somewhere around 600 625 they start minting their own coins and now they did have a number of uh coins the the anglo-saxons uh there were some little ones but there was the standard one which was the penny okay um it may have been called in some places the denier which is what another coin on the continent was called at first but pretty quickly it was the english word penny and that was the standard coin for the next seven centuries in england they traded in pennies um and in fact they got pretty good at it and they produced extremely good quality pennies that were emulated and admired across the the world that that knew about england at the time so you know i suppose that bit um there was also the um which think of the german modern word meaning peace well there you go it's it's a it's an old germanic word that just meant peace and the shilling which came along later uh it seems that the verb to separate shilling that's what where it comes from so you separate into parts and is a a piece of a penny so there were these smaller ones the the actually was minted in uh northumbria where i am and uh it was pretty much unique to that region of england and it was minted there in quite large quantities do quite high quality for quite some while so it was clearly a a well accepted coin um but it didn't become the standard english coin which was the penny now there's also the the shad or um which is spelt like this um and that really was a forum again of the penny uh it seems to be that that was just another early name for penny and this particular coin that was called that was then later valued at a penny so we get to a penny okay it's just let's go to the penny we have a chap here who's making very convincing silver in period coins from the viking age a lot of byzantine looking designs there so you make your own dies yes i do that's the hard part right so that's a lump of sprung steel or something yeah spring steel and i use hand engravers to make the design very patiently and expertly they're excellent noisy people they're some of the best noisy people i've ever seen noisy people are good well anyway making coin i uh use a silver yep trying to minimize waste yep the number three hammer yep okay so you've got a blank for one side on it yep i placed the silver blank on the die which is noticeably smaller than the design which it's going to take on yeah it feels out a little bit carefully place the upper die yep the piece of pipe is to center the die yeah and also i have a hard way to find a volunteer to hold the upper die when i strike it with it all right this little hammer you you okay i'm genuinely surprised it's quite such a massive hammer yep that should do it with a sledgehammer and you have it i have a coin so we do on the side sorry thank you very much sir you're welcome hey presto you've got a mint that's sort of all you need you need a hammer and a couple of dyes and you're away and uh mince proliferated one period there were 60 of them it got up to as many as 90 mints around england at one point but that 90 minutes was an awful lot of of mints for any king to keep an eye on but of course there were several kingdoms in the early periods so um each king wanted to be able to keep control of his old or his own uh mint and of course if you got an ability to mint coins and those coins go into circulation and people see them they are a propaganda tool they are a bit of like a little advertising hoardings for you so if you want to say hey there's a new there's a new king in town and he's just ace you can start minting coins to advertise the fact that you existed that well you know your ace well he must be because you're meeting these really good coins um and there seems to be loads of them in circulation at the moment so perhaps he's rich as well so there you go it was a a propaganda or advertising uh opportunity mint some coins set up a mint hey we're away but of course the more mints there are uh the more opportunities there are for low quality coinage which you know frankly is spoiling the game for everybody else and the penalties for debasing coinage for using uh lower value metals or underweight coins were was very heavy and yet people still did it now one of the problems uh was that there was no milling there was no edge detail on the coins so if somebody filed a little bit of the precious metal the gold or the silver off most coinage was silver at this point i suspected the silver uh the the the chemical symbol for uh for silver is a g well why isn't it s-i well that's silicon there's one reason but why isn't it sv then well there isn't one it's a g is silver and that's because it comes from the latin argentum or argentum and uh argentina got named after this and of course the word for money in a lot of a lot of languages like in french arjean today comes from the same word the latin for silver and it just means money uh anyway um so uh you're filing off the the precious metal uh mostly silver silver's more hard wearing for than gold for one thing and if you wanted a very low value coin in gold it would have to be so tiny it would be really inconvenient it would keep falling through holes in your pouches and it'd be really inconvenient i nearly said pockets there but of course pockets haven't been invented yet it's a weird thing but the pocket you think it's easy technology but it took the many many it took the millennia frankly to invent the pocket uh anyway so uh people would file the edges of the coins and then you had this this dust which could then melt down and then it's precious metals that was um that was valuable some people would even clip bits off the edges of coins so one of the reasons that a lot of very old-fashioned coins don't look perfectly round is because they've been filed or clipped also if they weren't perfectly round that was an opportunity to do a bit of filing or clipping that maybe someone wouldn't notice if you did it carefully so that was a problem people making coins uh they were underweight people making coins uh that are not out of pure metal and people filing and shaving bits off coins so really a king if he's to keep an eye on you know to keep a lid on this he's got he's got to watch his currency in his moneyers who are people who made coins like a hawk and how better to illustrate this than the goings on in 11 24. now in 1124 henry the first thought well it's christmas i'll summon all the monies to winchester and we can have the sizes of the moneyers won't that be fun this was a trial he was putting all the various um moniers in his kingdom on trial to see if they were in fact producing the right sort of coinage and it seems according to the anglo-saxon chronicle and various other sources which admittedly don't entirely agree on the details of exactly how many people and who they were but the broad sweep about half of them were guilty and just to show how how miffed he was with them he started having bits cut off them a number of hands were removed and apparently genitals as well so if ever you get in a time machine and go back to medieval period don't muck around with the currency the penalties are harsh you have been warned so that was the sizes of winchester 11 24 not such a happy christmas for all of those but frankly i think they probably deserved it um coming along to the normans next and you know what the normans arrive and they don't well they're changing anything in england they carry on using the pennies so there you go nothing complicated there with the normans um gold i should say something about gold uh there were gold coins as well gold is worth roughly 20 times the value of silver so there were for instance gold pennies a little bit confusing because a gold penny was worth 20 pence because it was it was a coin of similar size to a silver coin but gold is worth 20 times as much so it was so it's called a penny but it's not worth a penny i know a little bit confusing but it's a gold penny um now uh there was another kind of metal which actually england was hardly ever used but i think that's worth mentioning now called electrum a lot of the very first coins ever struck in fact were made out of the electrum and it could be that you're a little confused as to what what electrum well electrum i first found out about electrum because i was playing dungeons dragons and i picked up my copy of the advanced dungeons and dragons players handbook and i saw on page 35 that 10 copper pieces was a silver piece 20 silver pieces was one gold piece hey gary geigs 20 to 1 that's actually the correct ratio well done gary and two electrum pieces or eps were worth one gold piece oh uh well i'm sorry gary but you got that wrong no electrum was an alloy of gold and silver and it was deliberately mixed such that one electrum piece was worth 10 times the value of a silver piece so you mix in just a little bit of gold and that gives you something which is worth ten times the value of silver and that was used for for some coinage but actually the english didn't particularly go in into that but i just thought it was interesting so i'd i've i've thrown that in um so let's go ahead now to edward the first and he in 1279 introduces a new coin it's called the groat and this is one of those confusing moments oh no there's he's introducing another currency no he's not the grote is just the name of a coin it was a coin that was worth four pence so just as for instance uh in america you have the dime and the nickel for instance and people might think oh no the the dime it's a new currency no no it's just the name of a coin that's worth 10 or in the case of uh the nickel five cents well okay so it's just that it's called a groat and it was worth four pence although actually it didn't catch on it and and fell into disuse fairly quickly but it was introduced in 1279 and later was reintroduced and did catch on um uh now the mint uh was now that all of england was under one king it seemed a good time to uh bring the royal mint into the tower of london that's right in london in a big fortified place where the king was often uh stationed himself and so you could keep a really really close eye on what's going on in the mint it still wasn't the only place that coins were minted in in the realm but it was a standard against which other mints could be compared so it did help and this did as well as chopping bits off people helped to improve the quality of english coinage which at various periods it can be said that english carnage was the finest there was hurrah however in between these periods it can also be said that english coinage was sometimes really rubbish um so you win some you lose some anyway the uh the mint in the tower of london started minting the best coinage uh around that was widely accepted uh abroad and emulated and admired and copied even um and counterfeited uh for about two centuries so so hooray um and it's in also around this time uh edward the first that we get the first uh quarter pennies that's farthings and half pennies that's happening happening is just half penny just abbreviated happening that are proper round coins now it seems that there were some happenings and farthings from earlier periods but they only turn up around the uh the london area and they're very rare um but now in edward the first time you get these small [Music] copper coins and they are sorry um no i think his ones the first ones were probably silver pick a pardon uh there you go this first happens and farthings which are proper round coins now before if you had a penny and you wanted a half a penny what you could do is you get a pair of shears and you could look at the cross which was on most designs on one side and you could use that as a guideline and just slip it into two and now you've got two happenings great but of course that then goes into circulation and and people have got these two nasty sharp corners on it on what was previously a nice round coin that wouldn't wear a hole in your pouch because pockets haven't been invented yet yeah good you were listening um and if you snip that in half again down one of the other guidelines you had you had farthings well again after a while the coin is all turning into an awful lot of little bitty things with sharp angles on them and to put a stop to that good round small hypnies and filings were introduced and uh they did eventually become very common coins um now then on the uh obverse of a coin now you may wonder what that is now you may think that the coin has got heads and tails or maybe a front and a back but if you're a new mass numismatist then you say no no it has an obverse which is the front they've just decided that one of them is the front and a reverse which is the other side the back if you like and on the obverse you'd have a picture of the king looking kingly although the portraits weren't really very good and on the other side you would have where it had been minted so for instance if a coin had been minted in newcastle where i am now it would say novi castri on there on the reverse um and um i'm gonna write this i'm gonna skip forward to edward the third now there are enough other edwards to get through and he introduced some new coins the noble again don't worry it's just the name of a coin so uh the noble was worth 80 pence and uh that didn't actually catch on terribly well it was a gold coin um didn't become very popular but the half noble and the quarter noble uh worth 40 and 20 pence but you probably worked that out they did actually catch on and become quite popular um but there was a problem with gold coins you see the ratio of value which i said was roughly 20 to one it wasn't absolutely constant not just over time but also over space and on the continent there are a lot of people who were valuing gold more highly than in england so if you had a gold coin what you could do is you could just take it abroad and just sell it for more than its face value before it's just raw gold money value just the the the um the actual alloy the the material value and you get more for it and and this happened further on as well so in the arab world also the ratio between the value of gold and the value of silver wasn't exactly the same so for a surprising amount of time a mad trade went on with people thinking oh well what i'll do is i'll buy a load of gold using silver and then i'll take the gold to where gold is worth more than it is in ratio to silver where i am and then i'll get loads of silver off them and then i'll come back and then i'll use the silver to buy more gold and then i'll take the gold and you just go around and round just shipping coins back and forth and no actual goods are changing hands this is madness this is no way to run an economy anyway this was a problem because if you mentally gold coins and then people think oh well great it's made out of gold real gold okay i'll go abroad and sell it then all your all your coinage is going abroad that's not what you want so um what they could do is they could just say do you know what uh actually no it's it's not worth uh 80 pence the noble it's worth 100 pence um so there you go so now so that you're not gonna take it abroad now because you can get something worth a hundred pence for it here it didn't work very well unfortunately uh later another gold coin uh called the angel came along and and that was accepted and did become more popular and again it was worth 80 pence uh but there was still that that that's temptation to take the the the gold abroad when the prices were right uh so that was one uh problem that kings had to deal with um anyway edward iii so yes he also brought in the groat again and this time it's still worth four pence by the way just as before but this time it does catch on it becomes quite common and so when you you see that something cost so many growths it's probably from his time or later and it's just a multiple of four pence so really quite simple um now let's go to henry the seventh now henry vii in 1489 he introduced a gold sovereign and uh again it's a gold coin runs into a lot of the problems that other gold coins uh run into for the same reason um it was worth half a mark yeah okay now i have to explain something else what the hell was the mark then because in loads of history books you you're told that we look at the accounts for this year and see that the king spent so many marks on this and so many marks on that and this cost so many marks so this was the currency they were using it was the mark because it's not a pound it's not a shilling it's not pence it's a mark so what's that then show me go on shoot me a coin that's that there's a there isn't one there was no coin that was the mark these were not german coins it's not like the german mark no no instead it was an accountancy term it was a convenient subdivision of a pound so if you imagine there's naught pence here and there's a pound here you have two marks in between the mark and the half mark so half a mark was a third of a pound and a mark was two-thirds of a pound now you might think well how is that convenient well that's because you are probably used to modern decimalized coin coinage and so you're you never think in terms of dividing anything by three because you can't do that in in this happened to me a while ago i had a gig and there were three of us dancing and uh we got i think a hundred quid and we were given ten ten pound no it's oh how yeah decimalized coinage you can't divide anything by three you just try and you get 33.33333 recurring and there's no coin for that you can't divide anything by three which is ridiculous if you think about it now if you're picking a currency you really want it to be divisible by two don't you i mean nobody has 99 pence to the pound because if you wanted to halve it okay i'll split it with you oh i can't exactly because it's 99 pence to a pound this is one pound so one of us has to get an extra penny what you know no one would have no one would have an odd number of pence to a pound or to a dollar to whatever currency that you're trying to split into parts well no you wouldn't would you so after one two is clearly the most important number you want something divisible by two and what's the next most important number well three and there are actually quite a lot of numbers that divide by three in fact one in three numbers divides by three and yet decimalized coinage has picked a number 100 that doesn't divide by three and because it doesn't divide by three and it's so inconvenient to even try nobody ever does and so nobody ever thinks about the convenience that there would be if you could just divide things by three but it was charlemagne it was charlemagne um the the emperor of europe if you like uh um he set the value of a pound as 240 pence and this was this was not just so it's not i'm saying now it wasn't just an english thing it wasn't that the english had this weird quirk of having 240 pence to a pound no no it was actually used all around christendom but other places went to decimalization so many generations ago that people have forgotten this there were 240 somethings to something all around europe so there were 240 pence to a pound so that divides by three so actually it's a convenient it's a third of a pound and grouping things in threes is actually very convenient beginning middle and end early mid and late period there are loads of things that just naturally go into three a lot of things in life conveniently divide into three but you can't divide the decimal conjugates that way so people don't but back then they did a lot of the time hence the mark okay so there you go the mark is not a coin it's an accountancy convenience it's a convention things were counted in marks and one of the reasons for that is that a pound was really quite a lot of money so if you're uh trying to be a penny pinching accountant you're going to want to deal in a smaller unit perhaps than a pound so they did in the mark on paper uh right so that was my con my uh tangent into mark so how do i get that what was it talking about oh yes uh henry the seventh i was talking about and henry vii also introduced another coin called the test dune don't worry it's just the name of a coin and it was worth one shilling um it didn't catch on uh so well it comes on a bit in scotland where it got copied the test tune but um in england not straight away it didn't become very common in henry the seventh time but down to hendra viii then the testoon which people after a while stopped calling it the test tune and they started calling it the shilling it did under henry viii become very common now i've talked to about like a couple of times in english history already when our coinage would i say hour when the coinage i wasn't alive at the time i i have no i i gained no credit uh i deserve no credit for any of the the quality of the coinage in in medieval england but anyway in english coinage it was really good but under henry viii have to say though i've said uh things in defense of henry viii in many ways and his coinage was a bit rubbish under henry viii on his watch despite the fact that there was even the mints even then in his time in the tower of london uh where he should have been keeping more of an eye on things yeah the coinage got horribly debased so much so that one of his nicknames was old copper nose now i should explain it was the tradition to uh portray the king in profile on a coin um i suppose one reason it's just easier but under henry viii it came to full face and now we're starting to get quite realistic portraits for once the early kings they just look like some bloke uh whereas the portraits of henry viii were quite definitely yep that's him that's our henry we got to see him to go from young king to fat full-faced front-on king in his later years now what's the most prominent part of a portrait if your face on well it's the tip of the nose so if some cad has rather than making a solid silver coin used a copper blank plated it in silver and then stamped that with the dyes then after the coin has been in circulation for a bit and worn down a little bit what's the first bit to reveal the copper yeah the tip of his nose would wear away and would change color to copper oops so there you go that was a nickname for henry viii although i doubt many people actually called him that to his face and lived uh right so um things went a on the coinage front under henry viii but it's all right because under elizabeth the first his daughter uh things got better again and she put quite a bit of effort into um making coins worth what they really should be worth so a lot of uh coinage that had been debased she revalued so something that was meant to be worth say a shilling oh no no that's actually only worth four pence or something because it's been debased and she made things uh the right value and she introduced milling or rather someone during her reign introduced milling that is um adding detail to the edge of the coin all the way around so if someone were to file it down or try to clip and then this would immediately show and so if you see some something that's not got the the milling clear all the way around the edge well don't accept the coin because it might be underweight um admittedly though it was introduced in her time it didn't actually um become the norm uh it was horse being used uh for for putting the milling on and apparently it was quite a lengthy and expensive process and the guy who who developed the process he went on to do other things there was a there was a bit of um ill will it seems and uh so the milling didn't carry on for very long but at least it was started under under elizabeth the first um i realized that i've missed out that in 1551 uh edward the other sony edward sixth yes edward vi uh he brought in the crown and the half crown again they're just they're just coins don't worry the the the crown is a quarter of a pound which is 240 pence come on work it out it's five shillings well done so um let's skip ahead now to james the first and james the first brings in copper farthings that's right uh the earlier ones were silver i i was right to correct myself and uh you know i i think that's enough of of uh the innovations there let's let's skip forward to the english civil war and the parliamentarians ache they seized the royal mint in london the cads and being puritans of course and fighting against the king they're not going to put the king's head on the coin no meanwhile the king outside london he has to quickly come up with some emergency backup mints and start minting his own coins uh to compensate but what would these puritans do well they came up with the most boring looking coins but one innovation they came up with was that they did away with all this latin inscription nonsense and they put good stout english words on the coins which didn't last and today we have latin on modern uh coins in britain um but anyway so that was that was the boring period of the puritans and actually i realized that i've rabbited on for ages and it really is time that i said something about my sponsor all right it's time for my sponsor's message and my sponsor is acorn television or acorn tv as it has decided to style itself so what's that then well you've probably uh since you're watching this on on youtube you're probably the sort of person who also subscribes to various services which being by cunning means uh all sorts of series that 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the like to have stephen fry and something uh one that particularly caught my eye was the accused for it's stellar cast uh look he was um he was gollum wasn't he um oh it's it's it's it's thingy and and um and oh yeah now what was he in um oh and there's sheen bean of course now you've seen sheen been in plenty of things he was boromir in lord of the rings you've probably seen that but have you seen him uh with this look and you may be curious if you're not british to see what sort of part he plays in british television well there you go there's sheen been looking i think you'll agree a little bit different does he die in the end i'm not going to tell you um so there you go possibly you're intrigued by that um one thing that particularly caught my eye was rosen crans and guildenstern are dead i particularly remember seeing that at the local cinema uh here and uh they were two up-and-coming stars uh gary oldman and tim roth who were they i don't know i gave them a look and look there they are they look so young don't they and who's playing hamlet because yes this is set in elsinore during hamlet and well yeah it's him it's him from game of thrones you know um falls in love with khaleesi the knight that one yeah yeah it's him um looking also very young and uh it's if you've never seen hamlet um possibly you won't get everything out of here but if you have seen hamlet or at least moderately familiar with it uh you'll see that there are they they're the two characters rosencrantz and guildenstern have turned up at elsinore and the film is all about them um and occasionally you get a scene from shakespeare's hamlet but in between it's them wandering around the castle thinking what the hell is going on um and there's a there's a running gag over the light which is um lots of scientific demonstrations all of which go wrong so um anyway um if you want to avail yourself of this service which you can watch on all sorts of you know roku and amazon fire and iphones and android and google chromecast and all various others then you have all that sort of thing frankly if you're able to watch me now you probably won't have much trouble um then you could go to acorn.tv and use the promo code lindybeige and that way you can get a 30-day free trial watch what you like see if you like it and if you do then you can subscribe and it's a 5.99 a month or i think uh four pounds 99 a month if you're british and you can take it from there so uh please do use the promo code because that way they know that you went there from here and so maybe i get paid um anyway so there you go acorn tv thanks for sponsoring me back to coins now the english managed to get rid of that awful boar and tyrant oliver cromwell and soon king charles ii was restored to the throne and there was great merriment christmas was unbanned the theaters all opened again and people really let their hair down it seems after all those years of repressive austerity people wanted to party and party hard and they did and wrote a lot of very bawdy uh plays and songs anyway um what was happening the way of coinage because i mean let's keep this pertinent well um in this period we get the first properly milled consistently milled english coinage so it's got a texture all around the edge so it's resistant to clipping and filing and so forth this doesn't really shower the english with historical or technological glory however because in europe they'd had milled uh coinage for quite some while so at this point the english are playing catch-up and it seems that there was something of a period of neglect with coinage in general so much so that a lot of the merchants had to fill in they had to start minting their own coins because the crown was um not minting enough and not minting enough good stuff um now they weren't strictly supposed to do this but they did it anyway because what's what's a merchant to do you know trade must happen we need coins and a while later a chap called sir isaac newton yes you've probably heard of him you know the laurel laws of gravity and motion and calculus and so forth yeah yeah him well he was made master of the royal mint a job that it seems he took really seriously i don't know how seriously people expected him to take it but he took it really seriously and he went at it with a will he decided that in his estimation 20 of the coins that he brought in for examination were actually counterfeited this this was unacceptable this could not go on and he would put a stop to these counterfeiters but it was notoriously difficult to actually bring successful prosecutions against them but he went for it and it turns into something of an adventure novel at this point because he starts donning disguises and and he went into um he started i should stick to my tenses he started donning disguises and going into ins and taverns and and and questioning people on the sly and gathering evidence and he brought about 28 successful prosecutions against counterfeiters so well done sir isaac although overall this is still not a great period for english coinage the fact that isaac's work was necessary is not a good sign is it uh anyway so also under uh charles ii came in a new coin called the guinea now this was like many coins before it a gold coin it was worth a pound nothing too remarkable there but um what happened next was a little bit weird now it suffered from the same problem of earlier gold coins and that the price of dolls shifted again and so it turns out they'd used 21 shillings worth of gold to make a 20 shilling coins so its face value was lower than the gold value so again there was that danger that people were just going to ship it abroad but this time rather than just artificially pretending it's it's worth 20 they said no right it's a 21 shilling coin then i know not a very convenient uh uh denomination of coin but there we go we've just minted a 21 shilling coin and that was the solution to the problem they kept minting 21 shilling coins until the end of the napoleonic wars and then it gets even weirder because though they stopped minting guineas the coin itself did not exist anymore the value of the guinea continued so there was this notional value of 21 shillings that people still used even though there was no coin of that value and the people still using it were people trying it on to be a bit posh you know they wanted to come across as classy they used guineas not not common or garden pounds oh no so if you got a bill from your your doctor or your lawyer or your extremely classy uh tailor for instance or your architect um you might get billed in guineas and if you are offering a prize for a horse race uh you might say oh there's so many guineas to the winner rather than just not riff-raff pounds um but of course if you're a foreigner and new to this country and you realize you've got a bill in guineas what's that hang on so you examine what notes and coins you've got i've got pounds i've got crowns i've got florins i've got shillings which one's a guinea what's a guinea that wasn't a guinea but there was a bill for units of 21 shillings it's completely bonkers now um elsewhere in this video i am defending uh the rationality of the english coinage system but here no this really is just bonkers this was just uh class snobbery at play the purchase of rams for some reason was also done in guineas uh also the the auctioning of posh things like antiques or particularly good houses in guinea's anyway so that was a little quirk that visitors to to britain uh had to put up with although you know i would argue that some of these cultural quirks are sort of worth it for themselves i mean if you if you come to britain today and go into a pub don't you want the full british pub experience don't you want to buy a pint of beer and the eu was for many many years trying to get the british to stop selling uh beer in pints in pubs and instead do so in half liters well why what what was the advantage why it was just change really for changing conformity's sake if i go all the way around the world to some exotic far eastern country where they have an amazing cuisine i don't go to mcdonald's and if you come to britain well you want that sort of little quirk don't you well anyway i i think that these things are worth preserving sometimes just for themselves just for the fun of it um anyway so there you go the guinea there's no there's no good excuse for it really that was a weird quirk anyway let's fast forward now to 1796 and the industrial revolution is just about to kick off and we get the first steam-powered mints and with uh steam power and the the sudden lurch forwards in british technology yes again british coins become the finest in the world without doubt so they are extremely consistent in weight um sharp in detail the detail is is is very good and realistic the way the tools they've got for carving that the dyes and making the dyes and making the dyes last are much better the steels they've got a better this is a very accurate consistent uh coinage uh that can be produced in large quantities very cheaply yeah this is the world's best coinage okay so now we've we're coming forward into the victorian period and um we get the the the standard the the the lineup if you like of coins that were in use right up until decimalization in 1971 so you've got the sovereign you've got the half sovereign that's the sovereign is 20 shillings which is one pound and you've also got the florin now a florin was worth two shillings so you think well that's convenient okay there's a one shilling coin so why not a two shilling coin seems fairly convenient yeah but a lot of people pointed out that two shillings is exactly one tenth of a pound because there are 20 shillings in a pound 240 pence aha so this is actually decimalization and the flooring is sometimes described as an early attempt at decimalization although it's also a convenient coin even within the old system so i don't think it's anything to get too excited about decimalization fans there was also a double flooring which was worth you know what i'll let you work that one out yourself um so uh there was the the farthing which was one quarter of a penny uh there was the happening which was the half penny i should say which was abbreviated to hapni uh also by the way in the in the medieval period it shows you how well educated a lot of people were this small bronze coin was sometimes called an obol because there was an ancient greek uh small bronze coin that wasn't worth all that much called an obol and so they hate they got called in medieval times sometimes it was a slang term for it an obol there you go you see they were more well-educated these medieval peoples than perhaps you realized anyway so um so you've got the happening then you've got the the penny of course which didn't need a slang term because it's just a penny uh then you've got the tuppence which was two pence a two p two pence coin uh then there was the threatney bit or thruppence or threatens which was yes you guessed it three pence then there was the sixpence which was commonly called a bob or by the way the threatney bit was also sometimes called a tanner then there was the shilling and then there was the florin a two-shilling coin there was also a crown a crown was one quarter of a pound so that's five shillings and there was a half crown which was two and six that is a two and then a stroke and then then then six um which was uh two and a half shillings so half a crown and then above that it was notes there was a ten shilling note there was a pound there was a five a ten a twenty and the denominations of pounds went all the way up to 1 000 pounds but most people never saw anything more than a five pound note a five pound note that was a lot of money uh i find it still i find it quite amazing that there was a thousand pound note today in england our highest denomination note is 50 pounds and that's really rare i haven't seen one in years uh it's the 20 pound notice that is the the highest denomination that's in common usage uh anyway so those were the the the various kind now i got some some footage from beamish that i i shot years ago and i want to use it now because it's been hanging around on my hard drive so here it is this is these two little beauties let's just put my glasses on to [Music] was half the weird falling sorry is half the weight over here me and i hate me as half the weight of the penny if i fill a bag with multiple cup coins i don't have to count in the scales and weights and that's exactly two pounds and the same also applies to the silver coins the threatens is half the weight of the sixpence the six measures half the weight of the shilling the shoulder is half the weight of the florin the half crown is two and sixpence and if i took um two shillings and the sixpence and weird doors they would be the exact same way as that one coin of course depending what i'm wearing i have one for the silver and one for the copper so silver is exactly 20 times the value of copper yes so the next time you find yourself in a bank behind someone with a huge bag of mixed coinage and you think to yourself oh no and i'm in a hurry maybe you should also be thinking to yourself if only we used the old english coinage system now possibly i've really not made my case for 240 pence well enough i've talked about it being a convenient number but i haven't really said why you i'm going to assume are more familiar with the units of currency dollar whatever that divide into 100 subdivisions and i'm here to tell you that that's not really such a great number just because you're familiar with it and you think you understand it that doesn't mean it's the best number to have picked now when people who don't know that the old english pound divided into 240 pence they ask me and i tell them 240 pence the communist by far response is derisive laughter as if you stupid english well at last you've seen common sense and have decimalized like everybody else but there have been two exceptions to this twice i have told someone who didn't previously know that an english pound divided into 240 pence and they have made quite a different noise they have gone [Music] and i do not think that it was a coincidence that both of these people were mathematicians a mathematician you see would instantly recognize that 240 is a highly composite number now there aren't all that many highly composite numbers uh they're to towards the bottom end of numbers there are a fair few so at the bottom the first one is one shouldn't surprise you then there's two then there's a jump to four then six the next one is 12 but they start getting rarer and rarer each of these is a number which divides by more numbers than any number lower than it so after 12 uh the next one is 24 bit of a bigger jump then there's 36 then there's 48 then 60 then 120 then 180 then 240 then 360. then there's a whole jump of 360 to the next one which is 720 which is the 14th highly composite number by the time you get to the 30th highly composite number these numbers are tens of thousands apart they start to get really rare they're special numbers and 240 is a rather good one if you had to pick a number of pence to the pound you could hardly do better frankly and those mathematicians recognized that they saw the tremendous convenience of 240. now you are familiar with 100 and it's various subdivisions and you may also spotted that those subdivisions tend to have coins of that value so if you're american for instance uh you've got a five cent piece haven't you uh a nickel you've got a 10 cent piece a dime you've got a 25 cent piece a quarter you've got a 50 cent piece so those are fairly sensible numbers values of coins because they all subdivide conveniently into a dollar although i would criticize 25 cents a little bit in england we have a 20 pence piece not a 25. you see 25 divides by 5 but that's a prime number so you can't go anywhere from there you're stuck whereas if you've got a 20 pence piece that can then subdivide into 10 which then subdivides into two and a five and you get more sub sub multiples anyway i'm going to show you all the sub multiples of 100. um this won't take very long there they all are so you can see all the numbers that divide into 100 and the numbers that divide into those numbers and that's that's the whole lot so if you have a transaction which involves these numbers that will be convenient but you can see that um there are very few of them in comparison to well 100 so most transactions will involve inconvenient numbers now i'm going to show you the number of sub-multiples of 240 and you may be shocked by how many of them there are so i want you to sit down and brace yourself because here they come here they go here are the uh sub-multiples of 240. there are loads of them loads and loads and there's some really good ones 120 and 60 numbers that divide by loads of other numbers which themselves are really good numbers because they divide by loads of other really good numbers it just goes on and on and on so just think how many ways all these values can can apply can multiply up into each other just so many ways um so most transactions are going to involve convenient numbers and think also of the problem of uh splitting things so um nobody nobody buy it nobody sells five eggs do they you want a packet of five and then nobody sells eggs in fives in a box two rows of three six much more convenient and in britain we sell eggs in typically sixes and twelves in the supermarket so um you can imagine that certain numbers like 6 and 12 will crop up again and again and again so how many candles are there in the box how many bottles of wine are there in the crate whatever things get sold in 12s in eights in 20s and so forth in oh and there are coins of those values that easily subdivide in the old english system so um it was so much easier to split split a packet oh you know this costs uh 24 pence and there are 12 of them there's two pence each there easy um there are so many ways of splitting things and selling things and pricing things in different groups that were convenient which you can't do with modern decimalized currency so there you go i am here as a strong advocate of 240 pence now you may say oh but it's so much more complicated and you couldn't use a calculator either well no um it's not more complicated if you've grown up with it you'd be completely familiar with it if you are if you're american for instance and uh someone asks you how many quarters make a make a dollar you don't have to go oh um uh 25 times three so that's the three three five just fifteen let's carry the one uh oh no that comes to 75 that's not it let's try the string maybe it's four and you do this like no you don't you just know don't you because you've been living with these coins your whole life you just know that four quarters uh make up a dollar you don't have to do the sum you just know that from familiarity well if you'd grown up with pound shillings and pence you would know that um a shilling was twelve pence that the florence was two shillings that um the sixpence went into a shilling twice and did you just know all these uh relationships between all the various values you just know them absolutely and they'd be second nature to you no no uh you wouldn't have to do any sums in your head um and so your ability to manipulate all the various possible combinations of money and things that you might buy you're so much greater it's a much more powerful tool and that's with the calculator argument well if money were pound shillings and pence and people wanted to sell their calculators they would put a pound shilling and pence button on the calculator end of problem so no the calculator argument that they've got degrees and radians and other things and square roots all sorts of other things that people demand yeah they put a pound shillings and pence button on there because people will want to do money calculations on calculators it's very easy to program a calculator to do that not a problem not an argument and so there you go here i hope i've given you a reasonably interesting uh introduction to english coinage of old and a reassurance that actually it's not as complicated as you might think and that actually it was a flipping good system [Music] you

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 1,073,853

Keywords: history, money, coins, coinage, mint, moneyer, kings, england, english, pound, shilling, pence, penny, crown, silver, gold, currency, pre-decimal, decimalisation

Id: R2paSGQRwvo

Length: 58min 53sec (3533 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020