One of my favourite quotes from good omens is on the monetary system: Footnote from Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: "NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system: Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and one Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea. The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated."
Well, I'd imagine it wouldn't be if you'd grown up with it! Canadians were angry when the government stopped circulating pennies because the new system would be more complicated, charitable donations would go down and costs would go up. For the record, donations and costs were the same.
Wow! Even more complicated than I thought! As an American, you’ve made me feel just a tiny bit less embarrassed about my country’s resistance to the decimal system.
@@melanieahrens6739the US has always had a decimal currency after independence anyway. Now the metric system we resisted. In fact we still haven't adopted the metric system.
@@christajennings3828 I could also see it being a hold over. Like in the 18th century British schools did 12x12 times tables because of money. Early colonists used British money/went to British schools, so the same 12x12 times tables were taught. Once the US declared independence and switched to a decimal based dollar, no one bothered to change the multiplication tables in schools because "12x12 is the way it's always been done!" And it just stayed that way because tradition, even if it had little practical use
People talk about sentences that would harm a Victorian child, but I think the Victorian child has the upper hand on me for this one. 😅 I would truly have to live this to get it down!
@@AvaAdore-wx5gg It's an internet meme, the idea being that if you got something from the modern day and showed it to a Victorian child, that the simple sensory overload of the object would outright kill them (for instance, a child who subsisted solely on gruel and factory work their entire life would just keel over if they ate a dorito or something).
240 pence/pound. "L" for pound for the same reason that we (Americans, at least) write "lb" for pound: libra, the Latin word for "pound". "d" for denarius, the Latin penny. (The Romans never really left Britannia.) 20 shillings/pound 12 pence/shilling. *Very effective* when doing mental arithmetic, since 240 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 40, 60, 80 and 120.
In case nobody has mentioned it yet- the s in £ s d also stands for a Latin word, solidus (borrowing its name, though not its value, from a coin of the late Roman empire)
So a pound of silver, a gold coin, and a silver coin? All heavily debased over time, obviously. Another piece of Rome alive. We still use denarius here.
A shilling was nicknamed a "bob". Only normally used when referring to whole numbers of shillings without any pounds or residual pennies. E.g. five bob a week.
@@DavidEmery-tn2dh I still refer to £1.50 as thirty bob and occasionally to £1 as as a 'sov' or 'quid', much to the amusement of my son and grandchildren.
Canadian here - I definitely thought "bob" was slang for "pound" but never had a reason (or a method) to check. Frankly, the joke about a Guinea pig tail being worth £10 10s is feels much less impressive now.
@@DavidEmery-tn2dhbut if there were 12 pence to a shilling, wouldn't there be 120 pence in 10 bob? Even if it got simplified at some point to 10 pence to a shilling, wouldn't 50 pence be 5 bob? Now I'm even more confused.
I’m old enough to remember farthings - just! They went out of circulation when I was six years old. So, decimalisation when I was 16. I carried a small conversion chart in my purse. Prices inflated immediately as producers rounded up the selling cost. I remember being shocked at how much the cost of a Mars bar rose. I love your videos. As a history nerd and a Londoner no longer in London, I love all your content.
Very cool! It's always interesting to hear stories from people who have lived through historical events. Even moreso to think that someday we'll be able to do the same to *our* younger generations!
Older coins were kept around for a while, right? I'm american so I don't remember exactly what they were obviously, but like shilling coins were worth a certain amount of decimal pence afterwards, I think? What I'm trying to ask is, after decimalization were the shilling coins worth less than they were before? So, if someone had, for instance, 1000 pounds, 80 shillings, and 20 pence in their purse the day before the switch, did they effectively have less money the next day, or was it worth the same amount?
@@codyofathens3397 The old copper coins - penny, farthing etc were phased out within a few months of decimalisation. Other coins took longer but were treated as the new coins they most resembled. For example the old one shilling was similar to the new 5p coin and the florin (two shillings) to the new 10p coin. Effectively the £1000, 80 shillings would be the same amount. 20 old pennies was £1. The new 20 pence became worth the old two shillings. The issue with prices being rounded up was that pre decimalisation there were 12d (pennies) in 1s (shilling), 20s to £1 (pound). Post decimalisation there are 5p (pence) to 1s and 10s to £1. So manufacturers and shops rounded the prices up. If something cost, say, 8 old pennies, so three quarters of an old shilling, it was rounded up to 5p, effectively 12 old pennies. So it was not that your money was worth less, it was that some items cost more.
@@codyofathens3397 Pounds did not change - "A pound's a pound the world around" they'd say - which was not quite true because a pound was now $2 in Australia and New Zealand. Shillings were still 1/20 of a pound so now 5p. The 5p coins were actually the same size as shilling coins for a while to help people adjust. Old pennies had to be spent in lots of six in order to get exact change because 6d is 2.5p, and there was a new-half-penny coin to assist with that.
The amazing thing was the large number of Victorian pennies still in circulation up until decimalisation. Some were so worn that even the dates were illegible. It's funny that people seem to think that all the money will quickly change to King Charles III, when the only reason it was all Queen Elizabeth II was because of decimalisation. Before that we had coins of most of the monarchs from Victoria onwards.
When I was last in the UK back in 2011, I got a couple of 70s 1p and 2p coins in my pocket without even trying, so there must've been an enormous amount of them circulating at that time, and probably still are, given how rarely a coin gets destroyed to the point of no longer being usable. Though of course we all use a little less cash money every year, I think.
As a Canadian, we've had so many different effigies of the queen on our coins, that I'd be shocked if it wasn't changed to the king really soon. (I'm also not convinced that the only reason all your coins are the queen is decmalisation. I've only ever seen one 5-cent coin with King George on it, and even the 1-cent coins with his effigy were rare. She held the throne for a long time, and coins do eventually get retired or lost.)
After decimalisation in 1971 shillings weren't withdrawn from circulation but were made equivalent to five new pence. It was quite common to find a George V (reigned 1910-1936) shilling in your change in the 1980s.
@@1One2Three5Eight13My mother, born in the early 1950s recalls collecting “bun pennies” for charity in the 1960s. Those were the earliest issue of Queen Victoria coins from 1836 through to the 1850s so over 100 years old even then. George VI shillings and florins were in circulation (as 5p and 10p pieces) until the new style 5p and 10p coins came in, in the early 90’s.
You missed the best part, 240 pennies equalled 1 pound(currency) and what did 240 pennies weigh? 1 pound(weight). It's also where the symbol comes from.
That doesn’t sound right. The old British penny was huge, about the size of a US silver dollar. Can’t imagine it would take more than six of them to weigh a pound.
I've seen Australian newspaper ads for expensive things like big home radios advertised in guineas (from before we went decimal in 1966). I understand that guineas had a certain connotation of wealth and prestige, so even in the 20th century luxury items, private surgeons' fees and so on would often be quoted in guineas, even if no such coin existed.
From what I understand, this connotation comes from the fact that high end auctions (for property, racehorses, and the like) in the period priced in guineas. The additional shilling was the auctioneers commission (so if something sold for 50 guineas, the seller got £50 and the auctioneer 50 shillings, or £2 10/-). This might be nonsense, but it makes some sense.
Also, I read in his biography that Terry Nation (creator of the Daleks and Blake's 7) was contracted for a lot of his early writing work in the 50s and 60s in guineas, rather than pounds. "Radio and TV writer" seems somewhat less prestigious than surgeon, but even at that, it was apparently not uncommon to work in guineas pretty much right up to decimalization in the early 70s.
For anyone wondering the reason guinea are still used is in auctions, especially farmers auctions. Apart from tradition, is because of how quickly things move you are more likely to in the moment think 500 Gunieas that's 500 pounds, because there is not enough time to work out what 500 shillings will add up to which is an extra £25, which when added up over hundreds of lots means the auction house can make more. Yes a shilling in video is 12 pennies but that's old pennies in new pennies it's 5 pence. Because 1 pound was 240 pennies. Not 100 pennies as it is now.
Out of curiosity, was there a simple relationship between the guinea and the auction house commission? I could imagine the system being quite convenient if a lot sold for 500 guineas meant the seller got 500 pounds and the auction house the 500 shillings, but I have no idea if it was that simple.
@@Alex-cw3rz It's a fairly long held tradition(?) for people to "cry uncle" when surrendering. I have no idea if it was ever a thing people did in real life, but it appears a lot in media. Apparently it's a chiefly North American thing, and no one's exactly sure where it comes from.
This makes the scene in the classic Disney Animated Robin Hood that much more impacting and meaningful when the Sheriff of Nottingham takes the last farthing from the poorbox, right after the mice donated it. He took their last QUARTER OF A PENNY!!! Well, I am definitely going to save this video as reference material for my tabletop medieval fantasy role-playing game!
Victorian?!! That's the system I used¹ until my teens. I feel very old. ¹Last year I finished writing a book set in Nelson's navy and found that I still know that ⅓ of a pound is 6/8d and a guinea divided between 14 people is 1/6d each
The Groat, more recently called fourpence, worth 4d was issued occasionally to the late 1800s. Quarter and half farthings were issued in Ceylon, and monetised in the UK in 1842. Malta had a one-third farthing. Other British colonies and Empire members had other values, such ad 15d, aka 1/3d in Australia. That some pre-decimal coins remained in use in the UK was confusing for overseas visitors, such as us in 1986. Their value was based on the fraction of the pound they are worth, not the number of old pence. Meanwhile in Australia, 6d became 5 cents, a shilling 10 cents, and 10 shillings a dollar.
Up through at least WW2 lots of "rich things" were priced in guineas: large amounts of land, nice houses, expensive art and big motorcars, expensive rifles and shotguns, yachts, rents and leases in upper-class parts of cities, doctors' and other professional's fees. It's one way to sort of "build in" a 5% advantage for the seller ... buyers know the guinea is more than the pound, but it's close enough to make people forget the difference.
For a while, after we went decimal in 1971, the used car trade made a point of pricing their stock in guineas. Probably hoping that no one could convert a guinea to £1.05!
The US has a similar phenomenon, where it is the only place you'll hear "sawbuck." All the way back in the 1860s, a ten dollar note had a Roman numeral X on it. It looked like a sawbuck, so $10 = sawbuck. This is now doubly odd because the ten doesn't have a Roman numeral on it and we don't use the term sawbuck anyhow (long replaced with sawhorse). But, the term wiggled into the terminology of gambling on horses, where it found a safe slang haven.
The guinea was worth more than the sovereign was because it was made from purer gold. I don't know when the 4d piece, or groat, was decommissioned but that was probably well before the Victorian era.
IIRC, it's that a guinea originated as a gold coin that was worth a pound, but never changed weight, and gold's value compared to silver (upon which British currency was defined) rose, which meant that the value of a guinea rose. Then they decided that it was dumb to not have a coin that was valued at a pound, so they created that as the sovereign.
I read that in expensive establishments they put the prices in guineas to make the price seem less despite, as you have helpfully explained, guineas not being in existence in the 20th century.
In the US the lowest coin is a penny, but gas stations all give prices to a tenth of that, like "$2.93.9" - and they write that ".9" very small sometimes, too!
I started work in a bookshop in 1971. I can remember paperback books being marked with the price in both £ s d and decimal. For example, 3/6 171/2p. In other words, 3 shillins and 6 pence or 17 and a half pence. You probably don't know or remember there was still a half penny after decimalisation, and this was about the average price of a paperback novel.
Note: the fact that the UK waited so long to decimalize is why most British colonies adopted dollars, including places like Hong Kong that were still part of the Empire. That said, the USD was originally supposed to have a _mill_ (1/10¢) and an _eagle_ ($10), but they never caught on.
Guineas are still used, primarily at auctions where the house takes a 5% commission. So the buyer pays in guineas, and the seller receives the same number of pounds.
The sixpence coin was nicknamed a "tanner". We lost something when we went to decimal currency as modern coins have never attracted such lovely nicknames.
@@dj1NM3 That would have been really confusing! When the UK changed to the decimal system they continued using the old shilling coins and florin coins as 5p and 10p respectively. They brought out 5p and 10p coins but both old and new were around and freely used interchangeabley. They only disappeared altogether in the early 90s when they brought in the current tiny 5p and smaller 10p sizes.
@@TaraDreamswhen it changed I remember arguing about my change with a canteen lady. I was wrong which was highly embarrassing as it was my University canteen and I was studying mathematics.
I saw the thumbnail for this, and thought, "Oh, wow, Victorian paper money was weird and tiny, I had no idea that was a thing," only to find out it was J. Draper's demonstration of non-decimal currency. Two additional facts: 1) non-decimal currencies and measures are usually based on multiples of a number that can be evenly divided by a lot of other numbers, like 12, or 360. Basing everything on 10 makes basic math(s) easier, but makes fractions harder, and even divisions less common. That was why systems like this used to dominate. 2) The guinea was developed because merchants learned they could take British coinage overseas and sell it for its silver content, for more than the face value, in places where silver was more valuable. Having that extra shilling tacked onto the coin messed with this practice, although IIRC, it failed to stop it. But people started figuring things in guineas to seem posh, and to appeal to elite customers, and eventually the whole concept of a guinea survived as an affectation, even after the coin had been abandoned.
Also to be noted is that shilling coins were actually 1/20 of a troy pound in weight. When shillings were made of silver, they were not token money; they actually contained their value in metal. In the 1960s, pence were copper coins of about the same weight, though in the middle ages, pence were 1/240 of a troy pound of silver.
Takes me back to my nightmare of learning Imperial measures, and arithmetic around money. Don't understand why the UK is so dead against the Base 10 Metric System, but I would emigrate if my country ever went backwards to Imperial.
it’s easy if you grow up with it. and pretty well tuned for the human scale. A mile takes about 20 mins to walk, a pint is about 2 normal glasses, a pound is about a perfect size to buy flour or sugar in, etc
Huh? We have litres, grams, kilos, and metres and all their mili versions everywhere. Its only certain things like milk and beer and car driving distances that pints and miles and such are still the more common. Growing up in the 90s and 2000s I remember the metric system being rolled out and appearing everywhere
@@mariusdragoe2888 it’s really funny to me that people seem to think the metric system was made for some alien species. and tbh it’s more “alien” to me to measure things in some abstract standardised human organ or tree nut
@@mariusdragoe2888 Not really. I like metric because it's inter relational: A metre is nominally a pace, but a tenth of a metre cubed is a litre and a litre of water is a kg. A yard is nominally a stride, but a foot's a foot & an inch is the width of your thumb. Volumes & weights are divisions Gallon - half gallon - quart - pint. Halve a pound 4 times & you have an ounce, 3 times & you have 2 ounces...
I find another fascinating thing is that it was also 240 pennies to the pound, not 100 as it is today. That is because 240 pennies can be divided more than 100 making it actually much more useful especially when working with only coins.
And of course a pound back in the day was a lot of money. There were millions of people who lived their entire lives paying for things in farthings, pennies and, should a windfall strike them, a shilling or two.
@@Agamemnon2 well depends what year, as by the Victorian times rent would be a few pounds. However in Medieval times a few pounds would buy an entire hamlet even small village of farms.
Guineas were still in use until quite recently. In the art world, and in similar ‘high end’ transactions. I still think in terms of certain terms. I’ll often say things cost ‘a few bob’ - meaning overpriced. Or ‘it was only a couple of bob’ meaning a bargain. Also ‘bent as a nine-bob note’ meaning fake or a knock-off copy. Indeed, I have. A ten bob note that I use as a bookmark. Florin’s, half-crowns, and sixpence are still fondly spoken of here. Getting one of those to spend on sweets was a real treat. Mostly, it have been a thrupenny bit,
Actually, the guinea is still in use today, mostly at horse auctions where the extra 5 pence is the agent commission. So if a horse sells for 5000 guineas, the breeder gets 5000 pounds and the agent gets 250 pounds.
Forget about the Victorians - that monetary system was still around until 1971 when the current decimal system came into use. It is a shame. I love the old money.
You never know tho, if by happenstance you were to accidently time travel to any date before 1971 you would at least know how to deal with the currency :)
240d in a £ was actually quite clever. It is a multiple of 60. 60 is a highly divisible number divides equally into 2,3,4,5,6,10,12 etc. Which made it a certain good way for breaking down payments into "shares". 240 being 60 × 4 is even more divisible. We still use that divisibility factor of 60 for Time (seconds in minutes, minutes in hours) and measuring angles. One sixth of a circle being 60 degrees. You lose a lot of that flexibility by using the simplicity of decimal but inflation has meant such divisibility is pretty irrelevant for money nowadays
Guineas are posher too. Doctors and tailors used to charge in guineas. I suppose if you wanted to open a pound shop in a swanky area you could call it the guinea shop to make it sound classier.
240 pence to the pound is a highly composite number. That makes it very convenient in a way that decimal currency never can match. And with the larger system of Imperial measurements also generally being based on twelves or sixteens (both of which 240 divides evenly into), that was another point of familiarity until about half a century ago.
It’s convenient if you need to subdivide a pound in lots of different sizes. Inflation means that today we don’t usually need to divide up a pound or a dollar even as much as decimal currency allows.
@@yippee8570”A highly composite number is a positive integer with more divisors than any smaller positive integer has.” en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number
@@yippee8570it divides by 2,3,4,5,6,8,10,12,15,16,20,24,30,40,48,60,80 and 120 without needing to use fractions. It means that no matter how much you’re dividing it by it’s likely to have a neater sum than dividing by 100, which by contrast does multiples of 2 and 5 ok but nothing else
When I read "Paul Clifford", I found myself having to look up a lot of slang words for British coinage. They were very creative with their language back in the day! Being an American I don't know if some of these terms are still in use today, like bob for shilling, and the book uses the term quid to mean a guinea rather than a pound. We get some generic terms like 'blunt' for coins in general, and 'brad' for a small value coin, 'oil of palms' for money in general, and more specific words like 'sice' for six pence, 'mag' for a half penny, etc. Lots of other great slang and argot of 19th century Britain to be found in that novel besides. Bingo (brandy), stark-naked (gin), blue ruin (cheap gin), buzz gloak (pickpocket), Toby (the highway), and so many others. It's a real trove of such linguistic treasures!
I'm British. Apart from "blunt" all of those words are new to me. I get the same problem with dimes, quarters and "bits" in American films. Just last week I found out what a jitney was!
My favourite TTRPG is Warhammer Fantasy Role Play 4tg edition, or WFRP4e, and the currency in the empire is exactly the same as this, borrowing a lot of slang. Notably, your career (and what stage of the career you're in) has an attached "class" that affects social interactions as well as your ability to fit in or disguise yourself. This class is listed as a metal followed by a number, and your standard career earnings are based off it, so if you're a brass 4 village councilman, you're earning 6d10 pfennig for a week of settling disputes and voting against clean water, and if you're a Silver 2 mine foreman, you're getting 2d10 silver... And if you do the maths, the councilman earns better, even if he's lower class than the mine Forman, but because appearances are everything and at a glance people only see the colour of your weekly pay purse, they'll assume the foreman is more important (don't worry though, mine foremans can embezzle and are pretty much expected to do so😂)
What great timing! This came up with a friend here in Seattle over the weekend when we were looking at an old book in his collection. All of us were like, what are these prices, anyway? I had to search for currency in literature in order to find the right explanation. Yours is much better!
As a programmer in the seventies, I had to read COBOL language manuals, and I remember seeing that the manuals, written in the sixties, had special provisions for handling Sterling money, with pounds, shillings, and pence in separate number fields. Thankfully, I never had to work with them, since I live in the US, but I sympathized with the poor British programmers who did!
From what I understand, some British banking computer systems still calculate in pounds shillings and pence and then have a module which converts the values to decimal. Because of COBOL and not wanting to rewrite the whole system.
Guineas live on elsewhere as well. The Arabic name for the Egyptian pound is derived from that, and while most Egyptians might pronounce it closer to geneh, there are many (myself included) who pronounce it very close to the English guinea
I remember my father telling me of a practice where an item if sold with a price tag in guineas, the owner got the pounds and the sales person got the shillings, which effectively became their sales commission. A property sold for 500 guineas, for instance, the owner received £500, and salesman got 500'. That was at least an elegant implementation of a inelegant currency system. I missed most of that as here, down-under, we switched to decimalisation when I was 3. Changing from Imperial measures to SI units happened while I was at primary school, so a few of those legacy units still live on in my brain, pulled out when convenient.
And this is probably why, right up into my toddler years in the mid to late 90s, we were taught times tables up to 12 x 12. Even VAT at 17.5% meant I had a cast iron reason to know 7s back to front, money is one heck of a motivator to learn.
As an American it’s interesting hearing how complicated this seems to modern Brits. It is only marginally more complicated than the system we use today. Mostly because it doesn’t use metric fractions. Penny = 1/100 USD Nickel = 5 pennies (or cents) Dime = 10 pennies Quarter = 1/4 USD We also have a 50 cent coin and a dollar coin that you almost never see. So much so that they sometimes get mistaken as quarters by folks returning change. In Canada they got rid of the penny about a decade ago, but they also have their dollar coins. Loonie = 1 dollar Toonie = 2 dollar
We still learned up to 12x in the 1990s - we still have 12/24 hours in a day after all, and 60 minutes can divide by 12 as well as 10. (See also: 360⁰ of a circle dividing into 30⁰ angles)
I always enjoy your videos, Jenny, so don’t take this as a moan, but you do make me feel old. I grew up with pounds, shillings and pence and was already in my twenties when the switch came. I recall that as kids in the fifties (1950s not 1850s!) we loved it when we got old coins in our change with the head of Queen Victoria, and I have a memory of occasionally getting a smoothed and blackened penny or ha’penny with the head of young Victoria still visible on it. Is that a false memory? Were coins from the 1850s still in circulation a hundred years later, or am I even older than I think?
I recall reading that some high end shops were using guineas for pricing even after decimalization, with the implication that if you had to ask, you couldn't afford the 5% premium.
You also hear a pound called a quid, and apparently, in Ireland., a Euro is called a quid by association. And a tizzy was sixpence. But we have nicknames in the US for money too. A sawbuck is a tenner. A fin is a fiver. Two bits is a quarter. Luckily, the US adopted decimal coinage early on. So we didn't have to worry about 1, 3, and 4. (Meaning one pound, three shillings, and four pence.)
@@risfleming-allen3300 Ah -- you deal in larger amounts than I do. It's been ages since I had a Benjamin. Though if things keep going like they are now, we'll need one to buy a loaf of bread soon.😃
We used £sd up until i was 10 years old. My dad gave me 6d for lunch every day. A matchbox car cost 2/6. Even as small children we understood it easily. When decimalisation came we were confused.
The one thing that was lost with decimalization was the ease of dividing by many different numbers. 240 pence per pound had the advantage of being easily divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 40, 48, 60, 80, and 120. Now you can only divide by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, and 50. I don't think it was wrong to switch it up, i just think a system based on a highly composite number of pennies per pound or dollar would have been cool.
On the day of decimalisation, as a 10 yr old getting on the bus to go to school, finally money made sense. The feel of the new coins, the simplicity, just felt right - like the PO Tower and, er, SR.N6 Hovercrafts to France. Well done the Romans for ditching "Twelvety" and going decimal!
"For a soldier I listed, to grow great in fame. And be shot at for sixpence a day."- "Letters" (1774) by Charles Dibdin Really puts things into perspective doesn't it now that you explained the old currency system. Although now that I think about it, with the concept of inflation, sixpence was probably worth more in the Era of Enlightenment than in the Victorian Era.
it feel like the basis of this system shouldn't be too confusing - sure, we're not used it it, but it follows an easy logic. what really messes things up is when people then take some amount of coins, reify them (or, historically in the case of guineas, have actual coins of that value) and then talk about money in multiples of those. feels a bit like using miles and km alongside each other to me.
Fun video.😊 Very minor thing at 1:03 - memory says £1 was a note rather than a coin until quite some time after decimalisation, maybe a even up to the late-80s?!
A guinea was a specific coin that contained about a quarter of an ounce of gold whereas shillings contained silver. When first introduced it was meant to be worth a pound but because of subsequent fluctuations in the ratio of gold and silver prices its value varied between twenty and thirty shillings. From 1717 to 1816 its value was fixed at twenty-one shillings then it was replaced by the pound and ceased to be legal tender. It lives on in modern usage in the pricing of some traditional items that only the upper classes would purchase (e.g. bespoke tailoring) but this is in decline.
The online game Discworld MUD uses penny/shllling/crown money for areas set in Ramtops region. The more cosmopolitan Ankh-Morpork region uses decimal dollars/pence.
Although people complain about how complicated pounds, shillings and pence sound, they're actually very useful because 20, 12 and 4 are what's known as 'practical numbers'. A number is practical if all the numbers up to it can expressed as the sum of its divisors. Which makes it easy if you have to use balance type scales to weigh things out. 12 has divisors 6,3,4,2 and 1 Although practical numbers have been used for weights and measures for thousands of years, because err,.. they're practical, the name practical number was only coined recently. Wikipedia reports "The name "practical number" is due to Srinivasan (1948). He noted that "the subdivisions of money, weights, and measures involve numbers like 4, 12, 16, 20 and 28 which are usually supposed to be so inconvenient as to deserve replacement by powers of 10." Think of things that have to be divided up in halves, quarters, eighths etc. Using grams and kilos is very impractical because 10 doesn't divide neatly into halves, quarters and eighths, but pounds and ounces do. For a while there was a fringe campaign to use 12 as a base for counting instead of 10 because 12 is a practical number, it's called the 'duodecimal' system. Computers use practical numbers because they use binary, and all powers of 2 are practical numbers. Which is why there are 16 ounces in a pound weight.
I remember going to the shops to spend my sixpence and threepenny as a kid. I remember D day (decimal day) when a shilling went from 12d to 5p. My dad gave each of my brothers and I one of each of the new coins. Those shiny copper coins were dulled within a couple of days. But... it was 23/04/1969 when the 50p came out "arf a bar". The sixpence became worth 2½p... The pound coin only came out in 1983. My mother still has old ha'pennies sewn into her curtains to keep them straight. A pound is still 20 shillings, but it buys only a Mars bar, which was 3p in 1972.
This was the video and jingle the Australian Government used to transition from pre-decimal to decimal currency on Valentines Day 1966: ruclips.net/video/GtyNLwqljzI/видео.htmlfeature=shared
That's because money has always been more important than reading or writing because reading and writing are optional if you're making a living doing something else whereas you have to have the money to keep a roof over your head and food in your stomach and you don't want to be ripped off. That's why every child from a very early age learned his maths, so he could know if he was getting the right amount that he should be getting.
That pricing of £2 9s 11d to open a baked potato seller is super interesting. That’s only one penny away from two and a half pounds, so it’s kind of like the Victorian equivalent of pricing something like £2.49 today!
We have the same 'names for coins' in the U.S., even though we're decimalized. You have a quarter, dime, nickel, and penny. People also occasionally refer to paper bills by the famous person depicted on the front (usually Presidents, but not always). Pre-decimal British currency is really not that complicated, and I'm kind personally disappointed y'all got rid of it.
It was gotten rid of to bring us in line joining the common market(EU) in 1973, overnight everything went up in price, biggest con job ever bestowed on the British public...
Where a daily wage was a shilling and a pence, it was more comfortable to use a 12 divided currency. You can use half third and quarter than only half.
One of my favourite quotes from good omens is on the monetary system:
Footnote from Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman:
"NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system:
Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and one Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.
The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated."
Lovely!
Well, I'd imagine it wouldn't be if you'd grown up with it! Canadians were angry when the government stopped circulating pennies because the new system would be more complicated, charitable donations would go down and costs would go up. For the record, donations and costs were the same.
Read Terry Pratchett's Dodger for more :)
Wow! Even more complicated than I thought!
As an American, you’ve made me feel just a tiny bit less embarrassed about my country’s resistance to the decimal system.
@@melanieahrens6739the US has always had a decimal currency after independence anyway. Now the metric system we resisted. In fact we still haven't adopted the metric system.
And that, ladies and gentlemen is why we used to have to learn our "twelve times table" at primary school.
Can't be the only reason. I'm American, and I had to learn up to 12× tables, too. 12 hours, and 12 inches to a foot, I suppose.
@@christajennings3828 I could also see it being a hold over. Like in the 18th century British schools did 12x12 times tables because of money. Early colonists used British money/went to British schools, so the same 12x12 times tables were taught. Once the US declared independence and switched to a decimal based dollar, no one bothered to change the multiplication tables in schools because "12x12 is the way it's always been done!" And it just stayed that way because tradition, even if it had little practical use
12 is just a nice number. Way better than 10.
10 is 5 and 2, but 12 is 3 and 4, 6 and 2, too!
What about in US school in the 1990's? Why'd I have to learn my 12x's there? Lol
@@dasdiesel3000 still 12" in 1' (inches in a foot)
People talk about sentences that would harm a Victorian child, but I think the Victorian child has the upper hand on me for this one. 😅
I would truly have to live this to get it down!
@@AvaAdore-wx5ggyou gotta know a specific section of the internet for this one, I wouldn’t worry
@@AvaAdore-wx5gg It's an internet meme, the idea being that if you got something from the modern day and showed it to a Victorian child, that the simple sensory overload of the object would outright kill them (for instance, a child who subsisted solely on gruel and factory work their entire life would just keel over if they ate a dorito or something).
@@AvaAdore-wx5gg Well, internet memes aren't known for being rigorously factual.
240 pence/pound.
"L" for pound for the same reason that we (Americans, at least) write "lb" for pound: libra, the Latin word for "pound".
"d" for denarius, the Latin penny. (The Romans never really left Britannia.)
20 shillings/pound
12 pence/shilling.
*Very effective* when doing mental arithmetic, since 240 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 40, 60, 80 and 120.
@@imperiumoccidentis7351 "would just keel over if they ate a dorito or something".
That's the stupidest thing I've read this year.
In case nobody has mentioned it yet- the s in £ s d also stands for a Latin word, solidus (borrowing its name, though not its value, from a coin of the late Roman empire)
Just like dinar is borrowed from a coin from the late Roman empire. I'd forgotten about solidus though! Thanks for adding your information!
So a pound of silver, a gold coin, and a silver coin? All heavily debased over time, obviously. Another piece of Rome alive. We still use denarius here.
And "soldi" in modern Italian means "money".
@@Luubelaar And dinero in Spanish.
Solidus also became "sueldo" in Spanish (salary)
A shilling was nicknamed a "bob". Only normally used when referring to whole numbers of shillings without any pounds or residual pennies. E.g. five bob a week.
50p is still referred to as "ten bob" amongst some of my older customers.
@@DavidEmery-tn2dh I still refer to £1.50 as thirty bob and occasionally to £1 as as a 'sov' or 'quid', much to the amusement of my son and grandchildren.
Also: 6d was a tanner
Canadian here - I definitely thought "bob" was slang for "pound" but never had a reason (or a method) to check. Frankly, the joke about a Guinea pig tail being worth £10 10s is feels much less impressive now.
@@DavidEmery-tn2dhbut if there were 12 pence to a shilling, wouldn't there be 120 pence in 10 bob? Even if it got simplified at some point to 10 pence to a shilling, wouldn't 50 pence be 5 bob? Now I'm even more confused.
I’m old enough to remember farthings - just! They went out of circulation when I was six years old. So, decimalisation when I was 16. I carried a small conversion chart in my purse. Prices inflated immediately as producers rounded up the selling cost. I remember being shocked at how much the cost of a Mars bar rose.
I love your videos. As a history nerd and a Londoner no longer in London, I love all your content.
old man story mode engaged
Very cool! It's always interesting to hear stories from people who have lived through historical events. Even moreso to think that someday we'll be able to do the same to *our* younger generations!
Older coins were kept around for a while, right? I'm american so I don't remember exactly what they were obviously, but like shilling coins were worth a certain amount of decimal pence afterwards, I think?
What I'm trying to ask is, after decimalization were the shilling coins worth less than they were before? So, if someone had, for instance, 1000 pounds, 80 shillings, and 20 pence in their purse the day before the switch, did they effectively have less money the next day, or was it worth the same amount?
@@codyofathens3397 The old copper coins - penny, farthing etc were phased out within a few months of decimalisation. Other coins took longer but were treated as the new coins they most resembled. For example the old one shilling was similar to the new 5p coin and the florin (two shillings) to the new 10p coin. Effectively the £1000, 80 shillings would be the same amount. 20 old pennies was £1. The new 20 pence became worth the old two shillings. The issue with prices being rounded up was that pre decimalisation there were 12d (pennies) in 1s (shilling), 20s to £1 (pound). Post decimalisation there are 5p (pence) to 1s and 10s to £1. So manufacturers and shops rounded the prices up. If something cost, say, 8 old pennies, so three quarters of an old shilling, it was rounded up to 5p, effectively 12 old pennies. So it was not that your money was worth less, it was that some items cost more.
@@codyofathens3397 Pounds did not change - "A pound's a pound the world around" they'd say - which was not quite true because a pound was now $2 in Australia and New Zealand.
Shillings were still 1/20 of a pound so now 5p. The 5p coins were actually the same size as shilling coins for a while to help people adjust.
Old pennies had to be spent in lots of six in order to get exact change because 6d is 2.5p, and there was a new-half-penny coin to assist with that.
The amazing thing was the large number of Victorian pennies still in circulation up until decimalisation. Some were so worn that even the dates were illegible. It's funny that people seem to think that all the money will quickly change to King Charles III, when the only reason it was all Queen Elizabeth II was because of decimalisation. Before that we had coins of most of the monarchs from Victoria onwards.
When I was last in the UK back in 2011, I got a couple of 70s 1p and 2p coins in my pocket without even trying, so there must've been an enormous amount of them circulating at that time, and probably still are, given how rarely a coin gets destroyed to the point of no longer being usable. Though of course we all use a little less cash money every year, I think.
As a Canadian, we've had so many different effigies of the queen on our coins, that I'd be shocked if it wasn't changed to the king really soon. (I'm also not convinced that the only reason all your coins are the queen is decmalisation. I've only ever seen one 5-cent coin with King George on it, and even the 1-cent coins with his effigy were rare. She held the throne for a long time, and coins do eventually get retired or lost.)
After decimalisation in 1971 shillings weren't withdrawn from circulation but were made equivalent to five new pence. It was quite common to find a George V (reigned 1910-1936) shilling in your change in the 1980s.
I have a few coins with George V and George VI, as well as a few pre-decimalization coins with Elizabeth.
@@1One2Three5Eight13My mother, born in the early 1950s recalls collecting “bun pennies” for charity in the 1960s. Those were the earliest issue of Queen Victoria coins from 1836 through to the 1850s so over 100 years old even then. George VI shillings and florins were in circulation (as 5p and 10p pieces) until the new style 5p and 10p coins came in, in the early 90’s.
You missed the best part, 240 pennies equalled 1 pound(currency) and what did 240 pennies weigh? 1 pound(weight). It's also where the symbol comes from.
The origin is weight in silver, crazy to think it'd be over £250 today.
Never knew that about the penny, I presume it applied to all copper coins.
That doesn’t sound right. The old British penny was huge, about the size of a US silver dollar. Can’t imagine it would take more than six of them to weigh a pound.
My grandmother never quite got over decimalisation and tended to use old money terms a lot
Doubtless aided by some of the coins remaining in circulation.
Yes, on hearing the price in decimal, people would ask, “how much is that in real money?”
Not quite in earnest, but not quite in jest either,
So glad I found this video before I time travel back! You’re a godsend. Thank you 😅
This was right up until 1967, not 18967.
I've seen Australian newspaper ads for expensive things like big home radios advertised in guineas (from before we went decimal in 1966).
I understand that guineas had a certain connotation of wealth and prestige, so even in the 20th century luxury items, private surgeons' fees and so on would often be quoted in guineas, even if no such coin existed.
From what I understand, this connotation comes from the fact that high end auctions (for property, racehorses, and the like) in the period priced in guineas. The additional shilling was the auctioneers commission (so if something sold for 50 guineas, the seller got £50 and the auctioneer 50 shillings, or £2 10/-).
This might be nonsense, but it makes some sense.
Yes, whenever you read an old British novel, you'll see fancy items written up in guineas. A nice hat from a hat shop might cost three guineas, etc.
Also, I read in his biography that Terry Nation (creator of the Daleks and Blake's 7) was contracted for a lot of his early writing work in the 50s and 60s in guineas, rather than pounds. "Radio and TV writer" seems somewhat less prestigious than surgeon, but even at that, it was apparently not uncommon to work in guineas pretty much right up to decimalization in the early 70s.
@@gonvillebromhead2865 in Britain the price of a racehorse is still often given in guineas.
@@Doogie2K3 It was a unit of account with aristocratic overtones, so anything indicating luxury or not working class would often be priced in guineas.
We used Lsd until 1971
And many started LSD in the previous decade
I think 1971 was the first time I tried LSD.
Some of the articles and such by Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) were essentially math problems in the form of British money problems.
And people thought decimalisation would be too confusing
For anyone wondering the reason guinea are still used is in auctions, especially farmers auctions. Apart from tradition, is because of how quickly things move you are more likely to in the moment think 500 Gunieas that's 500 pounds, because there is not enough time to work out what 500 shillings will add up to which is an extra £25, which when added up over hundreds of lots means the auction house can make more. Yes a shilling in video is 12 pennies but that's old pennies in new pennies it's 5 pence. Because 1 pound was 240 pennies. Not 100 pennies as it is now.
Uncle! Uncle! I surrender!
@@mcv2178 I don't get the reference
Horses also bought and sold in Guineas
Out of curiosity, was there a simple relationship between the guinea and the auction house commission? I could imagine the system being quite convenient if a lot sold for 500 guineas meant the seller got 500 pounds and the auction house the 500 shillings, but I have no idea if it was that simple.
@@Alex-cw3rz It's a fairly long held tradition(?) for people to "cry uncle" when surrendering. I have no idea if it was ever a thing people did in real life, but it appears a lot in media.
Apparently it's a chiefly North American thing, and no one's exactly sure where it comes from.
This makes the scene in the classic Disney Animated Robin Hood that much more impacting and meaningful when the Sheriff of Nottingham takes the last farthing from the poorbox, right after the mice donated it. He took their last QUARTER OF A PENNY!!!
Well, I am definitely going to save this video as reference material for my tabletop medieval fantasy role-playing game!
Victorian?!! That's the system I used¹ until my teens. I feel very old.
¹Last year I finished writing a book set in Nelson's navy and found that I still know that ⅓ of a pound is 6/8d and a guinea divided between 14 people is 1/6d each
This is both amazing and confusing - thank you!
The Groat, more recently called fourpence, worth 4d was issued occasionally to the late 1800s. Quarter and half farthings were issued in Ceylon, and monetised in the UK in 1842. Malta had a one-third farthing. Other British colonies and Empire members had other values, such ad 15d, aka 1/3d in Australia. That some pre-decimal coins remained in use in the UK was confusing for overseas visitors, such as us in 1986. Their value was based on the fraction of the pound they are worth, not the number of old pence. Meanwhile in Australia, 6d became 5 cents, a shilling 10 cents, and 10 shillings a dollar.
Ty i was curious
When you started I thought great, now I get it, then more combination terms came up and I thought nope, I' back to being totally confused. 😹
Guineas are still referred to in horse racing, such as the 1000 guineas, which was the original prize money.
Racehorses are still frequently bought and sold in guineas, where the seller gets the pound and the agent gets 5p (the shilling) as their commission.
I was watching a video about sheep auctions recently, and the bids and prices were all expressed in guineas.
Up through at least WW2 lots of "rich things" were priced in guineas: large amounts of land, nice houses, expensive art and big motorcars, expensive rifles and shotguns, yachts, rents and leases in upper-class parts of cities, doctors' and other professional's fees. It's one way to sort of "build in" a 5% advantage for the seller ... buyers know the guinea is more than the pound, but it's close enough to make people forget the difference.
For a while, after we went decimal in 1971, the used car trade made a point of pricing their stock in guineas. Probably hoping that no one could convert a guinea to £1.05!
The US has a similar phenomenon, where it is the only place you'll hear "sawbuck." All the way back in the 1860s, a ten dollar note had a Roman numeral X on it. It looked like a sawbuck, so $10 = sawbuck. This is now doubly odd because the ten doesn't have a Roman numeral on it and we don't use the term sawbuck anyhow (long replaced with sawhorse). But, the term wiggled into the terminology of gambling on horses, where it found a safe slang haven.
The guinea was worth more than the sovereign was because it was made from purer gold. I don't know when the 4d piece, or groat, was decommissioned but that was probably well before the Victorian era.
IIRC, it's that a guinea originated as a gold coin that was worth a pound, but never changed weight, and gold's value compared to silver (upon which British currency was defined) rose, which meant that the value of a guinea rose. Then they decided that it was dumb to not have a coin that was valued at a pound, so they created that as the sovereign.
I read that in expensive establishments they put the prices in guineas to make the price seem less despite, as you have helpfully explained, guineas not being in existence in the 20th century.
well everything looks 5% cheaper
In the US the lowest coin is a penny, but gas stations all give prices to a tenth of that, like "$2.93.9" - and they write that ".9" very small sometimes, too!
Guineas were definitely still in existence in the 20th century.
Talks about a book by Mayhew, then introduces a book by wehyam right at the end.
Don’t know why I needed this but I absolutely did. Thank you! 🙏🏽
I started work in a bookshop in 1971. I can remember paperback books being marked with the price in both £ s d and decimal. For example, 3/6 171/2p. In other words, 3 shillins and 6 pence or 17 and a half pence.
You probably don't know or remember there was still a half penny after decimalisation, and this was about the average price of a paperback novel.
Note: the fact that the UK waited so long to decimalize is why most British colonies adopted dollars, including places like Hong Kong that were still part of the Empire.
That said, the USD was originally supposed to have a _mill_ (1/10¢) and an _eagle_ ($10), but they never caught on.
Guineas are still used, primarily at auctions where the house takes a 5% commission. So the buyer pays in guineas, and the seller receives the same number of pounds.
The sixpence coin was nicknamed a "tanner". We lost something when we went to decimal currency as modern coins have never attracted such lovely nicknames.
Depends on where you are, Canada has the loonie and the toonie!
I'm slightly surprised that the 10p coin wasn't renamed as the "new shilling", even though that really should be 5p for a decimal pound
@@dj1NM3 That would have been really confusing! When the UK changed to the decimal system they continued using the old shilling coins and florin coins as 5p and 10p respectively. They brought out 5p and 10p coins but both old and new were around and freely used interchangeabley. They only disappeared altogether in the early 90s when they brought in the current tiny 5p and smaller 10p sizes.
@@TaraDreamswhen it changed I remember arguing about my change with a canteen lady. I was wrong which was highly embarrassing as it was my University canteen and I was studying mathematics.
@@TaraDreams
It also would have been disconcerting to have the decimal pound only worth half as many shillings as the old pound, wouldn't it?
I saw the thumbnail for this, and thought, "Oh, wow, Victorian paper money was weird and tiny, I had no idea that was a thing," only to find out it was J. Draper's demonstration of non-decimal currency.
Two additional facts: 1) non-decimal currencies and measures are usually based on multiples of a number that can be evenly divided by a lot of other numbers, like 12, or 360. Basing everything on 10 makes basic math(s) easier, but makes fractions harder, and even divisions less common. That was why systems like this used to dominate.
2) The guinea was developed because merchants learned they could take British coinage overseas and sell it for its silver content, for more than the face value, in places where silver was more valuable. Having that extra shilling tacked onto the coin messed with this practice, although IIRC, it failed to stop it. But people started figuring things in guineas to seem posh, and to appeal to elite customers, and eventually the whole concept of a guinea survived as an affectation, even after the coin had been abandoned.
Also to be noted is that shilling coins were actually 1/20 of a troy pound in weight. When shillings were made of silver, they were not token money; they actually contained their value in metal. In the 1960s, pence were copper coins of about the same weight, though in the middle ages, pence were 1/240 of a troy pound of silver.
Takes me back to my nightmare of learning Imperial measures, and arithmetic around money.
Don't understand why the UK is so dead against the Base 10 Metric System, but I would emigrate if my country ever went backwards to Imperial.
it’s easy if you grow up with it. and pretty well tuned for the human scale. A mile takes about 20 mins to walk, a pint is about 2 normal glasses, a pound is about a perfect size to buy flour or sugar in, etc
Huh? We have litres, grams, kilos, and metres and all their mili versions everywhere.
Its only certain things like milk and beer and car driving distances that pints and miles and such are still the more common.
Growing up in the 90s and 2000s I remember the metric system being rolled out and appearing everywhere
@@eelsemaj99The argument that it's well tuned for the human scale is a complete joke because they all are.
@@mariusdragoe2888 it’s really funny to me that people seem to think the metric system was made for some alien species. and tbh it’s more “alien” to me to measure things in some abstract standardised human organ or tree nut
@@mariusdragoe2888 Not really.
I like metric because it's inter relational:
A metre is nominally a pace, but a tenth of a metre cubed is a litre and a litre of water is a kg.
A yard is nominally a stride, but a foot's a foot & an inch is the width of your thumb.
Volumes & weights are divisions Gallon - half gallon - quart - pint. Halve a pound 4 times & you have an ounce, 3 times & you have 2 ounces...
I find another fascinating thing is that it was also 240 pennies to the pound, not 100 as it is today. That is because 240 pennies can be divided more than 100 making it actually much more useful especially when working with only coins.
And of course a pound back in the day was a lot of money. There were millions of people who lived their entire lives paying for things in farthings, pennies and, should a windfall strike them, a shilling or two.
@@Agamemnon2 well depends what year, as by the Victorian times rent would be a few pounds. However in Medieval times a few pounds would buy an entire hamlet even small village of farms.
I’d love a video on how the various old coins got their names.
This is the first scheme I've encountered that makes the inch-pound system seem quite reasonable and straightforward by comparison.
Guineas were still in use until quite recently. In the art world, and in similar ‘high end’ transactions. I still think in terms of certain terms. I’ll often say things cost ‘a few bob’ - meaning overpriced. Or ‘it was only a couple of bob’ meaning a bargain. Also ‘bent as a nine-bob note’ meaning fake or a knock-off copy. Indeed, I have. A ten bob note that I use as a bookmark. Florin’s, half-crowns, and sixpence are still fondly spoken of here. Getting one of those to spend on sweets was a real treat. Mostly, it have been a thrupenny bit,
Actually, the guinea is still in use today, mostly at horse auctions where the extra 5 pence is the agent commission. So if a horse sells for 5000 guineas, the breeder gets 5000 pounds and the agent gets 250 pounds.
In America we say "phony as a three-dollar bill."
... and most of the 20th Century. We went decimal in 1971, which was the year I left school.
No, I'm not actually a cat. I did go to school. I was inkwell monitor.
You're old bro
Thank you! And all the posters! Understood this clearly for the first time.
There was a Mrs Shilling who appeared at Royal Ascot every year wearing the most ridiculous of hats.
Forget about the Victorians - that monetary system was still around until 1971 when the current decimal system came into use. It is a shame. I love the old money.
Ah the joys of learning long division of £sd in primary school. A skill I still have but will never have a use for!
You never know tho, if by happenstance you were to accidently time travel to any date before 1971 you would at least know how to deal with the currency :)
240d in a £ was actually quite clever. It is a multiple of 60. 60 is a highly divisible number divides equally into 2,3,4,5,6,10,12 etc. Which made it a certain good way for breaking down payments into "shares". 240 being 60 × 4 is even more divisible. We still use that divisibility factor of 60 for Time (seconds in minutes, minutes in hours) and measuring angles. One sixth of a circle being 60 degrees. You lose a lot of that flexibility by using the simplicity of decimal but inflation has meant such divisibility is pretty irrelevant for money nowadays
You might want to amend that bit about the circle.
[EDIT: That amendment seems good to me!]
@@marksnow7569 yep 😳
36⁰ is 1/10 of a circle.
It really makes you appreciate the metric system.
Guineas are interesting-they can be used to represent a 5% tip. "Shall we say guineas?" adds 5% to the transaction's price.
Guineas are posher too. Doctors and tailors used to charge in guineas. I suppose if you wanted to open a pound shop in a swanky area you could call it the guinea shop to make it sound classier.
Thanks for making me feel old! Yes, I'm old enough to remember £Sd!
240 pence to the pound is a highly composite number. That makes it very convenient in a way that decimal currency never can match.
And with the larger system of Imperial measurements also generally being based on twelves or sixteens (both of which 240 divides evenly into), that was another point of familiarity until about half a century ago.
Highly composite in what way?
It’s convenient if you need to subdivide a pound in lots of different sizes. Inflation means that today we don’t usually need to divide up a pound or a dollar even as much as decimal currency allows.
@@yippee8570”A highly composite number is a positive integer with more divisors than any smaller positive integer has.” en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number
@@yippee8570it divides by 2,3,4,5,6,8,10,12,15,16,20,24,30,40,48,60,80 and 120 without needing to use fractions. It means that no matter how much you’re dividing it by it’s likely to have a neater sum than dividing by 100, which by contrast does multiples of 2 and 5 ok but nothing else
@@yippee8570 As in it divides evenly into 20 different numbers. That's more factors than any smaller number has.
When I read "Paul Clifford", I found myself having to look up a lot of slang words for British coinage. They were very creative with their language back in the day! Being an American I don't know if some of these terms are still in use today, like bob for shilling, and the book uses the term quid to mean a guinea rather than a pound. We get some generic terms like 'blunt' for coins in general, and 'brad' for a small value coin, 'oil of palms' for money in general, and more specific words like 'sice' for six pence, 'mag' for a half penny, etc.
Lots of other great slang and argot of 19th century Britain to be found in that novel besides. Bingo (brandy), stark-naked (gin), blue ruin (cheap gin), buzz gloak (pickpocket), Toby (the highway), and so many others. It's a real trove of such linguistic treasures!
I'm British. Apart from "blunt" all of those words are new to me. I get the same problem with dimes, quarters and "bits" in American films. Just last week I found out what a jitney was!
In Australia, my dad still uses "quid" and "bob", though they're more commonly used by the older generation (silent generation).
*sighs* inflation
How many farthings was that? 🫢
My favourite TTRPG is Warhammer Fantasy Role Play 4tg edition, or WFRP4e, and the currency in the empire is exactly the same as this, borrowing a lot of slang. Notably, your career (and what stage of the career you're in) has an attached "class" that affects social interactions as well as your ability to fit in or disguise yourself. This class is listed as a metal followed by a number, and your standard career earnings are based off it, so if you're a brass 4 village councilman, you're earning 6d10 pfennig for a week of settling disputes and voting against clean water, and if you're a Silver 2 mine foreman, you're getting 2d10 silver... And if you do the maths, the councilman earns better, even if he's lower class than the mine Forman, but because appearances are everything and at a glance people only see the colour of your weekly pay purse, they'll assume the foreman is more important (don't worry though, mine foremans can embezzle and are pretty much expected to do so😂)
I'm definitely going to need a whole college class length video 😂
What great timing! This came up with a friend here in Seattle over the weekend when we were looking at an old book in his collection. All of us were like, what are these prices, anyway? I had to search for currency in literature in order to find the right explanation. Yours is much better!
As a programmer in the seventies, I had to read COBOL language manuals, and I remember seeing that the manuals, written in the sixties, had special provisions for handling Sterling money, with pounds, shillings, and pence in separate number fields. Thankfully, I never had to work with them, since I live in the US, but I sympathized with the poor British programmers who did!
From what I understand, some British banking computer systems still calculate in pounds shillings and pence and then have a module which converts the values to decimal. Because of COBOL and not wanting to rewrite the whole system.
Guineas live on elsewhere as well. The Arabic name for the Egyptian pound is derived from that, and while most Egyptians might pronounce it closer to geneh, there are many (myself included) who pronounce it very close to the English guinea
Here on the other side of the Pond we’re still dealing for inches and feet. The shilling went straight over me head. Lol
As a metal detectorist this is really helpful 😮😊
I’ve even found 1/4 d and half groat coinage 😢
I remember my father telling me of a practice where an item if sold with a price tag in guineas, the owner got the pounds and the sales person got the shillings, which effectively became their sales commission. A property sold for 500 guineas, for instance, the owner received £500, and salesman got 500'. That was at least an elegant implementation of a inelegant currency system.
I missed most of that as here, down-under, we switched to decimalisation when I was 3. Changing from Imperial measures to SI units happened while I was at primary school, so a few of those legacy units still live on in my brain, pulled out when convenient.
Thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Very informative
And this is probably why, right up into my toddler years in the mid to late 90s, we were taught times tables up to 12 x 12. Even VAT at 17.5% meant I had a cast iron reason to know 7s back to front, money is one heck of a motivator to learn.
As an American it’s interesting hearing how complicated this seems to modern Brits.
It is only marginally more complicated than the system we use today. Mostly because it doesn’t use metric fractions.
Penny = 1/100 USD
Nickel = 5 pennies (or cents)
Dime = 10 pennies
Quarter = 1/4 USD
We also have a 50 cent coin and a dollar coin that you almost never see. So much so that they sometimes get mistaken as quarters by folks returning change.
In Canada they got rid of the penny about a decade ago, but they also have their dollar coins.
Loonie = 1 dollar
Toonie = 2 dollar
0:34 cool to learn they had Costa Coffee in 1851.
And the £2 9s 11d that the potato seller needed to start a business (0:25) would just about buy him a cappuccino today.
Half a crown : two and a kick . In school it was obligatory to learn the 12 × table , 12 d to a shilling 12 inches to a foot
Yeah we still learnt the 12 times table in the 1980s despite the reason for it having largely gone away.
We still learned up to 12x in the 1990s - we still have 12/24 hours in a day after all, and 60 minutes can divide by 12 as well as 10. (See also: 360⁰ of a circle dividing into 30⁰ angles)
quickly put this in my “you need to know playlist” - one never knows when Rimmer may make a reference…
I always enjoy your videos, Jenny, so don’t take this as a moan, but you do make me feel old. I grew up with pounds, shillings and pence and was already in my twenties when the switch came. I recall that as kids in the fifties (1950s not 1850s!) we loved it when we got old coins in our change with the head of Queen Victoria, and I have a memory of occasionally getting a smoothed and blackened penny or ha’penny with the head of young Victoria still visible on it. Is that a false memory? Were coins from the 1850s still in circulation a hundred years later, or am I even older than I think?
Wow, be great if you still had some of those!
@@kellyshomemadekitchenI have one, in California! I'm not sure where it came from, it certainly wasn't in change, its huge!
@@christajennings3828 that’s great!
@@kellyshomemadekitchen Sadly I don’t have any. As the song says: you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
@@ron271828 very true!
The wizard money in Harry Potter is a reference to how complicated this system was
Fascinating!!!
this is the most usefull useless stuff ever its very interesting thank you
I recall reading that some high end shops were using guineas for pricing even after decimalization, with the implication that if you had to ask, you couldn't afford the 5% premium.
As a child, I remember seeing "d" on penny sweets in the village shop. This was the early 80s!
Very helpful 💷🪙
You also hear a pound called a quid, and apparently, in Ireland., a Euro is called a quid by association. And a tizzy was sixpence. But we have nicknames in the US for money too. A sawbuck is a tenner. A fin is a fiver. Two bits is a quarter. Luckily, the US adopted decimal coinage early on. So we didn't have to worry about 1, 3, and 4. (Meaning one pound, three shillings, and four pence.)
And the $100 dollar bill is a Benjamin
@@risfleming-allen3300 Ah -- you deal in larger amounts than I do. It's been ages since I had a Benjamin. Though if things keep going like they are now, we'll need one to buy a loaf of bread soon.😃
I would love a video explaining various Brit expressions, like “Bob’s your uncle”. I think it would be fun! (BTW: none of my uncles are named Bob.) 😎
Bob's your uncle and Fanny's your aunt. 😁
@@Poliss95 😄😄😄
We used £sd up until i was 10 years old. My dad gave me 6d for lunch every day. A matchbox car cost 2/6. Even as small children we understood it easily. When decimalisation came we were confused.
The one thing that was lost with decimalization was the ease of dividing by many different numbers. 240 pence per pound had the advantage of being easily divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 40, 48, 60, 80, and 120.
Now you can only divide by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, and 50.
I don't think it was wrong to switch it up, i just think a system based on a highly composite number of pennies per pound or dollar would have been cool.
On the day of decimalisation, as a 10 yr old getting on the bus to go to school, finally money made sense. The feel of the new coins, the simplicity, just felt right - like the PO Tower and, er, SR.N6 Hovercrafts to France. Well done the Romans for ditching "Twelvety" and going decimal!
"For a soldier I listed, to grow great in fame. And be shot at for sixpence a day."- "Letters" (1774) by Charles Dibdin
Really puts things into perspective doesn't it now that you explained the old currency system. Although now that I think about it, with the concept of inflation, sixpence was probably worth more in the Era of Enlightenment than in the Victorian Era.
it feel like the basis of this system shouldn't be too confusing - sure, we're not used it it, but it follows an easy logic.
what really messes things up is when people then take some amount of coins, reify them (or, historically in the case of guineas, have actual coins of that value) and then talk about money in multiples of those. feels a bit like using miles and km alongside each other to me.
Makes me glad I'm a muggle, 17 sickles in a galleon, and 29 knuts in a sickle would be too much for me.
Fun video.😊 Very minor thing at 1:03 - memory says £1 was a note rather than a coin until quite some time after decimalisation, maybe a even up to the late-80s?!
According to my dad, as a Scouse kid in the 50s, he called a three penny coin a "thripney bit".
A guinea was a specific coin that contained about a quarter of an ounce of gold whereas shillings contained silver. When first introduced it was meant to be worth a pound but because of subsequent fluctuations in the ratio of gold and silver prices its value varied between twenty and thirty shillings. From 1717 to 1816 its value was fixed at twenty-one shillings then it was replaced by the pound and ceased to be legal tender. It lives on in modern usage in the pricing of some traditional items that only the upper classes would purchase (e.g. bespoke tailoring) but this is in decline.
"What is a guinea? ‘Tis a splendid thing."
I was today years old when I learned why a pound of weight is abbreviated “lb.”
The online game Discworld MUD uses penny/shllling/crown money for areas set in Ramtops region. The more cosmopolitan Ankh-Morpork region uses decimal dollars/pence.
Guineas are still used when buying and selling racehorses. Love your explanation!
My brain hurt trying to figure that out. But then I remembered my nephew trying to explain how the French count and I felt a little better.
I saw the thumbnail, and assumed this was about electron orbitals
Although people complain about how complicated pounds, shillings and pence sound, they're actually very useful because 20, 12 and 4 are what's known as 'practical numbers'. A number is practical if all the numbers up to it can expressed as the sum of its divisors. Which makes it easy if you have to use balance type scales to weigh things out. 12 has divisors 6,3,4,2 and 1
Although practical numbers have been used for weights and measures for thousands of years, because err,.. they're practical, the name practical number was only coined recently. Wikipedia reports "The name "practical number" is due to Srinivasan (1948). He noted that "the subdivisions of money, weights, and measures involve numbers like 4, 12, 16, 20 and 28 which are usually supposed to be so inconvenient as to deserve replacement by powers of 10."
Think of things that have to be divided up in halves, quarters, eighths etc. Using grams and kilos is very impractical because 10 doesn't divide neatly into halves, quarters and eighths, but pounds and ounces do.
For a while there was a fringe campaign to use 12 as a base for counting instead of 10 because 12 is a practical number, it's called the 'duodecimal' system. Computers use practical numbers because they use binary, and all powers of 2 are practical numbers. Which is why there are 16 ounces in a pound weight.
Why anyone would need to invent the Guinea to represent 105% of a pound is beyond me.
We were still using the old two schilling pieces well into the 70s and early 80s as 10 pence, even still putting a schilling (5p) in gas meters!..
I remember going to the shops to spend my sixpence and threepenny as a kid.
I remember D day (decimal day) when a shilling went from 12d to 5p. My dad gave each of my brothers and I one of each of the new coins. Those shiny copper coins were dulled within a couple of days.
But... it was 23/04/1969 when the 50p came out "arf a bar". The sixpence became worth 2½p...
The pound coin only came out in 1983.
My mother still has old ha'pennies sewn into her curtains to keep them straight.
A pound is still 20 shillings, but it buys only a Mars bar, which was 3p in 1972.
This was the video and jingle the Australian Government used to transition from pre-decimal to decimal currency on Valentines Day 1966:
ruclips.net/video/GtyNLwqljzI/видео.htmlfeature=shared
straight banger, that
That's because money has always been more important than reading or writing because reading and writing are optional if you're making a living doing something else whereas you have to have the money to keep a roof over your head and food in your stomach and you don't want to be ripped off. That's why every child from a very early age learned his maths, so he could know if he was getting the right amount that he should be getting.
“19th century money” lasted until 1971. 😂
A decimalization was resisted because they thought it would be too complicated. . .
That pricing of £2 9s 11d to open a baked potato seller is super interesting. That’s only one penny away from two and a half pounds, so it’s kind of like the Victorian equivalent of pricing something like £2.49 today!
We have the same 'names for coins' in the U.S., even though we're decimalized. You have a quarter, dime, nickel, and penny. People also occasionally refer to paper bills by the famous person depicted on the front (usually Presidents, but not always). Pre-decimal British currency is really not that complicated, and I'm kind personally disappointed y'all got rid of it.
It was gotten rid of to bring us in line joining the common market(EU) in 1973, overnight everything went up in price, biggest con job ever bestowed on the British public...
Where a daily wage was a shilling and a pence, it was more comfortable to use a 12 divided currency. You can use half third and quarter than only half.
That last statement - can´t read but can count in many various ways - describes very old human knowledge.
You just made me feel really old!