Understanding British Money: What's a Quid? A Shilling? (2020)

Fun fact: the 20p and 50p coins are Reuleaux heptagons[0]. This means that they have a constant diameter even though they're not circular, which means that they can be accurately sorted by vending machines.

[0] https://wikiless.org/wiki/Reuleaux_polygon?lang=en

There are also coins called the Sovereign and Britannia, which are both legal tender, although not in general circulation. Both are minted from 24 carat gold. The Sovereign has a face value of 1 pound and I think the Britannia has a face value of 5. There actual value, on gold markets, is hundreds of pounds, and for a Britannia is over a thousand. Because they are legal tender, and could theoretically be used to buy a bottle of milk, they are exempt from VAT and capital gains tax, when buying or selling.

There's also enduring slang for some some values of cash, that doesn't necessarily have an accompanying bank note. A Pony for 25 pounds and a Ton for 100 is still fairly widely understood, but mostly heard these days in Guy Ritchie movies,.

Just to add some more niche currency slang. A few of the Hibs casuals[0] that used to come into the pub I worked at sometimes referred to pounds as “sheets” - “it set me back fifty sheets” = “it cost me 50 pounds”. I don’t know how common it is, I only heard it around these guys.

[0] - Hibs = Hibernian Football Club in Edinburgh, casuals = hooligan supporters (who were alright with me so long as they thought I supported a nothing-team like Montrose and didn’t know I actually supported Aberdeen :D)

A better explanation is Lindybeige's video about pre-decimal British coinage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2paSGQRwvo

It goes into the underlying mindset behind this seemingly bizarre system. Basically:

- the penny was always the fundamental unit. every denomination was defined in terms of the penny, not the pound or the shilling. It wasn't like the modern system where the fundamental unit is the pound (or dollar) and pennies (or cents) are defined as hundredths.

- the system was evolved, not designed

- different multiples and fractions of the penny went in and out of fashion at various times, so at any given time the system wasn't quite complicated as you might think, even though in retrospect it can be hard to keep track of every denomination from every period

- the shilling (12 pence) and the pound (240 pence) stuck around and became important denominations because those are highly-composite numbers and so have lots of ways of splitting them up

And this isn't stated explicitly in the video but it seems the system lost its value due to inflation, not any desire for metrication. Nobody gave a damn about pennies by the late 60s. You could very well make a new version of "old money" with modern coinage, just inflated by a factor of 100. A neo-shilling = 12 dollars, etc. Could be a fun cyberpunk worldbuilding detail.

It’s actually not unheard of that people with Scottish banknotes sometimes encounter difficulty when using them elsewhere. Small shop owners might not know that they can be accepted. It’s not so much of an issue these days since everywhere is pretty much cashless.

A thruppny bit (three-penny piece) was my favourite coin. It was a brassy colour, different from every other coin - not coppery, and not silvery. It was quite heavy - it felt like wealth. It had twelve sides - the only sterling coin that had sides, until the introduction of the 50p bit, with decimalisation.

The other thing I liked about it was that three is such a crazy denomination for a currency token, like a three-dollar bill; three old pennies were heavier and bigger, but the old pennies were ridiculously large and heavy.

I also liked florins and half-crowns. A florin was a two-shilling piece, and a half-crown was two-and-a-half shillings. These were coins that actually contained silver.

A crown was five shillings, but not generally used as currency, it was issued as a memorial, like a medal. At one time I owned a Churchill Crown, issued to commemorate Churchill's death. They were big, heavy coins. That's why a half-crown was two-and-a-half shillings.

Good Omens had one of the most eye-opening introductions to old british currency on the level of monoids and endofunctors. Since then I'm avoiding both.

The first time I visited England when I was 19 the people I was visiting showed me all this, and consequently a lot of my cash was turned into "shrapnel".

Later I wanted to buy some vodka, and someone wanted chocolate milk, so imagine the look on the cashier's face as I pay for ONLY vodka and chocolate milk with spare change.

We had a get together with our international team this past summer, and I was shocked to learn from a Scottish colleague that some banks are authorized to print their own currency notes. I thought "That can't be right". Though this is historically what many banks throughout the world used to do. It just seemed totally crazy that a private corporation could distribute nationally accepted currency. What a weird, wild world we live in...

> Scottish banknotes are a funny thing because they're not issued by a central bank, and they're not technically legal tender ANYWHERE in the UK. Three retail banks (Bank of Scotland, Clydesdale Bank, and Royal Bank of Scotland) are permitted to print notes, and they're classified as promissory notes rather than legal tender. Go to the ATM of any of those banks, and you'll get their notes.

My favorite money has always been the guinea because it set the profit for middlemen. You would pay the auctioneer in guineas (21 shillings) and they would pay the seller of the item in pounds (20 shillings), giving the auctioneer a 4.75% commission.

I never heard of "smacker", but now I understand where "smackeroos/smackeroonies" comes from in Aus.

I think five shillings (20 shillings in a pound) was sometimes called a dollar because for a long time there were four US dollars to the pound.

interestingly, while I was living in Ireland I heard people referring to a euro as a quid reasonably commonly.

A note on the guinea. IIRC, it was originally intended to be a gold one pound coin. However, the value of gold went up just when it was issued so it was revalued higher by adding the extra shilling. I imagine the extra prestige associated with it was mostly about it being gold.

10,000-foot geezer's perspective:

Before the Great War (WWI), Great Britain was rich, Great Britain completely dominated the financial world, Great Britain's Pound Sterling was the world's reserve currency ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_currency ), and the Pound Sterling was no more decimal than Her Royal Majesty Queen Victoria was Japanese.

When you are the 900 pound gorilla, not only can you get away with all sorts of unique complexity - mites, farthings, groats, shillings, florins, crowns, pounds, guineas, etc. - but being quite conversant with your complexity is a point of pride for many foreigners, who wish to be seen as educated and sophisticated.

WWI might reasonably be described as a "no matter how hard it is, no matter how long it takes" suicide pact by Europe's greatest nations and nobles, to destroy their own positions and prestige in the world. They were quite successful in that.

Great Britain's post-WWI economic policy might be described as "keep saying 'Great', but don't think nor try too hard". Combine that with interest payments on their huge war debts, and the writing was on the wall.

Then came WWII. Before the U.S.A. stepped in to pay for things, national bankruptcy was at least as much a threat to "Great" Britain as the Nazi armies were. More than a year before that war ended, on 22 July 1944, Britain formally signed the Bretton Woods Agreement ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_System ) - which explicitly made the U.S. Dollar the world's reserve currency.

Post-WWII, "Great"-no-longer Britain's economic situation was grim. Rationing of food, for the general population, did not end until 4 July 1954.

Still, the funny old Pound Sterling currency system hung on. I mostly credit human memory. Brits born in 1895 would have adult memories of pre-WWI British Greatness, yet be only 70 years old in 1965.

Finally, 15 February 1971 was Decimal Day - when the cool old farthing/groat/shilling/etc. British Pound was converted to the dull, conformist "100 pence to the pound" modern system.

Here's a good video about coins https://youtu.be/jRDOmgJyznI

Slightly easier explanation is that a quid is used the same way the word "bucks" is used for USD.

The article is out of date as it suggests that the uk is in the eu

> Luckily for those who enjoy travelling to the UK, the pound sterling has been weak in recent years, dipping as low as $1.07 in late 2022. Even still, dollars buy a lot more than they used to in the UK, so it's a great time to be travelling and shopping at British businesses.

https://www.royal.uk/coronation-weekend

Dont delay, book your coronation fortnite holiday straight away and upload your hot pics to youtube!

This is your chance to be part of history, captured in 8K definition by the BBC, as you line the route waving your Union flags, doffing your top hat to his majesty as he drives past you or taking a curtsey if dressed up as the fairer sex, which some men like Grayson Perry have been known to do. We'll take dictators, we'll take Jimmy Saville, we dont care as long as you spend lots of money when over here!

Take part in street parties, tell us where you are from and get to rub shoulders with cockney geezer's that sound like they are straight out of a Mary Poppins adaption, Cor Blimey Guvnor, steady on, or something like Guy Ritchie's Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

There's a Ronnie Pickering in every town, and if he's not driving you around the bend, you'll find him in the nearest pub.

Take in a football match, there is a Gordon Parmar Hill aka The Wealdstone Raider in every club waiting to oblige you in conversation and vocabulary a five year could understand, great for those people who want to practice their English skills on the cheap.

Or maybe you'd like to hunt some of the world famous Haggis in the wee hills of Scotland, its the only endangered species in the world not on the endangered species list, which some think is not offally fair game.

Find out who your Scottish relatives were and kit yourself out in the family tartan whilst tasting a wee dram of whiskey from the thousands on offer? Everyone has Scottish descendants, even Donald Trump!

Either way, the country is broke, and we are selling the crown jewels, so come to the UK and give us your money, its all hands on deck.

Decimalisation was just a dignified slight of hand way to cover up a hyper inflationary currency collapse from the oldest currency in the world.

Ignore the news that everything costs so much here especially food and heating, we are all doing fine, I'm hoping to have defrosted and come out of hibernation and be able to move in time for the coronation but at least I'm putting Stephen Hawkins speak and spell to good use communicating with the world.

Remember Global Warming lowers your heating bills, so jump on a plane, and jet into the UK for a fortnight long holiday, taking in the best of British.

If you fancy an unusual souvenir, we have bridges for sale, telephone boxes, and post boxes. They'll make the perfect metals investment to hand down to your kids, whilst reminding yourself of what a good time you had when you come to witness a country going mad, putting aside their differences, and showing respect to the Crown.

This once in a lifetime event hinges on you attending in person, so all the press will be gushing their Levity, not drawing attention to the Age of Empires, we've all moved on from that, although Charles has been watching too much Dr Who and is stuck in a time vortex from another world.

So dont delay, there will be dignitaries and politicians from around the world in attendance, it will be the best walking talking Madam Tussaud's show you'll ever see. You'll be bumping into more stars than you can see at the London Planetarium, more stars than the Royal Greenwich Observatory, where you can actually take part in time itself!

But all these rare events only happen during the week before and week after the crowning of a monarch, something many countries got rid of because they thought best.

And if you are really lucky, you'll find many people selling their souvenir quids and shillings that they have had tucked away safely down the back of their sofa. The money is worthless, but your kids or grand kids, could melt them down in years to come for the precious metal content, or keep them as a souvenir before cryptocurrency's took over the world.

Remember London is the only Govt backed crypto currency laundromat in the world!

So come and invade for two weeks only, the Empire that gave you English before the Americans bastardised it, and take part in the world's biggest fancy dress party!