coins and currency

The king's coinage was one of the most visible manifestations of royal authority. The number of mints was carefully controlled and permission to subjects to strike coins granted sparingly. Counterfeiting or clipping the coinage was regarded as a heinous crime. In 1350 Edward III declared counterfeiting to be high treason. As late as 1742 gilding shillings to pass as guineas was made treason. Nor were these idle threats. Phoebe Harris was burned before 20, 000 people in 1786 and Christian Murphy in 1789.

At the time of Caesar's invasion in 55 BC coins were circulating in southern England. They were largely imitations of Gaulish coins. Tasciovanus, king of the Catuvellauni, minted gold, silver, and copper coins (c.20 BC). After AD 43 the Romans substituted their own imperial coinage but by c. AD 430 the import and use of coins seems to have ended.

The peoples who penetrated the Roman empire—Vandals, Visigoths, Lombards, Franks, Angles, and Saxons—soon began to issue their own currency. At first the coins imitated Roman specimens, but later kings substituted their own names and images. In England, gold thrymsas and silver sceats appeared around AD 600. The earliest coins to be struck by an identifiable king came from the short-lived Peada of Mercia (656). King Ecgfrith of Northumbria had his name on coins soon after (670-85). In the 750s, Pepin assumed the kingship of the Franks and introduced a completely new silver coinage, using the Latin term ‘denarius’. When this was borrowed by the English, they used the name penny but retained the symbol d.: twelve denarii made one solidus, and twenty solidi one pound or libra, giving the term £.s.d., which survived until decimalization in 1971. Within a few years Offa of Mercia was issuing his own silver pennies, which were the main form of currency for the next 600 years. Edgar carried out a great reform of the coinage (c.973), with a system for calling in worn coins for reissue. There was little alteration in the design of the silver penny in the two centuries following the Norman Conquest. A continuing problem was that of change. With only one denomination, pennies were cut to provide halves and quarters. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported in 1124 that a man who took a pound of pennies (240) to market might find only twelve accepted. The coinage was at its worst during the civil war of Stephen's reign, when rival coins circulated, many of them crude.

The later Middle Ages saw a great increase in trade. Edward I carried out a grand recoinage in 1279-80, minting new coins, silver halfpennies and farthings, to remove the need to cut. The innovation of Edward III's reign was the introduction in 1344 of gold coins—a florin (6 shillings), half-florin, and quarter-florin. They were augmented by nobles (80 silver pennies), half- and quarter-nobles. Representations became more interesting. The half-florin had a rather benign leopard (which gave the coin its popular name): the noble had an elaborate scene of Edward III in a two-castled ship, perhaps commemorating his naval victory at Sluys in 1340. The noble was replaced during the reign of Edward IV by a coin of the same value, a noble-angel, which had a representation of the archangel Michael. It was accompanied by a ryal (from French royaux), valued at 10 shillings and with a large Yorkist rose—hence its popular name, rose-noble.

Tudor coinage was marked by three features—fluctuations in the value of the currency; the introduction of a great number of new coins; and the appearance of lifelike representations of the monarchs. Despite the political upheavals of the previous decades, Henry VII inherited a stable currency. But Henry VIII's systematic debasement of the currency from 1526 onwards drove up prices. Elizabeth brought the situation under control with some difficulty. The new coins included a magnificent golden sovereign by Henry VII in 1489 and a half-sovereign; a gold Crown of the Rose at 5 shillings by Henry VIII and a half-crown which settled down later as a silver coin and ran until the 20th cent.; and a George noble in 1526 on which the patron saint made his first appearance. Henry VII's silver shilling carried a good likeness of the king, known as the testoon (from French tête). Henceforth the national coinage carried some remarkable portraits—Henry VIII aged on a Bristol groat (1544-7); Edward VI's silver shilling (1550-3); an imperious Elizabeth gold pound (1561-82); a stylish Charles I shilling (1638-9), and a saturnine Charles II crown (1663).

James I celebrated the union of his two kingdoms in 1604 with a gold crown called ‘unite’ or ‘unit’, bearing the title ‘King of Great Britain’ and the legend ‘I will make them one people.’ But a more important development of his reign was the introduction of copper coinage. Lord Harington in 1613 was given a patent to produce copper farthings, known colloquially as Haringtons, with an intermediate status between coins and tokens.

The Civil War produced some desperate expedients, particularly ‘siege-money’, made out of any metal to hand and cut into strange shapes. The Commonwealth issued its own coinage, with inscriptions in English: one legend ‘God with us’ prompted cavaliers to the obvious retort that ‘the Commonwealth was on one side and God on the other’.

As soon as he returned from his travels in 1660, Charles II tackled the question of the currency. An innovation was the use of Guinea gold from Africa, which settled at 21 shillings and was called a guinea. The need for small change remained a problem and thousands of tradesmen's tokens circulated. To meet this, Charles introduced copper halfpennies and farthings in 1672: on the new coins, Britannia made her appearance for the first time.

Charles was also king of Scotland and of Ireland. The Scottish coinage dated from David I's reign in the early 12th cent. But the number of coins struck was small, and there were mints only at Edinburgh, Berwick, and Roxburgh. Scottish coins had their own peculiarities. Their international standing was undermined in the 15th and 16th cents. by persistent debasement. At the union of the crowns in 1603 the Scottish pound was fixed at only one-twelfth that of the English. The falling value of the Scottish currency derived in part from the practice of mixing silver with alloy to produce the base metal billon. James I introduced a billon penny and halfpenny: James III followed with a billon plack (from French plaque) valued at first at three pence and later at sixpence, a half-plack, and a copper farthing (1466); in James V's reign the bawbee (1"d.) and half-bawbee were issued, and in Mary's the hardhead was issued. The billon coinage was discontinued after 1603, but two pence pieces in copper called hardheads, bodles, or turners continued to be issued until the Act of Union.

The earliest known Irish coins were minted by Sihtric Olafsson in the Viking kingdom of Dublin after 990 and were copies of English silver pennies. No regular coinage was issued until after the Norman Conquest when John introduced coins stamped with a harp. There were no gold coins and, as in Scotland, silver was heavily alloyed. In the Tudor period the Irish coinage suffered great debasement, as did the Scots and English. In 1689 James II issued a bronze currency known as ‘gun-money’ which, after his defeat at the Boyne, was bought in at metal value—less than 3 per cent of its face value. The fury caused by Wood's halfpence in 1723 had less to do with the coins, which were of respectable quality, than the state of Anglo-Irish relations.

In Wales, no coins were struck until after the Norman invasion. Coin hoards have been found in Wales dating to the 9th, 10th, and 11th cents., but the coins were foreign, mainly English, Viking, or Arabic. Hywel Dda's silver penny (c 940) was minted at Chester, copied an English coin, and may have been a presentation piece. One persistent problem was the weight of coins. Individual merchants and financiers had long issued personal bills of exchange, from which developed the cheque and the banknote. The earliest extant cheque, dated 1659, is preserved in the Institute of Banking Library and is for £400. Paper credit expanded rapidly and by the end of the 17th cent. it was calculated that England and Wales had £11.6 million circulating as coins, but tallies, banknotes, and bills worth £15 million. The Bank of England began issuing large-denomination printed notes in 1725.

At the time of the great recoinage of 1696 bimetallism was still the basis of the British currency, silver and gold providing the mainstay. Later in the 18th cent. declining production of silver made it excessively expensive and the currency went over to gold almost completely. There was continuing difficulty about small change. Some of George III's copper coins (‘cartwheels’) were too heavy to be practicable since they were intended to contain their own value in copper. The result was that the country was again flooded with token coins.

Four developments in the 20th cent. may be noted. Substantial inflation, particularly after the Second World War, caused several coins to be abandoned: the farthing, beloved of haberdashers, was withdrawn in 1960, and the halfpenny, which survived decimalization in 1971, succumbed in 1984. Secondly, in 1971 the whole coinage was decimalized in preparation for Britain's entry into the EEC. Thirdly, there was fierce debate in the 1990s whether Britain should join a European currency. Fourthly, the spread of credit cards and electronic banking meant that coinage played a smaller part in financial transactions, heralding the day when money would be carried only for sundry purchases like sweets and newspapers.