And of course before decimalisation complicated everything it was a piece of cake to work out stuff like how much nine yards of material cost at 2s 3d per foot 
Probably comes from jokes like this:
A shark was swimming around looking for food…
… and he catches a squid.
The squid says: “don’t eat me, I’m really sick!”
So the shark says: “fine, I won’t eat you. But I know just what to do with you…”
The shark takes the squid to his friend and says: “here’s the sick squid I owe you.”
Sure. I was going for the last line about the British thinking decimalized currency was too complicated, which I found humorous, and for context, included the entire footnote.
British cash always managed to be unduly heavy and not well scaled. I am just old enough to remember farthings and halfpennies, which were relatively big copper coins despite being worth very little. The old penny was huge, about the size of the two shilling coin as was. The threepenny bit was heavy because it was very thick, but easily recognizable as it was brassy-looking and twelve sided.
After decimalization two of the silver coins were still used, the shilling (5 p) and the two shilling coin (florin, now 10 p).A large and heavy seven-sided 50 p coin was introduced to replace the ten shilling note. The pound note went through a couple of mutations before a coin was introduced, at the time Margaret Thatcher, and it unkindly named the Thatcher, because it was “thick, brassy and not really worth much.” A somewhat massive two pound coin followed. The smaller coins have changed, the 5 p and 10 p are - thankfully - much smaller.
When the Euro was introduced, I hoped that the weights would be properly scaled and the coins would be easy to distinguish. One out of two isn’t bad. The small copper coins are not easy to distinguish, nor the brass-like ones for 10 and 20 cents. Perhaps they should have done what the Japanese did with two of their coins; the brass 5 yen and the silver 50 yen have a hole in the middle. I have to peer closely at the smaller coins to be sure what I am giving. And the same for the smaller British and Polish coins. And to make sure that i have not mixed them up. Especially between Polish zloty and the Euro, some coins are a very close match in size and appearance (but not in value). Curiously, both the zloty and the Euro have bimetallic coins; 2 and 5 zloty, and the 1, 2 and 5 Euro; silver / bronze, but reversed between the two currencies. They are close enough that I can use a 1 or 2 zloty coin in a shopping cart that takes a one Euro coin; I have never tried this in a ticket machine, which would check moire than the diameter.
I don’t use English coins all that often, so I have to look hard at them when in the UK. The 20 p is now a multi-sided silver coin. At least a pocketful of change is much lighter now.
I have no interest in collecting coins or banknotes, but odds and ends of change accumulate after traveling. In some cases the currency no longer exists or what I have is no longer valid. For example, I have a few coins from Hong Kong, pre-1997, and a small number of German coins from the Deutschmark era.
I read somewhere (sorry, no cite) that the money system was deliberately kept complicated so that the lower classes, presumably uneducated in mathematics, wouldn’t be able to figure it out and would be kept poor. Is that true?
In my experience, the “lower classes” were always very well aware of the value of money. This is surely a universal truth, that those of us with very little tend to be a lot more careful than those with plenty.
I would venture that any reasonably intelligent 10yo could add, subtract and multiply money in their heads in the pre-decimal system.
Hey Sam, I’m further south than you are, these days. And about as east.
j
Poorer people worked almost exclusively in shillings and pence, and the subdivisions and multiples thereof (i.e., the complicated bits) Pounds (and guineas) were something for the better off, and in any case they employed people to look after all that for them.
So no, it isn’t true. The system would have arisen from a whole series of successive habits and decisions over centuries, as convenient to the bulk of the people using them.
I guess my family qualified as working class (Dad was a clerk and Mum stayed at home to bring up the kids.)
We never had much money (we never owned a car :eek: , our first TV was bought when I was 7 years old), but we knew how to count within the system of 12 pence = 1 shilling; 20 shillings make a pound.) When you handle the coins daily, it soon works out.
My pocket money was 5 pence a week. That may not sound much, but there was candy you could buy for a farthing (i.e. 1/4 of a penny.) Also I don’t remember the exact prices, but I could afford to go to the cinema once a week (because the matinee performance was cheaper.)
My parents got me a free library card 
and I walked everywhere local (we couldn’t afford a bicycle.)
Our holidays were either at the sea-side or countryside walking and of course we went by train.
My parents kept a budget and I learnt the importance of interest early on (so as an adult I saved up for a house and never paid credit card interest.)
On the contrary, an amount called a ‘Mark’ (cf. ‘Deutschmark’) was used for centuries in England, well into the 17th century.
A mark was two-thirds of a pound = 13s 4d.
So when you see historic amounts of money that look strange, it’s often because the real concept was marks.
e.g.
£6 13s 4d = 10 marks
£1 6s 8d = 2 marks
A guinea was also of practical use. It was evenly divisible by 7, 14, 21, and 28 - very useful if you were calculating weekly and daily wages.
In Scotland, a bawbee was 6d, a plack was 4d, and bodle was 2d. Up to 1707 there were 12 Scottish pounds to an English pound.
5 tonnes in a monkey.
Sorry, but that makes no sense at all.
I remember reading as a kid a story where a young child was digging for pirate treasure in the garden with a trowel. His grandfather came upon him an on finding out what he was up to, managed to drop a crown and scuff enough dirt over it so the tyke could find it. It was a very big thrill to him but I have no idea any more what the period of the story was nor what class they might have been. I presume upper as they had a garden you could wander around in.
At the time I knew the basics of pounds, shillings, and pence and hapenny and thruppence were obvious, but the ‘bastard coins’ like quineas, florins, and farthings were a bit vague and I’d never heard of a crown before. I remember trying to look it up but it must have been a small dictionary because the entry for crown talked mostly about a king’s headgear and did not mention coinage at all. Very frustrating.
You would be wrong to assume upper class “as they had a garden you could wander around in”. Poor people in cities may not have had gardens, but in the country, every cottage had one and they were used for growing vegetables as well as flowers; all suburban houses had/have gardens as well.
‘Crowns’ are by no means rare. The Royal Mint frequently coins them as commemorative pieces and sells them to gullible people who fondly imagine they are an investment. I have half-a-dozen around the house somewhere and they can be picked up on eBay for not much more than face value. I see a 1981 Crown coin minted for Charles and Diana’s wedding for £1.00 - less than it cost after inflation.
Your confusion over our “bastard” coins is similar to ours over dimes, pennies and quarters.
Well, a ton is a hundred squid, so… (Perhaps someone can fill in a good animal joke)
That’s basically all of our coins (other than the nickel and the pretty much unused half dollar and dollar coins)
Perhaps the confusion is that the actual denominations don’t appear on the face of the dime and the quarter. The penny says “one cent” and the nickel says “five cents” (but not “penny” and “nickel”).
The dime says “one dime,” which is the weird one, because “dime” is not a denomination of currency. It’s just the name for the coin.
The quarter says “quarter dollar,” which should be clear enough, if you know that a dollar is 100 cents. Similarly, the half dollar says “half dollar.”
I suppose it might be odd to Europeans that our coins don’t use figures (“1” “5” “10” “25” “50”) to indicate denominations. Except the current dollar coin, which says “$1.”
At least “di(s)me” obviously(?) means 1/10, analogously to “cent” being 1/100 of a dollar, so it’s no more or less bastard than a coin labelled “FARTHING”, for instance. I suppose on real bastard coins the value is not indicated at all, also head scratchers like “half crown”.
my own favoured crap joke is when in a restaurant
“let’s have the calamari because it’s only a couple of squid”
Officially, it kind of is a denomination of currency:
So, the dollar is the base unit, and other units are expressed in terms of their relation to the dollar, but there are officially four units–not just dollars and cents but also dimes and mills (the last of which only even theoretically comes up with the odd custom of pricing gasoline using numbers like “$2.56[sup]9[/sup] per gallon”).
I would bet dollars to dimes that that language originally dates back to the 18th century (and was just carried forward through various reorganizations and renumberings of the U.S. Code, most recently in 1982). I suspect the original 18th century intent was to set up a decimalized version of the very old “£sd” system (which as already mentioned was used not only in Britain but had its roots in monetary systems going at least as far back as Charlemagne). If so, the notion never actually caught on; $1.42 is of course read as “one dollar and forty-two cents” (or “a buck forty-two”). No American would ever read it as “one dollar, four dimes, and two cents”, notwithstanding how Congress originally defined things.
mm
There’s also the eagle (official designstion, $10) and union (unofficial, but used by the US Mint, $100).