Two marks (26s 8d) may have been a standard price for a small gold ring, as shown by bequests in a famous 1616 will:
Unlike groats or threepence, AFAIK no mark coins were ever minted in England. The U.S.A. also has a unit of currency that was never minted: the bit. “Shave and a haircut — two bits.” AFAIK prices were never quoted in an odd number of bits.
Do you young’uns ever speak of “bits” these days? Or is it too pointless in an age where a single cup of coffee costs fifteen(!) bits or more?
You must be thinking of the Mexican real coin, which may not have been a U.S. coin, but was certainly a coin that existed and circulated in parts of the U.S. as legal tender. Some prices were evidently quoted in an odd number of bits, and people would get a dime as change given a quarter.
Two bits = 25 cents, so one bit was one eighth of a dollar yes? ISTR that the New York (?) stock exchange once quoted prices in eighths of a dollar.
Quids can be used in the plural, as in a common saying in Australia
“I wouldn’t be dead for quids” implying that life is going well for the speaker.
Another Australian expression plays on the 2 shilling coin …2 bob,
“He’s as mad as a two bob watch”
(Doesn’t function all that well)
Reminds me of MAD way back in the day when it was a comic book, before it became a magazine. Renfrew is trying to go on a date with Godiva and wants to get rid of her pesky tag-along little brothers.
Godiva: Toss them a couple thrupence, ha’pence, tuppence, will you, Renfrew, old chap?
Renfrew: [tossing coins] I don’t have a ha’pence, but I have four ha’penny, thrupenny, fupence, tuppence, fuppence and a lead slug that you can use to play the slot machines! Now POP off!
I went to a school where we were taught mental arithmetic. Later on I worked in a sales office for a company that manufactured and sold catering machinery.
Part of my job was calculating commissions. Most items had prices like £75/18/11. That is £75, 18 shillings and 11pence. There are plenty of excellent mathematicians on this board, but I bet most of them would find it a challenge to calculate 7½% of that for the salesman, 2¼% for his manager, and ¾% for his manager. We had no calculator beyond a simple adding machine, but I did have a book of tables.
Is it any wonder that most of us welcomed the change to decimal currency in 1971.
When VAT (sales tax) was at 15% I used to amaze people by calculating it in my head.
Your nephew++ must have been proud.
There was no standard price for small gold rings. The price varied according to the amount and quality of the gold and the amount of decoration (if any). 26s 8d was actually a touch on the high side for a mourning ring. An equally famous bequest of mourning rings neatly illustrates this - Pepys ranked his bequests of them according to whether the recipients were to receive rings worth 20s, 15s or 10s.
The only real pattern in mourning ring bequests is that, unsurprisingly, testators tended specify round numbers. So often the figure would be 10s or 20s. It is just that in the seventeenth century 26s 8d was also a round number.
Eh??
Ah! takes a while at my age - Bob’s your Uncle I guess…
My nephew is Mick - make of that what you will…
Did it in my head
It’s a good thing that you did that.
Yes, a very good thing.
Not exactly English money, but close. I have an interesting coin from the Bailiwick of Jersey minted in 1960. The Bailiwick of Jersey, located in the Channel Islands, is a “crown dependency.” Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state but technically the Bailiwick of Jersey is not a part of the United Kingdom. The Jersey Pound is pegged at par with the United Kingdom Pound. My Jersey coin is of the exact same composition, dimensions, and weight of the one penny coin produced in the United Kingdom in 1960. The obverse of the coin depicts the queen wearing a crown and has the words “QUEEN ELIZABETH THE SECOND.” The reverse of the coin shows the denomination as “ONE TWELFTH OF A SHILLING.” This is where it gets interesting. Why is it denominated 1/12th of a shilling instead of simply one penny like the United Kingdom one penny coins? For many, many years, French coins circulated alongside British coins in the Channel Islands. The French coins were valued using the old French livre at the rate of twenty-six livres equal to one pound. The livre-based coins continued to circulate in the Channel Islands even after the French republic replaced the livre with the franc. There are 20 sous in a livre. Thus there were 520 sous in a pound or 26 sous in a shilling. The livre-based coin that was the functional equivalent of the British penny in the Channel Island was the two sous coin. This means that a shilling was equal to 13 two sous coins. Therefore, when the coins worth 1/12th shilling were introduced, they were not called pennies because the locals had always calculated 13 “pennies” (actually two sous coins) to the shilling.
Thanks for that explanation, it’s fascinating.
Having 13 pence to the shilling makes me want to fall on one knee, raise my hands in supplication, and cry out, “Haro! Haro! Haro! À l’aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort!”[sup]1[/sup]
[sup]1[/sup]You can still to this day in Jersey invoke a law (the Clameur de Haro) dating from perhaps the 9th or 10th century. Here’s the story in weird Jersey French.
“a quid fifty” would be acceptable.
Near as I can tell, Brits use the word “quid” in the same way that Americans use “buck”. An American would never say “three and a half bucks”, but might say “a buck fifty”.
Interesting, given that “livre” is the French word for “pound”. Both have been inflated since the time when they literally meant “the value of a pound of silver” (also the original meaning of “lira” and probably a bunch of other nations’ units), but is there any reason why the French unit would be inflated so much more than the British one?
I do recall a Benny Hill bit, where he was doing an advertisement for a sale item: “If they ask you how much it costs, you tell them 2 pee off!”
In a related matter, as a consequence of the 1707 Act of Union, the pound Scots was replaced with the pound sterling at the rate of 12 pounds Scots = 1 pound sterling.
Yep, horse auctions are an area where the guinea survives for an unexpected reason: As a way to express the auctioneer’s commission. The buyer pays a certain amount in guinees, but the seller receives only the same number of pounds. The difference is kept by the auctioneer. This has, of course, the same effect as adding a 5% commission on top of the sales price, but it definitely reeks classier.
Yes, both the British pound and French livre trace back to Charlemagne’s time, with a pound of silver dividing into 240 pennyweights. (And that “pound” was somewhat heavier than a Troy pound.)
For centuries, British money was based on the silver penny. Over time the pennies were reduced in size and purity, but the changes were mostly gradual. By the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign there were 62 silver pennies minted per Troy ounce and this, or a market-based gold equivalent, then remained a constant for centuries.
In France OTOH, coins were not minted with any particular denomination visible. The livre was a unit of accounting, and French Kings redefined the values of precious metals in livres as was convenient for them! I think this was the main reason that the French livre was eventually worth only 1/26 of a British pound. This was roughly the value of the French franc in 1803:
(Note that the “livre tournois” was still a unit of accounting and was worth slightly less than a Franc (though the arithmetic here still seems peculiar.)
This exchange rate — one dollar equals about five francs — will seem familiar to Americans who visited France in the 1980’s. … Except that in the 1980’s France used a “New Franc” equal to 100 Old Francs — the Franc had been devastated in the aftermath of WW I and during Hitler’s occupation.