Thanks for all the information so far, everyone. It looks like denominations of 25 are a lot more common than I thought!
I don’t think there was ever a 2 1/2 mark coin. Perhaps in the notgeld tokens of post-WWI.
They were proper big, yes.
Confusingly, they still mint coins nowadays that are called ‘crowns’ (for commemorative purposes) but they have a face value of five pounds.
The British sixpence coin was worth 1/40th of a pound in the pre-decimal days. After that (in 1971) it was still legal tender and worth 2.5p.
It works because “legal tender” doesn’t mean what most people think it means. A widespread understanding of “legal tender” is something like the following: “The currency that people are legally required to accept in a transaction, so that parties to the transaction must not accept anything else in payment, and they are obliged to make the transaction whenever someone demands them to do so and offers legal tender in payment.”
But that is not what “legal tender” means at all. The term simply refers to debt that already exists. So if you owe somebody pecuniary payment for whatever reason, and there is no contractual stipulation to the contrary, then the creditor of the liability has to accept payment in legal tender when offered.He cannot insist on payment in another form.
Legal tender statutes do not, however, prevent people from accepting whatever they fancy in transactions as long as both parties agree, when making the deal, that payment will take place in that form. In many countries, foreign currencies circulate alongside the domestic currency (or are even more desired by people than the domestic currency), without ever having been declared legal tender. If you buy something and you and the seller agree that payment will occur in gummy bears, then gummy bears it will be, irrespective of what the legal tender in the applicable jurisdiction is.
I still have mine … somewhere.
Ignorance displayed and fought. Seems like I used the wrong term.
What I meant to say is that I don’t understand how the notes came to be distributed and accepted by the population as having value. I am certain that if I started printing notes and trying to buy stuff with them, they would not be accepted. In the case of Chathams commemorative currency, there was a whole process happening – the details of which I do not know.
Not the only mistake I made in my post. It appears that the notes minted were $2, $3, $10 and $15 with $5 and $8 added later.
(But no $25 or $2.5)
Correct, I was misremembering the 2 DM coin. That ties in with what I remember about the cigarette vending machines. All the brands cost 3 DM in the machine, but if you chose the cheap brand, which was Roth Händle, you’d find change taped to the packet. I think it came to 60 Pf or something like that.
It’s a fascinating example of an uncoordinated process where order evolves spontaneously within a social system, without being imposed by authorities above. In the past, all sorts of assets have attained that status in various ages. In Germany after WWII, for instance, when food was rationed and a thriving black market developed, cigarettes turned out to become the commonly accepted means of payment - much to the delight of allied soldiers stationed in Germany, who were supplied with cigarettes as part of their provisioning, and could turn them into all sorts of goods on the black market. Cigarettes, at the time, performed all three functions that economists use to define money: They were a widely accepted means of exchange, a means of storing value, and a unit of account in which prices were quoted.
Here’s the thing- it sometimes depends how old your coinage is. A 1oz silver coin was common for about three centurys. 1/4 oz is a common division.
Thus “quarters”.
Many nations decimalized their coinage later, post silver. But since the US Dollar started out more or less decimalized, we never got rid of the quarter.
There were no 1-oz. silver coins. Many weighed about 0.86 ounces gross and contained about 0.78 ounce of silver.
I’ve heard that pieces of eight could be split into quarters, or “two bits.”
Is that correct, Sam?
Two pieces of eight is two bits, or one quarter of a whole real.
I say no, but I must admit that the issue isn’t settled.
Similarly, according to the Wiki article on the $3 gold coin, the idea behind that denomination was that it would pay for a sheet of 100 stamps.
There have been modern commemorative gold eagles and half-eagles, beginning with the 1984 Olympic Games. These have the same composition and are stamped with the same denominations as their pre-1933 counterparts.
Did you mean an 8th of an 8th, i.e. a 64th of a real?
If yes, pardon my misunderstanding.
No. A “piece of eight” was divided into eighths.
I have coins that are worth 25 something from the Bahamas. I’m pretty sure I have others from other British Commonwealth nations. I think I have some from Panama. All of these are also approximately the size of a US quarter, which is how I acquired them (I am a cashier in a Navy town who likes foreign coins).