I didn’t know that shilling came from solidus. The solidus has undergone quite a debasement since the late Roman Empire when it was a gold coin probably not unlike a sovereign in weight. In 19th-century Italy there was a soldo, worth only a fraction of a Lira, and then in France the solidus was the original progenitor of the sou, worth 1/20 of a franc and virtually a cliche for an insignificant amount of cash, as in “not a sou more!”.
So we’ve explored the etymology of pounds, shillings etc and we’ve seen how their proportions make sense.
But what about guineas, huh? Where’s the sense there?
I think you mean 21 shillings.
I was once told that the guinea became worth more than a pound due to fluctuations in the relative value of silver and gold. It started out as a gold coin with a nominal value of a pound, but its metal came to be worth more than that.
I seem to remember reading that six or seven hundred years ago, the everyday unit of money in England was the penny and its fractions (the farthing, etc). A pound was an huge amount to have all at one time for the average joe, like having a hundred thousand dollars in your bank account the day that you buy a house.
Apparently, one pound in 1300 equates to about £300 today. So not equivalent to buying a house, but certainly not something an acerage labourer would see often. That also makes a 1300 hapenny equal to £1.
Nothing on l.s.d. makes sense 
On the change to decimal money in February 1971, something bizarre happened to the humble penny.
Although the new version bore the words “One New Penny” on the back (the “New” was dropped a few years later), many people got it into their heads that it should be called “One Pence”. I see that friedo above makes that mistake.
Many people also abandoned the abbreviations “tuppence” and “thruppence” for the more prosaic “two pence” and “three pence”.
But others retained the old vernacular. For some, 50p is still “ten bob”.
As far as I know, none of the new coins has a recognised nickname.
If someone said “ten bob” to me I would have assumed they meant £10 rather than 50p but then I wasn’t born until after the decimal switch (thank Og).
On the subject of multiples of pounds, they are almost exclusively used in London and are as follows:
£20 - score
£25 - pony
£100 - ton
£500 - monkey
£1000 - grand (this is more widely used).
£1000 - gorilla (two monkeys).
Apparently the term monkey came from soldiers returning from India where the 500 rupee note had a picture of a monkey on it and the term stuck when they returned to Blighty, i’m not 100% sure if this is true or not so don’t take it as fact.
On the subject of slang terms for the modern coinage I can only think of a few slang terms for the £1 coin, those being: bob, squid and nicker.
So where would a white fiver fit into this apparently simple scheme? :dubious:
I have never heard the new pound coin called a bob. That name was for the shilling coin.
There was another slang term. This was “dollar” for five shillings. This was because there used to be 4 American dollars to the pound. Half a crown (2/6) was called" half a dollar".
Regarding the white fiver. Up till the 50’s the five pound note was white and was about three times as big as the present five pound note.
The “white fiver” is simply the old five pound note, it was replaced in 1957 by a blue note.
Which reminds me of some rhyming slang for British currency:
McGuiver - £5
Senna - £10
So if someone tells you something cost an Ayrton, they mean it cost £10.
Originally, a pound was quite simply, the value of a pound (weight unit) of silver. Hence really a lot of money. Though this reference was lost very early, a pound still had a very high value.
I’m not sure about the UK, but I would assume it was the same than in France at the same time : the “livre” (the equivalent of the pound) did not exist as an actual coin but was only a reference unit in the books. You’d have, say, a 50 “livres” income/ year, but it would be paid with various coinages, all of them only worth a fraction of a “livre”.
Also, during most of the midde-ages, gold was too scarce in Europe to be used as a currency. I’m not sure about the period, but maybe gold coinage was used for a couple centuries after the fall of the roman empire, and it reappeared only during the late middle ages (13th century, maybe?), and at first only as a “prestige” thing, i.e. the king would mint some gold coins but they weren’t actually used as a currency, but rather handed by the king as gifts. I believe that Venice might have been the first european state issuing gold coins again, but I’m not sure.
However, byzantines and arabs gold coins were used in international trade before this. Actually, international trade and imports from the mddle east and Asia is supposed to be the reason why gold became so scarce in Europe.
The transition from a monometallic (silver only) to a bimetallic (silver and gold) monetary sytem during the late middle ages caused some issues, since the respective value of gold and and silver could vary. So, you’d have to “adjust” the gold content of coins depending on its value relative to silver (or sometimes, kings would adjust it just in order to make some money) or to state that a given coin would from now on have a diferent value (expressed in the count unit, the pound or its equivalents) . Such adjustments, even when perfectly justified, were generally not understood and widely unpopular. The existence of a count unit different from the actual coins compounded the problem. Imagine for instance that the rent you pay for your house is expressed in Euros, but you pay it in dollars. And the value of your dollar bills in Euros is decided by the POTUS and can suddenly change. Preferably, assume that you understand nothing about currency. You’re going to suspect it’s some scheme intended to impoverish you and to fill someone else’s pockets and that the POTUS is a thief.
Regarding the guinea, it started out as a gold piece worth 30 shillings, i.e., a pound and a half, which actually made sense. But deflation resulted in the coin being worth only slightly over a pound, and it was ultimately fixed as a pound and a shilling, i.e., 21 shillings, until it was replaced as a coin by the sovereign under George III. As a mode of pricing, it was retained for nearly two centuries longer – charging a guinea sounded better than a pound plus change.
Not if you were used to it I would assume. I might say the same about the US and its system of measurements based on inches, feet and yards.
My Dad was an assistant bank manager before he retired, but he assured me once people were used to the system, it didn’t matter 
I always wondered what prompted the change at such a relatively late stage, pressure from other European countries?
Is the question why the change was late, or why they changed at all? If ‘at all’, then I’d hope it’s obvious - that with more people dealing with finances, with technological advances, and growth in everyday international movements, a decimal system was needed. If ‘why was it late’, you need to compare to other European currencies. As with metric measurements, revolutionary France led the way. Countries such as Germany and Spain standardised on a single currency in the 19th century, before which they had an array of localised systems. Likewise, the Italian Lira only became standard currency after the unification of the country - a mixture of systems were used before then, including this which puts the L/S/D system in perspective:
http://www.globalfindata.com/frameset.php3?location=/gh/159.html
Essentially, the ‘early’ decimalisation came about as a byproduct of necessary standardisation (something which also happened in America). Britain already had a single uniform currency, and decimaliastion for its own sake was not necessary at that time.
If you watch old Michael Caine films, you may hear ‘knicker’ mentioned. An example from the Internet. I suppose the proximity of Rebecca Loos (the bird who provided more than just nanny services for “Goldenballs” David Beckham) in the sentence might have susconsciously affected the writer’s choice of words.
It’s best to spell it ‘nicker’, mind you!
Yeah, it was the latter. I was thinking maybe the UK was holding on for traditional or more practical reasons before trading partners asked it to hurry up. Or maybe it was to do with further European integration.
Probably right, but then it’s not the sort of thing one writes very often, so accepted spelling probably remains in flux! I wonder if it could have anything to do with ‘nick’, as in police station/police cell. There might be an underground argot connection.