by Halbert Carmichael

Around 780 AD King Offa of Mercia, a Saxon kingdom in central Britain, initiated the striking of the silver penny, a coin struck on a flan larger than a modem five cent piece but much thinner than the modem dime. For most of the next five centuries that one coin served the needs of the small Saxon kingdoms and later of a unified England. The rule is born out by the exception: Alfred and a couple of his descendents did strike a few round half-pence.

For most of those five centuries, a period of time, as long as Europeans have been in the New World, small change was made by cuffing the round coins into halves and even fourths or farthings. The coins were designed to make this convenient. The reverse design included a voided cross which provided a guide for cutting the coins with a chisel,

In 1290, Edward I began making round half-pence and fahthings in his mints, primarily London. Commerce grew in its frequency and size, necessitating the issue of groats, or four pence, and half groats or two penny pieces, by 1320.

England now had a binary coinage: the penny, its half, its quarter, its double, and its quadruple. This range of denominations had been common in the ancient world and continued down to the massive issues of the Spanish in the New World. They struck the quarter real, the half real, the real, the two real, the four real, and the eight real.

Around 1500 Henry VII threw a monkey wrench into the nice binary system by making a coin that was worth twelve pence, not an integral power of two. Over the next two centuries the English played around with what denominations were struck. See the attached table.

However what is true is that all the denominations coined in stable times were powers of two times one of three basic units; the penny, the shilling, or the pound. By the mid-nineteenth century they had settled on that mixture of denominations that I found so quaint when it was first described to me by my brother in 1951 on his return from a cruise to England courtesy of the US Navy.

This coinage included:

The system made bookkeeping most complex.

While the Brits had settled on their own binary way of doing things the rest of the world had gone decimal. First Russia under Peter the Great, then the United States followed by France and most European countries had developed monetary Systems that were based on a unit subdivided into one hundred parts. With decimal notation this made bookkeeping much simpler.

I might note that the U.S. used something of a bastard system. The most efficient decimal system uses units of 1, 2,5; 10, 20, 50, and 100, … The quarter dollar in the American system is clearly a throwback to the Spanish two real or "two bits" which circulated in this country for the first seventy years after independence. Note that our gold coins were one quarter, one half, one, and two times the gold unit, the eagle of ten dollars.

The twentieth century saw the last remnants of truly binary coinage disappear. In 1957 India replaced is system of sixteen annas to the rupee and four pice to the anna with a rupee of one hundred piasa. The small states of the Arabian peninsula decimalized at about the same time. Yemen struck its last non-decimal coins in 1962.

That left only Britain and its colonies and associated states: South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand using pounds, shillings and pence. One by one each of these countries changed to their own decimal coinage. Canada and Hong Kong had never struck pounds, shillings and pence.

Nineteen sixty-seven saw the last non-decimal coinage, that of Great Britain itself convert to a pound of one hundred new pence. This conversion was done just in time for all the books to be transferred onto computers: Which do binary arithmetic.

ã Copyright Raleigh Coin Club   -  1999, 2000, 2001, 2002

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