Historical Monetary
The Tale of "L.S.D.": The Roman Ghost in British Pockets. Every British schoolchild had to master the complex "£sd" system: 240 pence to the pound.
All categoriesThe Tale of L.S.D.: The Roman Ghost in British Pockets
Long before decimalisation, every British schoolchild had to master the £sd system: 240 pence to the pound. It sounds like a mathematical nightmare, but it was a system of beautiful divisibility that had survived since the time of Charlemagne.
The Roman legacy
The abbreviations used for centuries were Roman ghosts:
- £ (L): from libra, a pound weight of silver.
- s: from solidus, a Roman gold coin.
- d: from denarius, a Roman silver coin.
The power of 240
Why 240 pence? Where 100 divides only by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25 and 50, the number 240 divides evenly into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, eighths, tenths and twelfths. For a merchant without a calculator, splitting a pound into a third (6s 8d) or a quarter (5s) mattered far more than decimal tidiness.
The shilling and the bob
The shilling of twelve pence was the workhorse of the system, and its name is the one everybody still half-remembers: a bob, a word whose origin nobody has ever satisfactorily explained. It did not actually die in 1971. A shilling was a twentieth of a pound and so was the new five-pence piece, identical in size and value, and old shillings stayed in circulation alongside decimal coins until 1990, when the 5p was made smaller and they were finally called in. The florin lasted the same way, as the ten-pence piece. Two coins named in Latin and Norman French went on being spent for a further nineteen years after the system that made sense of them had gone.
Angel
An official 1465 gold coin depicting the Archangel Michael slaying a dragon, replacing the Noble.
Originally 6s 8d (80 pence), later 10s ≈ £0.50 (face value)
Crown
A large, prestigious historical British silver coin worth five shillings.
5 shillings = £0.25 (modern)
Farthing (¼d)
A historic coin worth one-quarter of an old penny, withdrawn from circulation in 1960.
0.25 old pence ≈ £0.001 (modern)
Florin
Introduced in 1849 as an early decimal experiment worth one-tenth of a pound.
2 shillings = 10 new pence ≈ £0.10 (modern)
Groat
Reintroduced in the 1830s specifically to standardise hackney cab fares.
4 old pence ≈ £0.017 (modern)
Guinea (gn)
Originally a gold coin, it evolved into a prestige unit of account worth 21 shillings.
1 pound 1 shilling ≈ £1.05 (modern)
Halfpenny (½d)
A historic British coin worth half of an old penny.
0.5 old pence ≈ £0.002 (modern)
Mark
A medieval unit of account representing exactly two-thirds of a pound sterling.
13 shillings 4 pence ≈ £0.67 (modern)
Noble
An official gold coin introduced by Edward III in 1344 worth one-third of a pound.
6 shillings 8 pence ≈ £0.33 (modern)
Penny (d)
The historic coin whose abbreviation "d" derives from the Roman denarius.
1 old penny ≈ £0.004 (modern)
Shilling (s)
Equivalent to 12 pence, commonly referred to colloquially as a "bob".
12 old pence ≈ £0.05 (modern)
Sixpence
A historic British silver coin worth six pence, famous for wedding folklore.
6 old pence ≈ £0.025 (modern)