Old Money
I mentioned when talking about postcards that they could be purchased for pennies and the stamp was one more penny. That's not one penny as we have had since Feb 1971 in the UK. We are talking old money here, and an old penny was 1/240th of £1. Old money was of made up of three tiers - known as pounds, shillings and pence. There were 12 pennies to a shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. The only tier that stayed the same was the pound. The pennies remained but instead of having 240 to the pound, there were 100.
It was known as the duo-decimal system (12 based). We now have a decimal system.
Old money was better than metric because you could divide a shilling between two, three, four or six people. The metric equivalent of a shilling - 5p - can only be shared equally by five people. Before the 1/2p was abolished you could divide it by two or five. So there were more options with old money. These were the benefits of going duo-decimal.
You could also share a £1 three ways - each person would get six shillings and eightpence (this amount was known as a Noble). These days, dividing a £1 between three, the nearest you can get is 33p. You have 1p left over from this, sadly. So old money was much more useful in that respect.
Here's a table of names by which various values of the old coinage where known.
| Name | Amount in old money ('d' = penny, 's' = shilling) | Nearest decimal equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Farthing | 1/4d | 0.1p (one 960th of a pound) |
| Halfpenny (pronounced 'hape-nee' | 1/2d | 0.2p |
| PENNY | 1d | 0.4p |
| Three pence (pronounced 'thruppence') | 3d | 1.25p |
| Groat | 4d | 1.6p |
| Tanner | 6d | 2.5p |
| SHILLING or a 'bob' | 12d | 5p |
| HALF-A-CROWN | 2/6d | 12.5p |
| half-noble | 3/4d | 16.6p |
| CROWN | 5s | 25p |
| Noble | 6/8d | 33.3p |
| ten bob | 10s | 50p |
| GUINEA (still used for the sale of horses) | £1 1s | £1 5p |