Friday, February 06, 2015

In for a Penny, In for a Pound

Joanna here, talking about ... well ... money.

‘Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves.’
Before 1724.

In the change purse of your average Regency housekeeper or light-hearted debutant or even your evil-eyed villain you might find farthings and halfpence, pennies, two pence -- all of those in copper. Then the silver coins, which would be four pence, six pence, shilling, eighteen pence, and half crown. You can see what they look like them and the gold coins that you as a Regency person probably wouldn’t have been carrying around in your pocket every day here.

There is a whole possibility of coins in that purse. When you reached in and pulled one out, maybe the most likely of all would be the humble and fascinating penny.

‘A penny for your thoughts’ dates to 1546.

The rest of this blog lives over at Word Wenches. Here.


  1. I think the four-penny coin was called a groat, wasn't it? Also, the website should really make it clear that although post-decimal coinage uses the term "pence" not "penny" (and indeed we deliberately used the word "pence" to make the distinction), in pre-decimal times "penny" was much more common. So one would refer to a "tuppeny-bit", a "thrippenny bit" ("thrip" to rhyme with "skip") and a ha'penny (to rhyme with "hay"). Even now, over 40 years since decimilisation, no-one ever says "tuppenny" for the two-pence coin.

    The different names used for the coins could make a blog post of its own, especially since it probably varied by class and possibly by region! I have a feeling that there were vulgar names which might have been part of thieves cant; for example, I think Heyer uses several terms, such as "sow's baby".

    PS I found on Google books page 284 of Kloester's Georgette Heyer's Regency World which has a table of the slang terms Heyer uses for various coins, including sow's baby for sixpence.

    1. I wish they'd kept as close to the old 'coin names' as possible.

      And I love the slang terms for money. I haven't had much use for them yet in the writing, but I'm on the knife-edge of ready to go for it.

  2. The coins are all shown as if they were the same size. Can that be true? I know that the British coins I dealt with as a tourist pre-decimalization (or decismalisation) were differents sizes. I remember as a 12 year old being impressed with how big a British penny was versus an American one.

    1. Hi Hope --

      No. They were very different sizes. I'd love to have been able to take the coins and compare them to -- say -- a dime or a British current penny.

      But I don't have the coins to do it myself, of course, and none of the sites has this available.

      I couldn't take the coins to an image program and enlarge them or reduce them because I don't have copyright to the images. :[