Book ,'Our Mrs. Reynolds'
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meara, I was reading the money chart in Merriam-Webster, and wondered that myself. I still don't have mastery of pounds/shillings/bob/whatever as the money system was back in Jane Austen's, or Dickens's, day. Actually, I kept getting the sense that there was more than one overlapping money system, since shillings always seemed to divide up with a remainder left over.
Any kind soul care to explicate?
A pound was twenty shillings (a guinea twenty-one), a shilling twelve pence. So you had to do two divisions (L/20 remainder S, S/12 r D) in order to convert a number to pounds, shillings, and pence.
[L = Pounds (librum), S = Shillings, D = Pence (Denarius).]
And for conversion to decimal, a shilling is 20 pence.
IIRC, there was a major movement in the post-Revolution America to adopt anything-but-pounds as a monetary system. (Spanish silver dollars were very popular, as were francs -- but both empires were in major straits at the time. 'Dollars' was settled on as a monetary designation that upset the fewest people.)
Also there are other weird oddities you have to learn. A bob is a shilling, a crown is five shillings (I think?), so half a crown is 2s 6d. A farthing is 1/4 of a penny, and a ha'penny is self-explanatory.
The guinea is the weirdest of the lot though.
And for conversion to decimal, a shilling is 20 pence.
Aaah! My brain!
t explodes
Any kind soul care to explicate?
It had something to do with Plantagenet Palliser....
Things I'm glad I was too young to have to deal with - I only know the shillings thing because they were still in circulation when i was a kid. Actually, I'm wrong - 1 shilling=5 new pence
I thought that a shilling was 5p for purposes of decimal conversion? So still 20 shillings to the pound?
See my post, amych. I was talking rubbish, mislead because (deep breath) they changed the size of the 5p in the mid-80s, and brought out the 20p. So the 20p is now the size of the old 5p, which was interchangeable with the Shilling.