'Safe'
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A pound was twenty shillings (a guinea twenty-one)
That was the one that always confused me the most, especially when reading Edith Nesbit, because until I finally could come around to a guinea having pretty much the same value of a pound, it didn't.
[Edit: E. Nesbit x-post with Betsy, at least I was in good company]
And in Australia, when we decimalised our old pound turned into two dollars, so for us 1 shilling = 10 cents.
Props for mentioning E Nesbit. My favourite author as a child (along with Ransome).
Also props for mentioning poor old Planty Pal.
In Aus we also had a Florin which equalled 20 pence.
We had ha'penny, penny, threepence, sixpence, shilling, florin, and a crown, which equalled 5 shillings.
So, okay, it was the bobs and crowns and guineas that I couldn't figure out. Why was there both a pound and a guinea, if they were so close in value? Was one the elder, and on its way out, while the other was on its way in? Especially considering the guinea works with odd/prime factors like 3 and 7, while the pound is a nice, likeable 2x2x5 nominator.
I mean, if you're gonna have money, have conveniently mathy money! Good, even fractions!
(M-W explains the "guinea" connection -- gold, Africa, vague, hand-wavy etymological link -- but not the logic of settling a divisible currency at an odd number.)
If you're going to have weights and measures, have conveniently mathy weights and measures!
People are just weird. There's no accounting for 'em.
IIRC, guineas were only used to price posh, luxury items--ie the price of a pair of silk gloves might be in guineas, or the account of a Harley Street doctor, but not the price of a leg of lamb. But that doesn't really explain thre reason for them.
If you're going to have weights and measures, have conveniently mathy weights and measures!
The weights and measures in the Jewish tradition (especially 'Mishna' and 'Talnud') are all based on sizes that could be measured at the time - the length of a forearm, the volume of an egg, the weight of an olive. There are endless arguments now about their conversion to current units.
In Israel, around 15-20 years ago, when the inflation was so high they had to change the currency, they didn't replace the name of the coin with a new name (like they did some years before that, when they replaced the 'Lira', which is the Hebrew word for pound, with 'Shekel'), but added "New" before it, so instead of a "Shekel" we now have a "New Shekel" ("Shekel" is a monetary unit from as early as the book of "Genesis"), or NIS - "New Israeli Shekel".
Guineas were a specific weight of gold, rather than a unit of currency. The coins were a way of saying "I (bank) confirm this coin ways X and is of Y purity".