My Thrupence Worth

Those of you who remember the pre-decimal coinage of the British Isles may like
me fondly recall farthings with a wren on the back, ha'pennies, big copper
pennies, the chunky bronze 12-sided thrupenny bit with a portcullis on the back,
small silver sixpences or tanners that you could break your teeth on in the
Christmas pud, shillings, florins or two-bob bits, half-crowns, that is two-and-six,
crowns worth five shillings, but only issued on ceremonial occasions, big pound
notes and that mythical bird the guinea, worth twenty-one shillings. Wasn't
counting your change more fun when three, six, twelve, twenty and two-hundred-
and-forty were the denominators of our currency?

BusinessBalls has a fascinating post on the slang and history of British money at
http://www.businessballs.com/moneyslanghistory.htm

There we learn that " the term 'Sterling' - the modern name of the British
currency system - can be traced back to the reign of Henry II,in the 12th century.
The derivation of the Sterling word is almost certainly from the use of 'Easterling
Silver' which took its name from the Easterling area of Germany,noted for its
92.5% pure, hard and high quality coin-grade silver."
And that "Prior to decimalisation in 1971, British currency was represented by the
old English 'Pounds, Shillings and Pence' or 'LSD'.
The 'L' denoted the £ pound-sign; strangely 'D' or 'd' denoted the pence, and
coincidentally 'S' denoted shillings, since shilling was not the origin of the S. The
£ and L symbols were derived from Latin 'libra', like the Zodiac sign of the
weighing scales, and literally from 'libra' (also shown as 'librae') the Latin word
meaning a pound weight, from Middle English (weight, as you will see, related
closely to monetary value). The penny 'D' in LSD, and also lower case 'd' more
commonly used when pence alone were shown, was from 'Denarius' (also shown
as 'denari' or 'denarii'), a small and probably the most common silver Roman
coin, which loosely equated to one day's pay for a labourer. S of course was
associated with shilling but originally derived from the Roman coin 'Solidus',
originally an Imperial Roman coin introduced by Constantine (c.274-337AD), so
called from the full Latin 'solidus nummus', meaning solid coin. The symbols of
the pre-decimal British money therefore had origins dating back almost two
thousand years. " By Mark Heyne, aka Medway

Lots more fascinating info at BusinessBalls!

http://www.businessballs.com/moneyslanghistory.htm