Now now Uncle John...Being born just after the war, I should have known LSD but never tried drugs although I did grow my hair and skirts long at one point in the seventies .
Partly right - those are the latin words that LSD stand for but are names of coins/money amounts not the words for gold silver and bronze (which would be aurum, argentum and aes)
There was a roman bronze or copper coin called an aes and the silver denaius was worth 10 of these.
It just came to mind as I was writing on another thread, we also use Librae as pounds in weight, but abbreviated to lb! How is anyone ever meant to guess that lb is pronounced "pound"? At times like that you have to feel for people whose second language is English!
Sue x
Looking for Hanmores in Kent, Blakers in Essex and Kent, Pickards in East London and Raisons in Somerset.
Well, yes, it was - 1lb of silver was made into 240 coins, so 240 pennies made 1 lb of silver, lol. It has always been an offence to deface coinage, but people used to cut bits out. Also, the vast majority of the population didn't use standard coinage and there were many local variants of coinage before about 1500.
Gold standard wasn't introduced until the 16th century (I think), probably about the time banking started.
The £ sign is an L in old handwriting, but with the cross bars to indicate that this is used as an abbreviation. I've come across it in old (18th century) wills but don't know how long it has been used.
I have seen Wills and inventories pre 1500 which use "l" after a sum of mony, so 20l would mean £20. I think the crossbar and putting the L in front of a sum of money,(rather than after it) came into being again when formal banking started and currency was regularised, at least for formal and commercial use.
I should have said above, that the expression "The pound sterling" is from the fact that a pound of money had the value of a pound weight of sterling silver, but of course it is many a century since we had silver pennies.
I read somewhere that "Sterling" came from "Easterling" - a reference to silversmiths who'd come from lands further east - like Holland.
The cross-line (sometimes doubled) is often used for currency abbreviations e.g.:
€uro
£ Libra/Pound
$ Dollar (not quite sure what the background to that one is - probably in Wikipedia!)
¥en
Christine
Researching: BENNETT (Leics/Birmingham-ish) - incl. Leonard BENNETT in Detroit & Florida ; WARR/WOR, STRATFORD & GARDNER/GARNAR (Oxon); CHRISTMAS, RUSSELL, PAFOOT/PAFFORD (Hants); BIGWOOD, HAYLER/HAILOR (Sussex); LANCASTER (Beds, Berks, Wilts) - plus - COCKS (Spitalfields, Liverpool, Plymouth); RUSE/ROWSE, TREMEER, WADLIN(G)/WADLETON (Devonport, E Cornwall); GOULD (S Devon); CHAPMAN, HALL/HOLE, HORN (N Devon); BARRON, SCANTLEBURY (Mevagissey)...
That may be correct. Sterling was used to describe silver before it was used to describe money. Sterling silver is silver which has a legally required amount of silver content and I think (from memory) silver was legislated long before currency.
The £ sign is an L in old handwriting, but with the cross bars to indicate that this is used as an abbreviation. I've come across it in old (18th century) wills but don't know how long it has been used.
Thank you Judith and for everyone's contribution...been v. interesting.
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