Introduction
These pages give a list of officially issued denominations of coins and banknotes. They concentrate on denominations and do not attempt to detail the actual coins issued. For convenience, I have started with a new issue of coins in the reign of Eadgar in 959.
For most of the period, the weight or silver of gold contained in the coin determined what the value of the coin was. Coins were not made of pure silver or pure gold, but were always alloyed with another metal to improve their ability to withstand wear. The amount of silver or gold contained in the alloy is known as the fineness. Although coins may carry the same name throughout many periods of this history, they often varied widely in size, weight and, less often, fineness. Coins could also change value during their lifetime as the value of the metal in them became greater than their face value.
As long as currency was based on the value of silver, the basic monetary unit was the penny. Because that was a rather small unit the Mark (160 pence) and later the pound (240 pence) were used for accounting purposes, although no Mark coin was issued and there was no Pound coin before 1489. The Shilling was also introduced at this time as a coin, then called a Testoon. The relationship between the Pound, the Shilling, and the Penny is:
12 pence = Shilling
20 shillings = Pound
The abbreviation for a Pound is the £ symbol prefixing the value e.g. £4. Inevitably there will be systems where that symbol does not show correctly. It is a capital letter L with a cross bar and is an abbreviation for Libra, the Latin for pounds.
The abbreviation for the Shilling is the letter s as a suffix e.g. 2s. Depending which version of the Oxford English Dictionary you consult, it is either an abbreviation for solidus, Latin for a total, or for sestertius, a Roman coin.
The abbreviation for the Penny before 1971 is the letter d as a suffix e.g. 6d. It is an abbreviation for denarius, a silver Roam coin.
These can be put together in order e.g. £4 2s 6d. The values could also be separated by a slash without the s and with or without the d e.g. £4/2/6d or £4/2/6. Values of one shilling or more and less than a pound could also be shown by two numbers separated by a slash, e.g. 2/6 or 2/6d. Zero values were shown by a dash when the slash system was used, e.g. 3/- represented three shillings exactly.
A half penny was normally referred to as a ha’penny.
Before 1971, a single penny was always one penny, never one pence. In 1971 the penny became One New Pence and there were 100 New Pence to the pound. The new was eventually dropped and the name penny has returned. Values of one pound or more are now simply shown as decimal values after the pound sign. Lesser values are suffixed p.
In the last 30 years there have been many special issue coins. Generally these have been commemorative crowns (25p) but two pound commemorative issues have also been made. Although these are legal tender, they will not normally be seen in circulation
In the tables, the right hand column is coloured, according to the type of money, as follows. Modern coins are no longer made of real copper, silver or gold, but the names are still applied to the coins having those colours.
As found at bignell.uk.com/english_currency.htm
scottishcurrency