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Does "eight-and-sixpence" mean "eight shillings and six pence"?

David
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André Piquet
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1 Answers1

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It certainly does. I'm old enough to have grown up with this historical pain in the neck. It was actually worse than that because we had halfpennies and farthings (quarter pennies) as well so you could get amounts like £2/18/7¾ spoken as "two pounds eighteen and sevenpence three farthings" or, as my father who was a shop worker in the 1930s said was common "two pounds eighteen and seven three".

This must have been a bit confusing because eighteen shillings and threepence was usually spoken as "eighteen and three".

There were other oddities in the spoken version like "haypney" (written as ha'penny) for halfpenny "tuppence" for two pence and even the somewhat pretentious "thruppence" for three pence (most people with working class accents said "threppence")

Then there were prices quoted in guineas, a guinea being £1/1/- or one pound, one shilling and no pence, quite commonly spoken as "21 shillings". I can remember seeing adverts for furniture quoted in guineas, presumably to make it look both cheaper and 'posher' at the same time.

For some reason horses and some other livestock are often still sold in guineas or multiples of £1.05 in sensible money.

Some people of my generation are still nostalgic for "old money" but it really was a clumsy way of doing things. In my opinion decimalisation was a great advance.

BoldBen
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  • To think that LSD once meant something else! :) – tchrist Sep 13 '20 at 02:25
  • Thank you very much, Mr. BoldBen! – André Piquet Sep 13 '20 at 12:26
  • Except that the decimal system does not allow exact division by three or four. Be careful when you talk about clumsiness — do you really think a system would evolved for use by common people if it were clumsy? Obviously times have changed, and as a scientist I was using the decimal system before it was introduced as far as cm were concerned, but I can see why a base 12 was used for both length and money. Not obvious why not for weight, though. – David Sep 13 '20 at 13:15
  • @David the pre-decimal system wasn't invented for use by common people, it grew up as a medium for large scale transactions by wealthy people. Most people hardly handled money at all until around the second half of the 17C and then it was small change. If the most you handled at once was a few shillings the number of shillings in a pound would be irrelevant. Also a lot of the gold coins were foreign which is why we had a guinea at all, let alone "pieces of eight". It was the industrial revolution that turned most people into cash workers and bybthen the system was set. – BoldBen Sep 13 '20 at 15:24
  • @David Also you can't call the LSD currency 'base-12' the base changes at each level as you go up. It was arguably base 4 for farthings, base 12 for pennies, base 20 for shillings (unless you were working in base 21 for guineas), then true base 10 above that. The same thing applies to weights and measures. By the time you've introduced rods, square rods, furlongs, hundredweights, quarts, pins, firkins, dry bushels, liquid bushels, troy ounces, avoirdupois ounces etc the whole thing becomes an mess. Then you end up with a crashed Mars probe because scientists and factories use different units. – BoldBen Sep 13 '20 at 15:47
  • Ordinary people is perhaps a misnomer, but merchants and farmers, though wealthy were perhaps not so numerate. I think if you look at the square rods and bushels etc, you will see a pattern of choosing a scale in which to work that suited the magnitude of the transaction, something I discuss in my answer to this question. See also this answer. – David Sep 13 '20 at 16:30
  • And 4 seems the most common divider — convenient for halving and halving again. No need to lecture me on moon shots. I'm just saying that it is simplistic to think people continue with a "clumsy" system for no good reason. And our American cousins still manage with their "clumsy" feet and inches and pounds and gallons. Of course they are more isolated from the rest of the world than we are — most don't even possess a passport. But who knows — the new blue passport may lead to a chain (22 yards) of events. – David Sep 13 '20 at 16:38
  • @David I didn't say that there is no good reason behind sticking with familiar units, they're familiar and that's enough for most people, that's why there was, and still is much resistance to metrication in the UK. It doesn't mean that decimal units aren't easier to use and worth adopting. The US adopted a decimal system for it's own currency hen it's people had grown up with LSD. It seems odd that one of the first countries to have a proper decimal currency should resist decimalisation of weights and measures but then most 17th C Americans wouldn't have handled a lot of coins either. – BoldBen Sep 14 '20 at 14:47