About this coin

Face value: one penny
Collector value: not much more

I think this is my favorite coin of all. Look at the size of this thing!

British pennies have an ancient and honorable history, but this particular design was made for 111 years, from 1860 until Britain changed all her currency in 1971. In sheer audacity, this object is pure Victorian swagger.

The first time I remember seeing one of these was in a museum of automatons from old penny arcades. Slide a penny down the chute of one of these contraptions and instruments play themselves, or clockwork puppets dance. It needed a penny of the same size and weight as the original to activate the machinery, so you paid the man £1 for ten lovely old pence to use. I was supposed to leave the pennies there, of course, inside the machinery. But I fell in love with the coins themselves and sprited one away. I have it still.

At first, I was writing up these pence one at a time. Then I realized how very many of them I had, and the descriptions were getting boring.

The venerable British penny:

The penny is a very elderly coin, probably introduced in England around 750 AD. It was a little silver coin, and it got littler as the price of silver went up, because the value of a coin was more or less related to the value of the metal it was made of.

English silver pennies were highly regarded for their consistent size and purity, and were imitated or adopted outright in many places in Europe. Though the exact word origin is in dispute, this is when and why "sterling" came to mean "geez, that's really great." The silver penny remained the principal coin of the realm for centuries.

The copper penny made its debut in 1797 with the extraordinay 'cartwheel' penny of George III. It's nicknamed the cartwheel because it's a great big mama jama — one full ounce of copper — an attempt to realign the value of the coin with the value of the metal. There was even a 2 ounce, 2 pence version! Something like 73,000 of these pence were minted over several years, though they all bear the date 1797. A surprising number of them are still around, at least in part because they were used as weights in household scales (recipes given are by weight over there even now, and every kitchen has a scale).

Pressing the cartwheel penny was the first commercial use of Matthew Boulton and James Watt's newfangled contraption, the steam engine. It was also the first British coin to be allowed in British colonies — before, colonials had to invent some kind of bogus Monopoly money to trade with. By that time, of course, Americans weren't colonials anymore. So ha ha.

Subsequent pence, though still large, were somewhat smaller. They, along with cartwheels, stayed in circulation until 1860.

Composition of the penny changed from copper to bronze in 1860 (bronze is copper with a bit of tin and zinc mixed in). The size and shape of the penny and the overall design of this penny stay the same for the next one hundred and seven years, through a Victoria, two Edwards, two Georges and an Elizabeth (though Edward VIII wasn't around long enough to get his minted). Each monarch, by tradition, faces the opposite way from the one before — except awkward old Edward VIII again. He thought his left side looked better. They pretended he hadn't done that, since Edward VIII money never got past the design stage anyway, so actually three kings in a row faced left.

Let's face it, if this is what your penny looks like, you rule. No, seriously. I mean you actually sit on a throne with a crown on your melon and you rule, because you're such a honking great sun-never-sets-on-it, woo-look-out-for-me empire. The people who called this great lump of bronze "small change" were brimming with energy and confidence and were certain sure of their place in the world. And so, of course, it had to change in the 1970s.

The current British penny is a small, unremarkable object, very slightly larger than an American cent, made of copper-plated steel. Isn't that a shame?

Britannia rule the waves:

The old broad on the "tails" side of the penny is Britannia, the personification of Britain. And a very old broad she is, too. The Romans called the land Britain or Britannia long before they invaded it. To them, it was the very end of the earth.

Hadrian built a shrine to Britannia-as-a-goddess in York around 120 AD, and put her image on coins. In many of these designs, she already has her familiar warlike furniture — shield, standard and sea. When the Romans began to drift away, around 400 AD, Britannia slunk away for a millenium or so, too.

In 1672, Charles II brings her back, on the copper halfpenny and farthing (one-fourth penny). Samuel Pepys wrote that the model for Britannia was Frances Stewart, the king's mistress. These were the first copper coins in Britain, and the first to be made by a milling machine (rather than by hammer). On these coins, Britannia has a spear, a shield (with a union flag on it) and an olive branch. I guess after all that time in exile, she was anxious to make peace.

In 1793, Britannia was further nauticalized — her spear becomes a trident (as in Neptune, god of the sea), there's a ship in the distance and waves are lapping around her toes. Pretty much, this is the Britannia who appears on British coins right up until the decimal coinage of 1971. She's still on the 50p piece today, but she's back to waving an olive branch and she's got a lion instead of an ocean at her feet.

Then there's a proposed design for a 5 Euro piece featuring a silly Brittania who looks like she got lost on her way to a comic book convention. She's got a cape and a miniskirt and Marvin the Martians Sunday-go-to-meeting helmet, and a magical never-fall-down trident and it appears she's squishing France with her index finger. Well, that last bit's kind of interesting.

Before they metricafied (or decimalated) it

The traditional system of counting British money is called LSD — or £/s/d. That's the pound (libre), the shilling, and the penny (denarius). The first and last are Latin, the one in the middle is Old English (means "divide," since people used to break coins into smaller coins to make change).

At one point in the way-back, a pound really was an actual pound (by weight) of silver pennies. Which was 240 of them. And so it was that there were 240d in £1. Hence, 12d in 1s and 20s in £1.

So! If a Dickens character said a thing was worth "two and six," that meant two shillings and six pence, or 30 pence. Which is half a crown. He would write that 2/6. If you added a pound to that, he would say "one pound, two and six" and write it £1/2/6. And you could pay him with a sovereign, a florin and a sixpence. Or ten florins, two shillings, two tuppences and two pence. Or two crowns, two half crowns, a thruppenny bit, a ha'penny and two farthings.

This is why English people were so reserved. They were busy doing all this math in their heads.

Britain changed to a metric system in 1971. The pound stayed the same (it's important in world trade, so they didn't want to mess with it), but "new" pence are worth 2.4 of the old ones and are written as p rather than d. They added and subtracted coins for a while, but right this minute it's £2, £1, 50p, 20p, 10p, 5p, 2p and 1p.

A penny for your thoughts

Let me know if this penny finds a home with you. Address correspondence to: coins@FieldNotebook.com.