About this coin

For centuries, the silver penny was the only coin minted in England. In the 13th Century, that was enough for a workman's daily wage. Or a sheep. So how do you buy a turnip if your smallest unit of currency represents a whole day's labor?

In practical terms, what they usually did was break a penny into pieces, halves and quarters. The earliest penny had a cross design which made cutting it thusly especially convenient. I imagine a good deal of barter went on, as well, for small goods like a few eggs or a loaf of bread. Probably they kept long-running bills, too ("perforce, puttest thou this pickled bear kidney on ye tab, Aethelbert!"

The first silver halfpenny was minted in the 800s for Alfred the Great (I suppose that's what was so great about him) and, like the silver penny, it had many imitators in other countries. But halfpence weren't minted in any great quantity for hundreds of years.

Here's the deal: until quite recently, the value of currency was closely tied to the value of the metal it was made from. But not exactly the same value by weight. Mints (which were sometimes privately-run operations) were allowed to charge a fee for the cost of making coins. But the government certainly wasn't going to absorb that price, so the value of the coin was slightly (and sometimes very considerably) less than the value of metal. The difference in the cost of production and the value of the coin represented a profit to the government or mint (or sometimes the guy who provides the metal). This profit is called seignorage.

Though there's half the metal, the work involved to make a halfpenny (or smaller) coin is essentially the same as to produce a penny, so the profits are less. Before the stationary steam engine, coins were mostly made by hammering metal into a mold. Not easy and not cheap! Making halfpence simply didn't pay well enough to make it worth the labor.

Halfpence were more abundant in the 13th Century, but there were periodic shortages right up until modern times. In some cases, it's clear that the government tolerated a degree of counterfeiting to ease the demand it couldn't fill. Throughout their history, the metals and design halfpenny closely follow that of the penny.

This particular ha'penny

The great pile of halfpence on my desk were mostly made for George VI and Elizabeth II. This is one of the few coins where the modern pattern is more beautiful. Britannia was on the reverse of the halpenny for centuries, but a different version was designed for Edward VIII (he's the one that abdicated). Some pattern coins were struck for him, but weren't minted in quantity until George VI took the throne.

The reverse of this halfpenny features the Golden Hind, Sir Francis Drake's ship. It's a cheerful engraving, a hearty Boy's True Adventure Stories sort of a ship in full sail.

Drake was a privateer, which is a government-sponsored pirate. In 1577, he set sail from England with a fleet of five ships, with the intent of harrassing the Spanish colonies in the New World. He headed down and around the tip of South America and right up the other side, as far as Canada (which wasn't Canada yet), then turned around and went back again the same way. As he rounded the Straits of Magellan on the way out, he decided to rename his flagship (formerly the Pelican) the Golden Hind. A hind is a female red deer (d'oh!) and a golden one was on the family crest of his main patron.

It took three years to go 'round the world and home again, in the course of which he had many adventures, lost all the ships except his flagship, harrassed the living bejeebers out of the Spanish, and came back full to the brim and low in the water with Spanish gold. Which had been somebody's else's gold before the Spanish got it, so I suppose that's okay.

When he got back, Queen Elizabeth I knighted him. Pirates and lords, lords and pirates. Not a ha'penny's worth of difference, my dears.

If you haven't got a penny...

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