BRITISH MONEY FACTS

• The venerable and popular Great British Pound has a colorful history. This little article will give just a few of the many interesting facts about the Great British Pound. Though almost everyone simply calls the money by its colloquial name “the pound,” its official name is something else. “British pound” or “Great Britain Pound” is also not officially a correct name for the currency unit. To be formally accurate, call the money “British Pound Sterling.”
• The sterling part of the name has a long history and is also the derivation of the term “sterling silver.” It has to do with the metal with which the old coins were made.
• We go way back to the year 1158. In that year, new metal coins were introduced by English King Henry II to replace the silver pennies that had previously been in circulation for centuries. The problem with the old pennies was that they were made of 100% silver.
• Sounds fine but the problem was that pure silver is a soft metal and images stamped into the metal wear away too easily. What King Henry II did was make the new pennies from an alloy of 92.5% silver and the remainder a harder metal such as nickel or iron. So, even though the coin had less silver, it was tougher and wore better and lasted longer.
• The Great British pound sterling is the world's oldest currency still in use. British pounds sterling has been the currency of the realm for centuries. It actually is older than England itself, which in turn is older than Great Britain - Great Britain being the unification of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The pound as a currency originated in the Kingdom of Mercia in the 8th century, a country that exists in what is now the center of England.
• The pound was innovated by King Offa of Mercia when he introduced the silver penny as a sub unit of the pound. His money system was patterned after the Frankish Empire’s system used under Emperor Charlemagne. In the Carolingian system, 240 penny coins weighed 1 pound so 240 silver pennies were worth a pound in terms of money too. Charlemagne patterned much of his kingdom and customs on the ancient Roman Empire and the money system was no exception. In a sense then, the British pound has a heritage that dates back 2,000 years to the ancient Romans.
• The biggest change in the history of Great British pound though had to be when the United Kingdom converted its system of measurement. This happened in 1971 when they currency went decimal. What that means is that the confusing divisions of the pound into shillings and pennies gave way to a new system of money were amounts less than a pound now calculated with one subdivision, the new penny.
• So instead of 240 pennies to a pound, 12 pennies to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound, there were no more shillings at all and simply 100 even pennies to a pound. That also meant that amounts smaller than a pound could be expressed with decimals such as 1.50 pounds.