Shillings vs Pence
 

Silly, question, but I will be going to London soon, and I found some coins left from a trip 20 years ago. Most are pence, but I do have a few 'shillings'. Are they the same as pence, will they be accepted or should I just toss them? Any comments will be appreciated.

I'm not sure of the exact answers to your above questions, but here is an interesting web page about Shillings, Pounds, and the coversion between to the decimilization of British money.
http://www.tclayton.demon.co.uk/dec.html

I'm no UK expert. However, 240 old pence equals 1 pound. 20 pence to one shilling, 12 shillings to one pound.
You might keep them as a conversation piece. The stores won't accept them, but I don't know about a bank. I once tried to use a 10 year old 5 pound note and the store asked me to exchange it with a new design note (the bank changed it)

The shilling coins (and all new pence coins from then, i.e., 1/2p, 5p, 10p & 50p except the 1 & 2p coins) are obsolete but the banks may exchange them for new ones. Of course there may be some collector value (the shilling + higher coins contained silver if minted before a certain date).

The 1 shilling coin was worth 5 new pence (the new 5p coin is about the size of a dime)

The 2 shilling coin was worth 10p (new coin is about the size of a quarter.)

The only other coin might a 6 old pence (2 1/2 new pence) piece which is a collector item.

Hey mauld!

Sadly Terenz is right. The 1 and 2 shilling coins were interchangable with 5 and 10 pence coins until the Royal Mint/Bank of England issue the newer coins about 5 or six years ago.

The original idea was that eventualy the larger the coin, the greter it's face value. Of cousre we have to wait until they decide what to do with the 1 and 2 pence coins. At the size of the new 5p, the 1p will have to be about the size of a grain of sand!

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Mark
"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools." - Dr Martin Luther King Jr



[This message has been edited by MarkB (edited 01-04-2000).]

Just to pull together a few points where someone said they agreed with someone else and then posted something different...

1. The old British system was 12 pence to a shilling, and 20 shillings to a pound. A shilling, and I'm sure one of the old U.K. hands will enlighten us as to why, was commonly abbreviated as "d."

21 shillings was called a Guinea, and provided an opportunity for shopkeepers to raise prices by 5% by re-pricing things from pounds to guineas. If an item were priced today as, say, "10 Guineas", it would be generally understood as meaning £10.50.

2. The 1 shilling coin was the same size as the (old) 5p coin and was accepted as such until a few years ago. The 2 shilling coin was the same size as the 10p coin and (I think) would probably still be accepted in a vending machine. The 1p and 2p coins were never changed in size and the old ones were essentially re-valued upwards when the system changed.

3. I haven't seen any trend towards a uniform progression of size vs. value. The 1p coin is larger than the 5p coin which is smaller than the 10p coin, which is larger than the 20p coin, which is smaller than (either) 50p coin, which are both larger than the £1 coin.

RichG

d stands for dineri, as in the Roman coinage.

I'm not sure if you meant the old 1 and 2p coins survived. They didn't. They were completely new for decimalisation and didn't run parallel with any old coinage.

The coins survived decimalisation

Only the:
6p (2 1/2 new pence)
shilling (5 p)
florin (2 shillings) (10 p)
survived

The coins that passed on included:

old penny
(a big copper coin, bigger than the 2 new pence and 50 new pence coins (the 50 new pence coin has shrunk with a new one coming out in 1997-98))

3 pence
(about the size of a new pound coin and the same colour too)

Crown (big coin which I think was worth 5 shillings or 25p)

Also possibly coins such as the farthing (1/8th of a penny?)

A new coin, the 1/2 new pence, was issued at decimalisation but has been withdrawn since)

Thanks for all the info, the totall value of my 'shillings' is only about US$2.40, so I think I will just 'donate' them to some lucky street person and thus relieve myself of figuring out if they will be accepted. Now, about my "Bank of Scotland" notes.......

Sorry!

[This message has been edited by martin (edited 01-06-2000).]

.....you'll probably have problems with those, anywhere other than Edinburgh!

Guineas ,interestingly, originally represented the gratuity for a service. For every £1 asked, you paid a guinea, effectively giving a 5% gratuity. Those were the days!

Martin,

As a foreigner I don't want to try to correct you, but I have used Bank of Scotland notes (including the one pound notes) in London many times. Occassionally a shop clerk will look at me funny, but they have always taken the notes.

On the other hand, I tend to save my Scottish notes for using up north because by the time I get to some of the smaller town further north, they are at times not all that fond of the Bank of England notes.

Larry

Forgot about Scottish and English pounds (didn't run across any in my recent 2 years there). You have trouble converting Scottish pounds outside the U.K. I would think you'd see the same for the Northern Ireland Pound (banks there are allowed to issue their own currency)

I guess the Pound Sterling should be referred to as the *English* Pound and certainly not the British Pound as only the BoE notes are accepted overseas.

Larry,

You're right, of course. Just a bit of irony on my part. In England, unlike Scotland, we gave up £1 notes years ago, to be replaced by £1 coins. It always feels as though I'm carrying a pocketful of shrapnel!

To set the record straight, there is no problem in getting Scottish bank notes accepted anywhere in the UK. Now it's different with Irish £'s or Channel Islands coins, but that's another story.

Incidentally 2 banks in Scotland issue notes. 'Bank of Scotland 'and 'Royal Bank of Scotland'. Look out for them next time you're this side of the pond!

Martin

Martin,

Actually I'll be over on your side of the pond twice this year http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif Unfortunately I'll only get up to Scotland on one of those trips http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/frown.gif

If memory serves me right, there are THREE Scottish banks that issue notes - I believe the third one is the Clydesdale Bank. The only notes that I have with me now are from the Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland, but I'm pretty sure of the third.

Larry

Larry's right about Clydesdale Bank.

Retailers in England can refuse to take Scottish bank notes but good ones usually do. What can be interesting is handing over a Scottish one pound note in a busy shop and seeing what change you get. As they are blue, it is not altogether unknown for them to be confused with BoE five pound notes. (I firmly believe that British shop clerks could never, ever handle US dollars - how do you get by with all the notes the same size and colour?) http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/wink.gif

[This message has been edited by james (edited 01-07-2000).]