£sd
£sd (occasionally written Lsd, spoken as "pounds, shillings and pence" or pronounced /ɛl.ɛsˈdiː/ ell-ess-DEE), is the popular name for the pre-decimal currencies once common throughout Europe.
Although the standard ledger accounting system recorded only pounds, shillings and pence, actual minted coins could represent one, several or fractions of these units.
The penny was subdivided into 4 farthings until 31 December 1960, when they ceased to be legal tender in the UK, and until 31 July 1969 there was also a halfpenny (/ˈheɪpəni/ or /ˈheɪpni/, HAY-p'nee) in circulation.
The perceived advantage of such a system was its use in some aspects of mental arithmetic, as it afforded many factors and hence fractions of a pound such as tenths, eighths, sixths and even sevenths and ninths if the guinea (worth 21 shillings) was used.
Although the names originated from popular coins in the classical Roman Empire, their definitions and the ratios between them were introduced and imposed across Western Europe by the Emperor Charlemagne.
King Offa of Mercia adopted the Frankish silver standard of librae, solidi and denarii into Britain in the late 8th century.
For much of the 20th century, £sd remained the monetary system of most of the British Commonwealth, the major exceptions being Canada and India, until the 1960s and 1970s, with Nigeria being the last to abandon it in the form of the Nigerian pound on 1 January 1973.
Since most reforms were not even completed before the next one began, the late Roman Empire had a veritable mess of multiple overlapping systems of weights and currencies.
The new coinage and accounting system was imposed uniformly across the vast Carolingian Empire and also infiltrated countries on its periphery.
Although £sd ultimately prevailed in Britain, the "mark of account" system lingered on in North Sea trade and areas of Hanseatic influence through much of the Middle Ages.
Charlemagne's new monetary system prevailed across much of Western Europe including France (where the units were known as the livre, sous and denier), Italy (lira, soldo and denaro), the Holy Roman Empire (pfund, schilling and pfennig) and in England (pound, shilling and penny).
During the early Middle Ages, only the denarius was issued as an actual coin; the libra and solidus were merely units of account.
To facilitate larger transactions, gold coins began to be minted in western Europe around the same time.
A parliamentary select committee was set up in 1821 to inquire into decimalisation, but ended up recommending retaining the £sd system.
However, pressure groups were formed inside Britain advocating the adoption of decimalisation of the currency, and Parliament returned to the matter in the 1850s.
This was a change from the system used in the earlier wave of decimalisations in Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia and South Africa, in which the pound was replaced with a new major currency called either the "dollar" or the "rand".
By the mid-19th century, most of continental Europe had decimalised, leaving the United Kingdom as the only major country to continue to maintain the £sd system.
[7] United Kingdom pre-decimal banknotes are no longer legal tender, but are exchangeable for their face value (regardless of the possible greater worth if sold or auctioned) if they are taken directly (or posted) to the Bank of England.
[9] Computers and calculators sold pre-decimalisation – mostly in the 1960s – occasionally came with special support for the £sd system in the form of a fixed-point currency datatype.
