Recounting a Great Recounting

Imagine this: prices are skyrocketing, in part because of import/export laws. People are finding it hard to afford bread. The country is deep in debt. What do you as a member of government do?

Have everyone bring in their coins and give them new ones.

Really, that’s what happened in 1816 and 1817 in England. The so-called Corn Laws were keeping the cost of grain artificially high and preventing other countries from bringing in grain at lesser prices. Things were looking wobbly economically. Parliament in its wisdom decided the best way to stabilize the economy was to standardize the coinage, and to do that they needed new coins.

The Coin Act of 1816 ordered the Royal Mint to put forth new silver coins to replace the old ones. Master of the Mint, William Wellesley-Pole, older brother of the Duke of Wellington, came up with a daring plan. (He added the Pole part of his name as a requirement to receive his inheritance from a distant relative). He had to create new coins, get everyone in the entire country to trade out their old ones, and bring the old ones back for destruction.

Not easy by any imagining. Right away, he ran into trouble. To begin with, the Royal Mint had no record of the coins it had previously cast, so he had no examples on which to build. Joseph Banks, head of the Royal Society, gave him some old coins, and Wellesley-Pole started the Royal Mint Museum, which is still in operation today.

For another, the old coinage had been cast in such a way that the designs and denominations were rubbed off over time, until no one was sure what was worth what (one of the reasons Parliament wanted to have new money minted). Wellesley-Pole used the latest engraving and printing processes.

Then there was the fact that Parliament wanted him to keep this whole endeavor strictly secret until it was time to redistribute the coins. (You can imagine how robbers eyes would gleam if it were known new coins were being transported around the country.)

Finally, there was the matter of the Prince Regent. He had to approve the design of each type of coin. To ensure success, Wellesley-Pole contracted with the great Italian engraver, Benedetto Pistrucci to design the faces of the coins. And they were literally faces—then as now, English coins carried a bust of the reigning monarch. Normally, Pistrucci would have had his subject sit for him to create the bust, but King George wasn’t in any shape to comply. (He was quite mad at this point.) So, Pistrucci set up the coin based on other portraits. Shall we say, they were not his finest work? His initial design has been dubbed the “bull head George” (the coin at the top of the post). I’m sure you can see why. It was roundly criticized, and another design prevailed. This St. George and the Dragon was used then and in 1915, as shown on the coin.

Wellesley-Pole also prevailed. He managed to have cast new silver coins and a new gold coin, the sovereign, which was worth 20 shillings as opposed to the new defunct guinea, which was worth 21 shillings. He also had cast crowns and half crowns. All coins were cast to specific standards, bagged and crated, and distributed by 1,000 agents through banks all over Britain.

The effort at last met with high success. Approximately 57 million coins were exchanged, with no robberies and no riots, over the course of two weeks. And the coins remained in circulation until 1971.

Well done, Wellesley-Pole, well done. I’m happy to recount your triumph.

With this Ring (and your ₤25,000), I Thee Wed

Last week I posted about the intricacies of 19th century England’s monetary system…okay, who remembers what a groat is?

This week, we’ll look at a related topic, one of great importance to a lot of teen girls in the 19th century: dowries.

So what is a dowry?

A dowry (also referred to as a “marriage portion” or just “portion”) is the money or property that a bride brought into her marriage. Families of wealth and property usually started putting aside money for a daughter’s dowry as soon as she was born (it could later be used to support her if she chose not to marry). Often it represented her share of what she would inherit from her parents on their death, but given to her upon her marriage rather than later.

Usually some part of a bride’s dowry was designated to be her settlement, an amount of money or other assets like an allowance allotted to her for her own personal use so that she would have some independent means…because her dowry pretty much became her husband’s property upon their marriage. Until a series of legal bills over the course of the middle and later century changed it, women had almost no rights in marriage—in fact, they had no separate legal existence, had no legal right to money they earned or inherited, could not sign a contract or make a will. The marriage settlement was intended to give her some independent means in case her husband should die unexpectedly or go bankrupt (assets listed in a marriage settlement could not be seized by her husband’s creditors); and she was able to make a will to designate who would inherit those assets (often younger sons, who wouldn’t inherit much otherwise.)

Okay, I know this is getting kind of dry…so let’s talk about the fun part: what having a good dowry meant.

What it meant, of course, was that a girl whose family had money could pretty much marry whom she pleased. Among the aristocracy, a standard dowry between families of equal importance usually ran between ₤10,000 and ₤30,000. If the potential bride and groom were of different social classes and backgrounds, this could change: a dowry for a girl whose father was, say, a factory owner who’d risen from the lower classes and made his fortune could range as high as ₤60,000 or more if she wanted to marry into the aristocracy…and a lot of aristocrats, especially later in the 19th century, were quite willing to “buy” a wealthy wife to shore up shaky family fortunes or provide for a younger son. Even Queen Victoria wasn’t immune to this…she was quite interested in securing an heiress named Daisy Maynard for her son Leopold, but the girl had other ideas and went on to become the Countess of Warwick (and mistress to one of Victoria’s other sons, the Prince of Wales!) By the end of the 19th century, poverty-stricken aristocrats were eagerly seeking out wealthy American brides who might bring as much as ₤500,000 in exchange for a title.

And dowries weren’t necessarily in cash; they could include houses and other real estate, jewelry, art, or pretty much any other asset agreed upon between the two families. Among the working classes a girl’s dowry could simply be the household linens and crockery she’d need to set up house, or perhaps a sewing machine so that she could earn money at home.

Balsam, Blunt, the Lour, Mint-sauce, and the Ready Rhino

Okay...now that you’re thoroughly confused about the topic of today’s post…

Believe it or not, these five terms all mean the same thing: money. I’m not sure of the origin of most of them (how did “rhino” come to be slang for cash?) but I love their color and creativity.

The English monetary system, up until 1971 (we’ll talk about that date in a few minutes), was as eccentric to modern eyes as the above slang terms. Our 19th century misses knew about farthings, pennies (pence), shillings, pounds, crowns, sovereigns, guineas…so what was what?

Pounds, shillings, and pence were the main units of value. There were 12 pence to a shilling, and 20 shillings to a pound. The symbol for pound was written ₤, s. was shilling, and d. meant pence…so, say, a bonnet costing 5 pounds, 8 shillings, and 9 pence would have a price tag marked ₤5.8.9. A box of candy costing 4 shillings and sixpence would be marked 4/6. A penny stamp would set you back 1d. Okay so far?

The actual coinage was slightly different. In the 19th century, the one pound coin didn’t exist under that name: a coin worth one pound was called a sovereign. They and half-sovereigns (worth half a pound) were gold. A crown was made of silver and was worth 5 shillings, or a quarter of a pound (and there were also half-crowns, worth, of course, 2 1/2 shillings). A florin was worth 2 shillings and was also silver, and a shilling was worth—yes, you guessed it—a shilling.

Are you still with me?

Then there were the penny-related coins, some made from silver, others copper and later bronze. There was the sixpence (I don’t need to explain that, do I?), the fourpence, threepence, twopence (known as “tuppence”), and the penny. The first three of these were silver, the rest copper or bronze.

Even the lowly penny had its divisions. There was the halfpenny coin (a “ha’pence”), the farthing (worth a quarter of a penny), and the half farthing (worth an eighth of a penny).

And what about guineas? This gets even odder…the guinea coin was worth 21 shillings (one shilling more than a pound). Although they were no longer made after about 1817 the existing ones remained in circulation and became, in a way, the coinage of the wealthy—expensive items were usually valued in guineas, not pounds.

In addition to all this, each coin had various nicknames, as did values…for example, if you hear about Lord Whatchamacallit betting Sir Whosit a monkey on the outcome of a wager, they weren’t exchanging wildlife—a “monkey” was slang for ₤500. A coachwheel was a crown, a half-borde was sixpence, a groat fourpence….

Phew! I think I begin to understand why in 1971 they decimalized the English monetary system and went to the plain and simple, if far less colorful, 100 pence to a pound!