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bruno
@bruno

We almost never delve into the specifics of British currency in Fallen London, partly because FL in-universe doesn't actually use the old sterling monetary system that was used in the Victorian period, but also because it is intensely confusing to anyone who isn't familiar with it (which is 99% of our players, who are either not British or, if British, born well after decimalization).

An example of this: In this era, fees for luxury goods and professional services (lawyers, doctors, etc) were often quoted in 'guineas'. Wtf is a 'guinea'? A guinea is a gold coin that had been extinguished nearly 100 years earlier in the 1810s, but survived as a purely abstract unit of account. A guinea is 21 shillings, which is to say, 1.05 pounds. Why were prices quoted in guineas? Because back when guineas were still being struck, they were big fancy gold coins; so denominating values in them was a way of signaling that you could command a high price for your goods or services, and it stuck.

You can find several mentions of 'guineas' in Sherlock Holmes stories, for example. Watson's brother's watch from A Study in Scarlet is referred to as a 'fifty-guinea watch'. Holmes frequently offers a guinea as payment or a reward to his 'irregulars'. This is, again, in spite of the guinea as an actual coin being out of use for 80 years at the time these stories take place. If you don't know this history you can easily not realize that Holmes is talking casually about an amount (and he probably means just a pound, not a pound and a shilling) and not referring to an actual coin.

British coinage of the pre-decimal era is a panoply of pointlessly confusing denominations; you have the farthing, ha'penny, penny, threepence, groat, sixpence, shilling, florin, gambrel, half-crown, crown, half-sovereign, sovereign, and double sovereign. One of these I made up, you probably can't tell which. They kept this barbaric system into the seventies. Prices at horse auctions in the UK are still, apparently, denominated in guineas.



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in reply to @bruno's post:

I may be alone in the crowd here but I think base 10 currencies make a good deal more sense than whatever the hell was going on with British coinage

i would like to both thank and curse you for sending me down a rabbit hole.

it is actually a super fascinating subject to look into! for the benefit of others (you know this shit way better than i do i assume, i wouldn't want to insult you by implying that my day of research comes close), the tldr of the seven hours of my life i lost for this is "we PROBABLY got it from the spanish because we found some business letters that refer to the peso as an S with the line through it as a shorthand as was the style at the time and it probably caught on but we aren't ENTIRELY sure that's where the symbol came from, that's just our best bet, but it is just as likely to be unrelated. idfk."

wild shit. i expected there to be a straightforward answer, not a century plus of academic debate for something that's so everyday and mundane. what the fuck

i wouldn't want to insult you by implying that my day of research comes close

no no no - you probably outdo me, i'm just a nerd who did much the same thing (and thinks pre-decimal currency gets an un-earned bad rap)

It's a fascinating subject. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the guinea's weird value is to denote it as being the special money just for upper-class people. like, if you wanted to buy something priced in pounds, you would pay in guineas and the extra shilling per pound would go to whatever servant facilitated the actual purchase. Don't know how accurate that is though.

on top of the names meaning just as little out of context, there were (1866–1873) 3 coins of different values called a nickel being minted (3¢, 5¢, and a different 5¢) and a fourth 1¢ nickel (up to 1864) that was probably still being circulated

a currency that is 240:1 makes just as much sense as one that's 100:1, since you can divide 240 evenly by every single digit number except 9 and 7 (whereas 100 only has 2, 4, 5). but the british went and screwed it up with the extra divisions and coins! i guess it did make a lot more sense when 1£ was more money than you'd get in a year? but still, too many coins.

americans don't get away with anything on stupid names though; there were four different coins called a "nickel" and they still have a one-cent! and paper banknotes!

my mother, who had a bit over a decade of life pre-decimalisation, sometimes likes to tell me it "wasn't that difficult" which i have to assume is because she was a child and did not have to manage her own finances

Tepid take: As a resident post-decimalisation British person who grew up playing shopkeeper with their grandparents and watching old films, it's really actually not that difficult.

20 shillings to a pound, 12 pence to a shilling, that's all you need to know.

Everything else is slang that makes the system sound harder to use than it is. The moment the price is actually written, all ambiguity falls away. My low-stakes conspiracy is that this is just the effect of geriatrics trying to editorialise -- "I bet you don't know what a floppy disk is", "I walked to school uphill both ways in my day" etc.

Obviously if given the choice, I prefer decimalised currency, but I think a lot of the discourse around how confusing it is ends up being overblown in practice -- a bit like imperial/metric discourse.

I have noticed a pattern of Americans of the "I fucking love science" variety (/nbh) tending to unite behind jingoistic dogmas of 'objectively good' and 'bad' systems that they don't take the time to consider/use first.