Pounds, shillings and pence were Charlemagne's idea and lasted over a thousand years
Britain's old money, with 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound, was not a quirky island invention. It came from the Frankish emperor Charlemagne around the 780s, and for centuries most of Western Europe counted the same way. Britain simply held on longest, until Decimal Day in 1971.
The abbreviation £sd comes from the Latin librae, solidi and denarii, names borrowed from Roman coins. Charlemagne defined a new pound of silver, about 408 grams and heavier than the old Roman pound, ordered 240 silver pennies struck from it and declared the pound divisible into 20 solidi of 12 pennies each for easier bookkeeping. France knew the units as livre, sou and denier, Italy as lira, soldo and denaro, and the German lands as Pfund, Schilling and Pfennig. King Offa of Mercia brought the scheme to England in the late 8th century, partly to ease payments to the Church.
For a long time only the penny actually existed as a coin; the pound and shilling were units for accounts. As Europe's silver ran short, rulers repeatedly debased the pennies, so contracts started naming the mint, since a Paris penny held more silver than one from Tours. Bigger coins followed from the 13th century. The French franc of 1360 was the first coin anywhere worth exactly one pound, and England's gold sovereign, first minted in 1489, was its first pound coin.
Continental countries went decimal in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the United States dropped the old reckoning in 1792. A parliamentary committee in Britain looked at decimalisation in 1821 and recommended keeping £sd; schemes debated in the 1850s all seemed too costly or flawed. Australia switched in 1966, and the United Kingdom and Ireland on 15 February 1971, when the pound was divided into 100 new pence. Nigeria, the last holdout, followed on 1 January 1973.
The old system even shaped early computing. Some models of the IBM 1401 sold in Britain had built-in support for sterling amounts, as did the ICT 1301 and the PL/I language. The final £sd banknote to lose legal tender status anywhere was the Isle of Man ten-shilling note, in 2013.
Source: £sd
