Before paper and coins, the most secure currency was a piece of split wood
In short: Long before digital ledgers, people used notched sticks to record debts. These 'split tallies' were virtually impossible to forge, as the jagged, natural edges of the wood ensured that only the original two halves could ever perfectly reunite to verify a transaction.
The concept of the tally stick dates back to the Upper Palaeontological era. Archaeological finds like the Lebombo bone, a baboon's fibula from Eswatini dated to roughly 44,200–43,000 years ago, feature 29 notches. Other prehistoric artifacts, such as the 30,000-year-old Wolf bone from Czechoslovakia and the Ishango bone from the Belgian Congo (c. 18,000–20,000 BC), suggest that notched bones served as early mnemonic tools for recording quantities.
While single sticks served as simple memory aids, the 'split tally' became a sophisticated financial instrument in medieval Europe. To document a debt, a piece of hazelwood was notched and then split lengthwise. One part, the 'stock,' was kept by the lender, while the 'foil' went to the receiver. Because the split followed the wood's natural irregularities, any attempt to alter the notches would be immediately obvious when the pieces were rejoined. This system was so robust it was recognized in the 1804 Napoleonic Code.
In England, around 1100, Henry I used tallies to record tax payments, which eventually evolved into 'wooden money'. These sticks circulated in secondary markets and even helped form the Bank of England; in 1697, the bank issued £1 million in stock by exchanging £800,000 of these tallies at par. The era of the tally ended spectacularly in 1834, when the burning of six centuries of financial records in Parliament's furnaces triggered a massive fire that destroyed much of the building.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Tally stick
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