History of the English penny

For silver pennies produced after 1820 see Maundy money

The silver penny was introduced to England around the year 785 by King Offa of Mercia, in the English midlands. The currency was decimalised in 1971 which meant the discontinuation of the penny at that time. A new penny was minted that was worth 2.4 times the value of the old coin.

The name penny comes from the Old English pennige (roughly pronounced 'penny-yeah', IPA [penije]). It shares its roots with the German pfennig, which was a German denomination. The coins were similar in size and weight to the continental deniers of the period. The abbreviation d. comes from the Roman denomination denarius and was used until after Decimalisation in 1971.

Anglo-Saxon silver pennies were the currency used to pay the Danegeld, essentially protection money paid to the Vikings so that they would go away and not ravage the land: as an illustration of how heavy a burden the Danegeld was, more Anglo-Saxon pennies of the decades around the first Millennium have been found in Denmark than in England. In the reign of Ethelred the Unready (978–1016), some 40 million pennies were paid to the Danes, while King Canute (Knut) (1016–1035) paid off his invasion army with another 20 million pennies. This adds up to about 93 tons of silver, equivalent to £250,000 at the time, and worth about £10 million in today's money (however its purchasing power at that time may have exceeded £100 million and as high £1 billion of today's currency).

The penny initially weighed 20 to 22.5 grains of pure silver (1.3 to 1.5 grams). It was standardized to 1/240th of a Tower pound (approx. 350g). The alloy was set to sterling silver of 925/1000 in 1158 under king Henry II. The weight standard was changed to the Troy pound (373.242 grams) in 1528 under king Henry VIII, i.e. a pennyweight became about 1.555 grams. As the purity and weight of the coin was critical, the name of the moneyer who manufactured the coin, and at which mint, often appeared on the reverse side of the coin.

From the time of King Offa, the penny was the only denomination of coin minted in England for some five hundred years, until the attempted gold coinage issue of King Henry III, and the later issues of King Edward III.

British penny from 1964.

See also: British coinage

Pennies by Period

• The Early Normans and the Anarchy (1066–1154)
• The Plantagenets (1154–1485)
• The Tudors (1485–1603)
• The Stuarts and the Commonwealth (1603–1714)
• The Hanoverians (1714–1901)
• The Twentieth Century Penny (1901–1970)

• Decimal Day, 1971
• Post-decimalisation (1971–present)

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia article. Browse Wikipedia for more information.