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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;PaddyB, post: 2902587, member: 40017&quot;]Ah yes - denominations are much more complicated! Over the centuries we have had dozens of different sizes of coins, many of them short lived and most of them unmarked. </p><p><br /></p><p>In part this was people &quot;knew&quot; what each coin was at the time, but also because the way of trading was different in the past: in any big transaction you didn&#039;t trust to anything written on the coin, you weighed them - usually in bulk - and gave value accordingly. This was because many European coins were in common circulation, and in any case nominal value coins may have been clipped to &quot;harvest&quot; the silver (or gold).</p><p><br /></p><p>A few simple guides:</p><p>I don&#039;t believe British Gold coins have ever had a marked denomination.</p><p>For many years there was only one silver coin - the penny. Change was given by breaking it into half or quarters along the cross lines.</p><p>By Elizabeth I&#039;s time there were lots of different denominations from a Crown (60 pennies) down to a farthing (1/4 penny).</p><p>Small silver coins began to bear marks around 1603 - usually in Roman numerals on the obverse, before or after the bust, in numbers of pennies.</p><p>In Charles II&#039;s reign the smaller coins indicated their value by the number of interlocking &quot;C&quot;s on the reverse. James II used Capital &quot;I&quot;s.</p><p>In the 18th century the smaller coins had a number on the reverse for the number of pennies - bigger coins (sixpence and above), you were still expected to know.</p><p>In the 19th century the sixpence began to be marked as such, as was the new Florin (= 2 shillings or 24 pennies) but the rest remained unmarked. The half-crown (30 pennies) and the shilling (12 pennies) followed in 1893.</p><p>Thereafter most silver (and later cupro-nickel) has been marked except the Crown.</p><p>... and I will leave bronze to another time![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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