£sd

.sd is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Sudan.

in the Guildhall Museum of Rochester illustrates the conversion between pence and shillings and shillings and pounds. , which teaches children the value of a shilling £sd (occasionally written Lsd ) is the popular name for the pre-decimal currencies once common throughout Europe. The abbreviation originates from the Latin currency denominations , , and . Under this system, there were 12 in a and 20 (or 240 ) in a . In the countries of the (former) British Empire, these were called pounds, shillings, and pence (pence being the plural of penny), with 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound. Although the names originated from popular coins in the classical Roman Empire, their definitions and the ratios between them were introduced and imposed across Western Europe by Carolingian Emperor Charlemagne. King Offa of Mercia adopted the Frankish silver standard of , , and into Britain in the late 8th century. The £sd system was the standard across much of the European continent for over a thousand years, until the decimalisations of the 18th and 19th centuries. The United Kingdom was one of the few countries that retained it into the 20th century, and so the system became particularly associated with Britain. For much of the 20th century, £sd remained the monetary notation of most countries in the (former) British Empire with the exceptions of Canada and India until the 1960s and 1970s, with Nigeria being the last to abandon it in the form of the Nigerian pound, on 1 January 1973. Historically, similar systems based on Roman coinage were used elsewhere; e.g., the division of the in France and other pre-decimal currencies such as Spain, which had 20 to 1 and 20 to 1 or 5 . The classical Roman Empire originally used a decimal currency system based on the "as" whereby 1 denarius = 10 asses. The silver denarius was the common circulation coin, but accounting was in sestercii. Later Roman Emperors undertook multiple coinage reforms, redefining weights and coins' relative values and introducing new coins and new accounting systems for them. Since most reforms were not even completed before the next one began, the late Roman Empire had a veritable mess of multiple overlapping systems of weights and currencies. Around the 780s, the Frankish emperor Charlemagne created a new uniform system of coinage. He defined the "libra" as a new measure of weight equivalent to around (substantially larger than the old Roman pound of ), and ordered 240 silver units known as denarii to be struck from the new Carolingian pound of pure silver, each denarius containing of silver. To simplify the accounting that would be needed in the new system, Charlemagne also decreed that the pound was divisible into 20 solidi, each of 12 denarii. Thus began the Carolingian monetary system (1l. = 20s. = 240d.). The new coinage and accounting system was imposed uniformly across the vast Carolingian Empire, and was also used in some commerce in neighbouring nations. In the late 8th century, King Offa of Mercia imported the system into Britain to facilitate transactions (notably "Peter's pence") with the Roman Catholic Church (which used the Carolingian coinage system). For some time, the £sd system coexisted with the Viking "mark" accounting system, which had been previously introduced into Danelaw regions. Although £sd ultimately prevailed in Britain, the "mark of account" system lingered on in North Sea trade and areas of Hanseatic influence through much of the Middle Ages. Charlemagne's new monetary system prevailed across much of Western Europe, including France (where the units were known as the livre, sou and denier), Italy (lira, soldo and denaro), the Holy Roman Empire (Pfund, Schilling and Pfennig) and in England (pound, shilling and penny). The English name pound is a Germanic adaptation of the Latin phrase ('a pound weight'). On the Iberian peninsula, the Kingdom of Aragon adopted the Carolingian monetary system (Catalan: lliura, sou and diners), but those of Portugal and Castile (and subsequently Spain) retained the currency system inherited from al-Andalus. During the early Middle Ages, only the denarius (denier) was issued as an actual coin; the libra and solidus were merely units of account. But over time, Europe's silver resources were gradually exhausted and the coins became repeatedly debased by medieval monarchs, prompting the minting of larger coins from the 13th century. It also led to the specification of currencies by mint of origin in contracts and accounting (e.g. a denier parisis, of the Paris mint, contained more actual silver than the very debased denier tournois of Tours). To facilitate larger transactions, gold coins began to be minted in western Europe around the same time. The French franc, introduced in 1360, was the first coin anywhere to represent exactly £1, and the gold "sovereign", first minted in 1489, was the first English £1 coin. As new coins representing various quantities were introduced, expressions in terms of these new coins (guineas, crowns, farthings, etc.) made their way into the common language. However, the £sd system remained intact in ledger accounting. As countries of the British Empire became independent, some abandoned the £sd system quickly, while others retained it almost as long as the UK itself. The United States of America was among the first to drop the £sd system and adopt a decimal currency in 1792, 10 years after independence from the British Empire, but retains many other aspects of the customary units for length and weight. Australia, on the other hand, only changed to using a decimal currency on 14 February 1966. New Zealand did so on 10 July 1967. Still others, notably Ireland, decimalised only when the UK did. The UK abandoned the old penny on Decimal Day, 15 February 1971, when one pound sterling became divided into 100 new pence. This was a change from the system used in the earlier wave of decimalisations in Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia and South Africa, in which the pound was replaced with a new major currency called either the "dollar" or the "rand". The British shilling was replaced by a 5 new pence coin worth one-twentieth of a pound. In Europe, decimalisation of currency (as well as other weights and measures) began in Revolutionary France with the law of 1795 ("Loi du 18 germinal an III", 7 April 1795), replacing the £sd accounting system of the Ancien régime with a system of 1 franc = 10 decimes = 100 centimes. Decimalisation was propagated by France to neighbouring European countries during the Napoleonic wars. By the mid-19th century, most of continental Europe had decimalised, leaving the United Kingdom as the only major country to continue to operate the £sd system. All countries and territories that formerly used the £sd system have now decimalised their currency, with most decimalisations occurring after the Second World War. Malta decimalised its currency in 1972, while Nigeria decimalised in 1973. The British pound sterling and Irish pound were among the last to be decimalised, on 15 February 1971. In places where £sd was used, there were several approaches to decimalisation: The pound remained the base unit (in Malta, using the Maltese name "lira"), but was subdivided into new fractional units of of a pound. The new fractional unit (called the "new penny" in the UK and Ireland and the "cent" in Malta) was worth 2.4 old pence. Malta also created a fractional unit worth of a pound, called the "mil", worth slightly less than a farthing (0.24 old pence). A new base unit (often called the "dollar") was created equal to ten shillings (half a pound), and subdivided into 100 fractional units, with one fractional unit (usually called the "cent") equal to of a shilling or 1.2 old pence. This was the approach adopted in South Africa (as the Rand), Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Fiji and many other countries. A new base unit called the "dollar" was created at parity with the US dollar. This was done in Canada in 1858 and in many places in the West Indies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Bermuda in 1970, as the pound was fixed at US$2.40, i.e. US$1 = 100d., this made the new Bermudian dollar equal to exactly 100 old pence, with the new cent equal to one old penny. Some countries have adopted alternative approaches, such as Ghana, which created a new base unit equal to 100 old pence (not equal to the US dollar), with a fractional unit equal to one old penny, Bahamas, which adopted a new base unit equal to seven shillings, with a fractional unit equal to 0.84 old pence, and The Gambia, which created a new base unit equal to four shillings, with a fractional unit equal to 0.48 old pence. The following table shows the conversion rates of common denominations of coins of the £sd systems. The d, 1d and 3d coins were all demonetised on decimalisation; in the UK and Ireland, the 6d (as 2 p) continued in use until demonetised subsequently. The following coins were not in common circulation in the UK at the time of decimalisation, though the ten shilling note and the pound note were. The half crown might have continued in use as 12 p but had already been demonetised.

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1362729407 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.