What a mark, a noble, a groat and a guinea were actually worth — and how to read a sum like £4 3s 2½d.
Almost every will, probate inventory, and account you'll meet before 1971 records money in the old £/s/d system — pounds, shillings and pence — and earlier documents add a scattering of older units on top: marks, nobles, groats, crowns. None of it is intuitive if you've only ever used decimal currency. This is a working reference, not a history of coinage — enough to actually read a figure and know what it means.
From medieval times until decimalisation on 15 February 1971, British currency worked like this:
12 pence (d) = 1 shilling (s)
20 shillings (s) = 1 pound (£)
240 pence (d) = 1 pound (£)
The "d" for pence comes from the Latin denarius; the "s" for shillings from solidus; the "£" for pounds from libra — all three drawn from the Roman monetary system, which is why the abbreviations don't obviously match the English words.
A sum was written with all three units together, largest to smallest — for example, £4 3s 2d, or in the older slash notation, 4 / 3 / 2. An even number of shillings with no pence was written with a dash: 6s – or 6/–. Fractions of a penny (see farthings, below) were shown as a simple fraction: 2½d.
| Name | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Farthing | ¼d | Quarter of a penny |
| Halfpenny | ½d | Often written "ha'penny" |
| Penny | 1d | Plural "pence" when counting an amount, "pennies" for the coins themselves |
| Groat | 4d | In circulation until 1662, briefly revived in the 19th century |
| Sixpence | 6d | Nicknamed a "tanner" |
| Shilling | 1s (12d) | Nicknamed a "bob" |
| Florin | 2s | Two shillings |
| Half-crown | 2s 6d | |
| Noble | 6s 8d | An older gold coin; one-third of a mark |
| Crown | 5s | A quarter of a pound |
| Mark | 13s 4d | Never a physical coin — a unit "of account" only, two-thirds of a pound |
| Pound / sovereign | £1 (20s) | "Sovereign" was also the name of the gold coin worth £1 |
| Guinea | £1 1s (21s) | First minted in the late 17th century — not used in documents before then |
Because the base isn't 10 or 100, converting an old sum takes a little arithmetic. The reliable method: convert everything down to pence, add it up, then convert back.
A probate inventory values goods at £12 7s 9d. In pence: (12 × 240) + (7 × 12) + 9 = 2880 + 84 + 9 = 2,973 pence. That figure is mainly useful for comparing two sums exactly — for reading the document itself, the £/s/d form as written is what to transcribe and quote.
It is tempting to want to know what an old sum was "really worth" — but converting historic money into today's purchasing power is a much less exact exercise than converting between old units, because prices, wages, and what money could buy have changed enormously and unevenly across centuries. The Bank of England and The National Archives both publish inflation calculators that give a rough modern equivalent, and they're worth using for a sense of scale — but treat the result as an order-of-magnitude estimate, not a precise conversion, and always keep the original figure as the document states it.
Denominations and values checked against university manuscript-collection reference guides (University of Nottingham) and the Bank of England's own pre-decimal currency converter (updated September 2025). Decimalisation date confirmed as 15 February 1971.
Damaged or abbreviated sums in a will or inventory can be genuinely hard to pin down. Send me a photograph or scan for a free sample transcription.
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