skip.knox submitted a new blog post:
History for Fantasy Writers: Money
by E.L. Skip Knox
Medieval money can be divided into two distinctly different types: the kind that existed and the kind that didn't.
Real money was currency, specifically coins of various qualities and weights. The other kind was called "money of account." This was purely an accounting unit, used for large-scale transactions and never turned into a physical object. When you read about a silver mark in the Middle Ages, do not picture a coin. No such coin existed before modern times.
Currency
By far the most common coin throughout the Middle Ages was the silver penny, known in Latin as the denarius. The word was preserved in the Romance languages as the denier in French, the dinero in Spanish, denari in Italian, and denar in Hungarian. The Germanic languages had their own term: pfennige in German, penningen in Dutch, and pence or penny in English. The coin was typically quite small. Now that you know the term and the coin, you understand why pence in English is abbreviated with a lower-case d, as in: £5 3s 5d. The "s" is for shillings.
In the 13th century a larger coin came into existence, known in English as a groat (groschen, gros, gros tournois). The word...
Continue reading the Original Blog Post.
History for Fantasy Writers: Money
by E.L. Skip Knox
Medieval money can be divided into two distinctly different types: the kind that existed and the kind that didn't.
Real money was currency, specifically coins of various qualities and weights. The other kind was called "money of account." This was purely an accounting unit, used for large-scale transactions and never turned into a physical object. When you read about a silver mark in the Middle Ages, do not picture a coin. No such coin existed before modern times.
Currency
By far the most common coin throughout the Middle Ages was the silver penny, known in Latin as the denarius. The word was preserved in the Romance languages as the denier in French, the dinero in Spanish, denari in Italian, and denar in Hungarian. The Germanic languages had their own term: pfennige in German, penningen in Dutch, and pence or penny in English. The coin was typically quite small. Now that you know the term and the coin, you understand why pence in English is abbreviated with a lower-case d, as in: £5 3s 5d. The "s" is for shillings.
In the 13th century a larger coin came into existence, known in English as a groat (groschen, gros, gros tournois). The word...
Continue reading the Original Blog Post.