Thruppence and history
Paying with physical money, especially pocket change, is going away. That will make future historians’ work harder.
Our astronomer did his graduate work in England, which means he became familiar with different ways of doing things. He found driving on the left-hand side of the road much easier to get used to than he expected. In time, he became familiar with the currency, coins of different shapes and sizes and values than the US equivalents. Recently, he was going through the pocket change he retains from that period, and found a George V three pence piece (“thruppence”). It was marked “1933,” which is long before he visited the island. Indeed, he arrived well after the shift to decimal currency, which replaced shillings and thruppence pieces with a simple 100 pence to the pound. (A shilling of 12 pence makes a thruppence coin understandable: a quarter shilling. It makes less sense as a strange fraction of 100.)
So the George V thruppence had shown a remarkable tenacity, lasting decades after the demise of pre-decimal currency. It resembles a US dime in size, which might mean it circulated unnoticed among expatriates (and Cambridge is an international place). In any case, it’s still there while his granddaughter’s reign is setting records for longevity. Coins are durable.
Which is one reason historians love them. They can last when paper records, even wooden structures, have long decayed. Mostly they have dates, or information that can be turned into dates. The images and inscriptions give wonderful clues to politics and ideology, sometimes unconsciously. And their circulation tells something about the economy. Sometimes, when other information is quite lacking, they are our only clue about economics. They can be tantalizing: Roman coins found in China, Umayyad dinars imitated in Medieval Europe (by moneyers who have no conception of Arabic writing!).
But, like much of modern life, money is changing. Sometime during the Renaissance paper became a way to transfer money, as Italian banks sought to limit large shipments of precious metals across a bandit-prone Europe. Eventually paper banknotes replaced coins in all but the smallest transactions.
Then came credit cards, on-line banking, paying by waving one’s smartphone. Instead of a pocket-full of coins, now most of our cash exists in the form of digits in a database. The George V thruppence and its fellows in our astronomer’s pocket tell almost nothing about his buying and spending.
And they may vanish altogether. Canada has already eliminated pennies as legal tender, since whatever convenience they have in use is not justified by the cost and trouble of making them. When anyone can pay with a nod of the head, why should anyone touch stamped metal?
Like the demise of letter-writing, the end of coins will cut off a valuable source of information for the historians of future centuries. They are uniquely durable and, in a real sense, honest: their existence cannot be erased at a keystroke. To someone digging up our George V in the year 2756, he will be worth far more than thruppence.
