Archive for the ‘News’ Category

In Britain we are holdng on to the pound while most of the rest of Europe, incuding Ireland, has moved over to the Euro.

With Christmas just past I was reminded of the old tradition of stirring in silver sixpences into the pudding and it reminded me of the days when we had a wide variety of coins, until decimilisation in 1971, with all their colloquial names.

The Pound is still often called a ‘Quid’
The Pound was divided into 20 Shillings
A shilling, or ‘Bob’, was worth 12 pence
A sixpence was worth 6 pence (not surprisingly) and was called a ‘tanner’
A Crown was worth 5 shillings and a half crown was 2 shillings and sixpence.
A Florin was worth 2 shillings
A guinea (which was long extinct by decimalisation) was 1 pound and 1 shilling.
A pretty 12 sided coin was worth 3 pence, called the threepenny piece (pronounced ‘thruppance’)
Half a penny was a halfpenny (pronounced ha’penny)

It is a wonder how we managed to work out it all out! There was a lot of resistance to converting to pence (100 pence or ‘p’ to the pound), just as there is now resistance to getting rid of the pound all together. For many years considered the reserve currency of the World, it has had such a glorious history!

We often tell potential visitors to Britain and Ireland that you do not have to travel far to find places of interest. Every town and village, and even the countryside, is steeped in history. These countries really are living museums!

Take our own village, Barford, in Warwickshire. It was mentioned in the Domesday Book, but goes back many years before this. The name derived from it’s position on the banks of the River Avon where the river is quite shallow. Hence it was the perfect place to ford the river with your load of barley, or other grain, to take to market at Warwick. ‘Barley Ford’ soon became shortened to Barford.

We have a web site dedicated to the heritage of Barford. I hope you find it as interesting as we do!

You can tell a lot about a history of a British town by the names of the streets. For instance:
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In researching the last blog entry on place names I used the Domesday Book web site. It dawned on me that many people, although they may have heard of it, may not know exactly what it is.
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The names of the towns and villages in the UK and Ireland were largely derived from their environment. You can often tell from the name the time period in which they were founded. For instance, ‘cester’, as in Gloucester, denotes a Roman settlement, usually the place of a fort. (Cester, by the way, is pronouced ‘ster’ so Gloucester is pronounced ‘Gloster’.)

Here are some more examples The Origins of Place Names