Pound sterling
In September 2022, after a mini-budget of tax cuts funded by borrowing, the pound sterling hit an all-time low of just over 1.03 US dollars. The currency that tumbled that day is the oldest in the world still in continuous use. In 2022 it was the fourth-most-traded currency on the foreign exchange market, after the US dollar, the euro and the Japanese yen. Those three, plus the renminbi, join sterling in the basket that sets the value of IMF special drawing rights. As of late 2022, sterling was also the fourth most-held reserve currency in global reserves.
The unit at the center of all this carries a strange name. A pound is a measure of weight, yet the pound sterling began life as a handful of tiny silver pennies. This documentary asks why a silver coin gave its name to a modern currency, and why the pound sign is a letter L. It follows the gold, wars, empire and political gambles that pushed the value of the pound up and down. It also asks why Britain resisted a decimal system for over a century, and what happened when it tied the pound to the Deutsche Mark and then walked away from the euro.
King Offa of Mercia, who reigned from 757 to 796, gets the credit for the origins of sterling. He introduced a coin called a sterling, made by dividing a Tower pound of silver into 240 parts. That pound weighed 5,400 grains, or 349.9 grams. In practice the coins varied in weight, and 240 of them seldom added up to a full pound. No shilling or pound coins existed yet, so those units served only as an accounting convenience. Halfpennies and farthings were struck too, but small change usually came from cutting a whole penny into pieces.
In 1158 King Henry II introduced a new coinage, known as the Tealby penny. A Tower pound of silver at 92.5 percent purity was minted into 240 pennies, each holding 20.82 grains, or 1.349 grams, of fine silver. This alloy was called sterling silver. It was harder than the 99.9 percent fine silver traditionally used, so the coins wore down more slowly. The English penny stayed nearly unchanged from the year 800. It was a rare exception while coinage across the rest of Europe was progressively debased.
The Latin phrase librae sterilensium appears in the 12th-century Historia Ecclesiastica of Orderic Vitalis, the earliest known use of the term. Where the word sterling itself came from is unclear. It first shows up in the 11th and 12th centuries, which suggests it described the new, heavier penny introduced by the Normans. The Oxford English Dictionary favours an Old English form meaning coin with a star, since a pair of stars appeared on certain Norman pennies. The numismatist Philip Grierson disagrees. He points out that the starred penny was minted only between 1077 and 1080 and made up a tiny fraction of Norman coinage. Grierson proposes a word meaning stout or strong. He notes that the Roman solidus had a name of similar meaning and was also introduced to replace a lighter coin. An older theory credited Easterlings, meaning Hanseatic merchants, but it fails on historical and phonological grounds.
The letters L, s and d on old British price tags all come from Latin. L stood for libra, the Roman pound of weight, which became the English Tower pound. The s came from solidus and the d from denarius, both Roman coins. The arrangement of twenty shillings to the pound and twelve pence to the shilling was borrowed from the livre carolingienne, a system Charlemagne introduced to the Frankish Empire. A penny was in turn split into four farthings.
A price of 3 shillings and 6 pence was written 3/6 and spoken as three and six. Five shillings was written 5/- when no pence were involved. Coins carried their own names, such as the florin at 2/-, the crown at 5/-, the sovereign at one pound and the guinea at 21 shillings. Some prices, such as professional fees and auction prices for works of art, were still quoted in guineas long after guinea coins disappeared.
The Bank of England has used only the single-bar version of the pound sign since 1975. Older writing put a capital L in black-letter type before the numerals, or an italic l after them. The Royal Mint was still using that style as late as 1939. In global finance the code is GBP, which joins GB, the country code for the United Kingdom, to the first letter of pound. Many stocks on the London Stock Exchange are quoted in penny sterling under the unofficial code GBX. In wholesale currency markets, traders call the sterling-dollar rate cable, a habit from the mid-19th century when the rate travelled by transatlantic cable.
Before decimalisation almost every British coin had a widely recognised nickname, such as tanner for the sixpence and bob for the shilling. Most have since faded, surviving mainly inside proverbs. Quid, the common slang for a pound, stays the same in singular and plural, except in the phrase quids in. Its origin is unknown. One theory points to scudo, the name of several Italian currency units, brought by Italian immigrants. Another points to the Latin quid pro quo, meaning what for what. The word nicker, also the same in singular and plural, can refer to a pound as well.
In 1663 the guinea was introduced, struck from 22-karat gold with 7.6885 grams of fine gold in each coin. It was initially worth one pound, or 20 shillings, and its price in shillings was not legally fixed. Its trade value kept rising above 21 shillings, which reflected the poor state of clipped, underweight silver coins tolerated for payment. Full-weight milled shillings were hoarded and exported to the Continent, while clipped, hand-hammered ones stayed in circulation, as Gresham's law describes.
From the mid-17th century, around 28,000 metric tons of silver flowed to China, mostly from European powers, in exchange for tea and other goods. The Chinese insisted on settling in silver. England at first exported to other European nations and demanded silver in return, until the British East India Company fostered the indirect sale of opium to the Chinese. At home, a rising merchant class wanted silver tableware. Silversmiths treated coins as raw material whose fineness the government had already checked, so sterling silver coins were melted down at an accelerating rate. An Act of the Parliament of England in 1697 tried to stop this by raising the minimum fineness for wrought plate from 92.5 percent to the Britannia silver standard of 95.83 percent.
Sir Isaac Newton, Master of the Mint, presided over the fixing of the gold guinea at 21 shillings in 1717. The underweight silver coins were left unaddressed, and the gold-silver ratio stood at 15.2. The result was a firmer footing in gold guineas than in silver shillings, and a de facto gold standard. Silver and copper tokens issued by private entities eased the shortage of small change until the Great Recoinage of 1816.
During the American War of Independence and the Napoleonic Wars, Bank of England notes were legal tender and floated in value against gold. Between 1797 and 1804 the Bank also counterstamped Spanish dollars with a small head of the King so they could circulate. In 1816 the gold standard was officially adopted, and silver coins were minted at 66 shillings to a troy pound of sterling silver. That made them token issues, not coins holding their value in precious metal. The sovereign followed in 1817, struck in 22-carat gold with 7.32238 grams of fine gold, and it replaced the guinea as the standard gold coin.
As other countries adopted the gold standard, conversion rates could be read straight from their gold content. One pound sterling equalled US$4.87, Can$4.87 and 9.46 roubles in Russia. After the International Monetary Conference of 1867 in Paris, the United Kingdom discussed joining the Latin Monetary Union. A Royal Commission on International Coinage examined the question and decided against it.
The gold standard was suspended at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and Bank of England and Treasury notes became legal tender. Before the war the United Kingdom held 40 percent of the world's overseas investments. Afterwards it owed £850 million, and interest swallowed some 40 percent of government spending. Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Chancellor Austen Chamberlain tried a deflationary policy, which only led to the Depression of 1920-21. By 1920 the silver coinage had been debased from .925 fine to .500 fine, because silver rose from an average 27/6d per troy pound between 1894 and 1913 to 89/6d in August 1920.
A version of the gold standard returned in 1925, with the pound fixed at its pre-war peg. Holders could now exchange currency only for gold bullion, not for coins. On the 21st of September 1931, during the Great Depression, the arrangement was abandoned and sterling suffered an initial devaluation of some 25 percent. Sterling has been a fiat currency ever since, valued by its acceptance in the national and international economy. In 1940 an agreement with the United States pegged it at US$4.03, down from US$4.86 only a year earlier.
The American journalist Nellie Bly carried Bank of England notes on her 1889-1890 trip around the world in 72 days. By the 19th century, sterling notes were widely accepted outside Britain. In Canada the gold sovereign was legal tender alongside the Canadian dollar. Several colonies and dominions adopted the pound as their own currency, including Australia, Barbados, British West Africa, Cyprus, Fiji, British India, the Irish Free State, Jamaica, New Zealand, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. The South African pound kept parity with sterling throughout its existence. The Australian pound drifted away from parity after the gold standard ended. Together with other sterling-linked currencies, these formed the core of the sterling area.
The original English colonies on mainland North America stayed outside the sterling area. The silver shortage in England coincided with their formative years. Through equitable trade, and rather less equitable piracy, the Spanish milled dollar became their most common coin.
In the 17th century, Scots currency was pegged to sterling at £12 Scots to £1 sterling. In 1707 England and Scotland merged into the Kingdom of Great Britain. The Treaty of Union made sterling its currency, and the pound Scots was soon replaced at that pegged value. In 1801 Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland were united, but the Irish pound was not replaced by sterling until January 1826. The long-standing conversion rate was £13 Irish to £12 sterling. In 1928, six years after the Anglo-Irish Treaty restored Irish autonomy within the British Empire, the Irish Free State created a new Irish pound, initially pegged at par to sterling.
The Crown Dependencies of Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man use either sterling or a currency pegged to it at par. So do a third of the British Overseas Territories. The Manx, Jersey and Guernsey pounds are issued independently, and the Bank of England does not regulate them. Bank of England notes are legal tender on the islands, forming a one-way de facto currency union. Internationally these are treated as local issues of sterling, so they have no ISO 4217 codes. The Falkland Islands, Gibraltar and Saint Helena pounds are fixed 1:1 to the British pound and do have their own codes. Other territories peg to the US dollar or the New Zealand dollar. On the 1st of January 2008 the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia followed the Republic of Cyprus into the euro, making them the only territory under British sovereignty to officially use it.
The Bank of England was founded in 1694, and the Bank of Scotland followed a year later. The first sterling notes appeared shortly after the English bank's foundation, with the amount handwritten at the time of issue. From 1745 notes were printed in denominations from £20 to £1,000, with any odd shillings added by hand. Further denominations arrived over time, with £10 notes in 1759, £5 in 1793 and £1 and £2 in 1797. The two lowest were withdrawn after the Napoleonic wars. In 1855 the notes became entirely printed.
The Bank of Scotland began issuing notes in 1695, denominated in sterling in values up to £100, even though the pound Scots was still Scotland's currency. That made it the first bank in Europe to issue its own paper currency, and the longest continuous issuer of banknotes in the world. The Royal Bank of Scotland joined from 1727. Both banks also issued some notes in guineas. In the 19th century, regulations capped Scottish notes at a smallest value of £1, a note not permitted in England.
The Bank of Ireland began issuing sterling notes after sterling was extended to Ireland in 1825, and other Irish banks followed. Among them were unusual denominations such as 30/- and £3, with £100 as the highest. In 1826 banks at least 65 miles from London were allowed to issue their own paper money. From 1844 new banks were excluded from issuing notes in England and Wales, but not in Scotland and Ireland. Private notes dwindled in England and Wales and proliferated elsewhere, and the last English private banknotes were issued in 1921.
In 1914 the Treasury introduced notes for 10/- and £1 to replace gold coins. They circulated until 1928, when Bank of England notes replaced them. During the Second World War the Bank of England feared mass forgery by the Nazis, known as Operation Bernhard. It stopped producing every note of £10 and above, leaving only 10/-, £1 and £5 notes. Scottish and Northern Irish issues were unaffected. Repeated devaluations and spiralling inflation brought the £10 note back in 1964, followed by £20 in 1970 and £50 in 1981. Bank of England £1 notes were withdrawn in 1988, and among Scottish and Northern Irish banks only the Royal Bank of Scotland kept issuing that denomination.
Modern UK notes combine raised print, watermarks, an embedded metallic thread, holograms and fluorescent ink visible only under UV lamps. Three printing techniques are involved, and the notes use a total of 85 specialized inks. The Bank of England also produces notes called giants and titans. A giant is worth one million pounds and a titan one hundred million pounds, and both are used only within the banking system.
The Northern Bank £5 note, issued in 2000 by Northern Ireland's Northern Bank, was the only polymer banknote in circulation until 2016. The Bank of England introduced its polymer £5 in September 2016, and the paper £5 was withdrawn on the 5th of May 2017. A polymer £10 followed on the 14th of September 2017, with the paper note withdrawn on the 1st of March 2018. A polymer £20 arrived on the 20th of February 2020, and a polymer £50 in 2021.
Bank of England notes are legal tender for any amount in England and Wales, but not in Scotland or Northern Ireland. The Bank sets monetary policy and regulates the notes of seven authorized banks in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Notes from Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar and the Falklands may be offered anywhere in the UK, though no one must accept them. Merchants in England generally accept Scottish and Northern Irish notes, but some who are unfamiliar with them may refuse. Banks exchange all of these notes at face value, although some people in the UK have had trouble exchanging Falkland Islands notes.
Before 1971, a handful of British change might hold coins more than 100 years old, bearing the heads of any of five monarchs. That mix of old and new survived partly because decimalisation was stalled for generations. In 1824 Sir John Wrottesley, MP for Staffordshire, asked the House of Commons whether decimalising the currency had been considered. He raised it again in 1833. In 1847 John Bowring, MP for Kilmarnock Burghs, raised it once more, and his efforts led to the florin in 1848. Valued at one-tenth of a pound, it was in effect the first decimal coin in the United Kingdom.
John Benjamin Smith, MP for Stirling Burghs, pressed the matter in 1853. Chancellor William Gladstone soon announced that "the great question of a decimal coinage" was "now under serious consideration". In June 1855 William Brown, MP for Lancashire Southern, tabled a full proposal. He wanted the pound divided into one thousand parts called mils, noting that the pound then equalled 960 farthings, which could be rounded up to a thousand. The result was a Royal Commission. Two of its appointed members, the banker Lord Overstone and John Hubbard, Governor of the Bank of England, were hostile to the idea. Their opposition effectively quashed decimalisation in Britain for over a hundred years.
British colonial territories moved first, and several used William Brown's idea of 1,000 parts. Hong Kong decimalised from 1863 to 1866, and the Palestine Mandate from 1926 until 1948. Cyprus did so from 1955 until 1960, and the division survived on the island as part of the Cypriot pound until 1983.
In 1966 the UK Government decided to put a plan to convert sterling into a decimal currency in the Queen's Speech. On the 15th of February 1971, the shilling and the penny gave way to a single subdivision, the new penny, worth 2.4d. The pound now held 100 pence. The symbol for the penny became p, so an amount such as 50p is often pronounced fifty pee. The old d was not reused, to avoid confusion between the two units. The word new vanished from coins minted after 1981. The florin, redesignated as ten new pence, survived the changeover, and examples stayed in British coinage until 1993.
The first decimal coins came in 1968, with cupro-nickel 5p and 10p pieces matching the size and value of the shilling and the florin. In 1969 a curved heptagonal 50p coin replaced the ten shilling note. A 20p coin appeared in 1982, followed by a round brass £1 coin in 1983 and a bi-metallic £2 coin in 1998. In April 2008 an extensive redesign was unveiled, with parts of the Royal Shield on the reverse of the small coins and the whole shield on the pound. In 2017 a twelve-sided bi-metallic £1 coin was introduced to reduce forgery. The old round pound ceased to be legal tender on the 15th of October 2017. The oldest coins still circulating are the copper 1p and 2p pieces introduced in 1971.
On the 19th of September 1949, after months of denials, the government devalued the pound by 30.5 percent to US$2.80. The move prompted several other currencies to be devalued against the dollar. It happened inside the Bretton Woods system, which governed post-war exchange rates. Sterling came under renewed pressure in 1961-1964 and 1966, as speculators sold pounds for dollars. In summer 1966 the Wilson government tightened exchange controls. Tourists were banned from taking more than £50 out of the country in travellers' cheques and remittances, plus £15 in cash. That restriction was not lifted until 1979. On the 18th of November 1967 sterling was devalued by 14.3 percent to US$2.40.
With the breakdown of Bretton Woods, sterling floated from August 1971. It rose almost to 2.65 in March 1972, from 2.42, the upper bound of its old band. The sterling area effectively ended then, as most members chose to float against both sterling and the dollar.
James Callaghan became Prime Minister in 1976 and was immediately told that the economy faced huge problems, according to documents the National Archives released in 2006. Inflation had risen to nearly 27 percent in 1975. In April of that year The Wall Street Journal advised selling sterling investments, in a story that ended "goodbye, Great Britain. It was nice knowing you". Callaghan was given three possible outcomes: a disastrous free fall, an unacceptable siege economy, or a deal with key allies to prop up the pound while painful reforms were made. The United States feared the crisis could endanger NATO and the European Economic Community. In November 1976 the International Monetary Fund announced the conditions for a loan, including deep cuts in public spending.
The Conservative Party took office in 1979 on a programme of fiscal austerity. Interest rates rose under a monetarist policy of targeting the money supply, and sterling at first rocketed to US$2.40. The high exchange rate was widely blamed for the deep recession of 1981. Sterling then fell sharply, reaching a low of US$1.03 in March 1985, before climbing to US$1.70 in December 1989.
In 1988 Chancellor Nigel Lawson decided that sterling should shadow the Deutsche Mark. Low interest rates followed, the economy boomed, and inflation rose rapidly. After German reunification in 1990, the reverse happened. High German borrowing costs, worsened by the decision to convert the Ostmark to the D-Mark at 1:1, left British interest rates far too high for domestic circumstances. A housing decline and recession followed.
On the 8th of October 1990 the Thatcher government decided to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, setting £1 at DM 2.95. Black Wednesday, the 16th of September 1992, ended that. Remarks by Bundesbank president Helmut Schlesinger, suggesting the pound would eventually have to be devalued, helped trigger the pressure. Interest rates jumped from 10 percent to 15 percent in a failed attempt to hold the pound above the limits, and the rate fell to DM 2.20. Those who had argued for a lower rate felt vindicated, because the cheaper pound encouraged exports and contributed to the prosperity of the 1990s.
In 1997 the new Labour government handed day-to-day control of interest rates to the Bank of England. The Bank must keep inflation, measured by the Consumer Price Index, very close to 2 percent a year. If it strays more than one percentage point either way, the Governor must write an open letter to the Chancellor. That first happened on the 17th of April 2007, when CPI inflation was reported at 3.1 percent and Retail Prices Index inflation at 4.8 percent.
In 2007 Chancellor Gordon Brown ruled out membership of the eurozone for the foreseeable future. Tony Blair's government had pledged a referendum if "five economic tests" were met, and the UK would also have had to satisfy the Maastricht criteria. The idea was always controversial, partly because sterling symbolised British sovereignty. A BBC poll of 1,000 people in December 2008 found 71 percent would vote no, 23 percent yes and 6 percent unsure. The UK held an opt-out, as did Denmark. On the 31st of January 2020, after the UK left the European Union, the Bank of England ended its membership of the European System of Central Banks.
On the 17th of April 2007, sterling hit a 15-year high against the dollar, with £1 reaching US$2 the day before. On the 7th of November 2007 it reached a 26-year high of US$2.1161. After the 2008 financial crisis it fell sharply, to US$1.38 on the 23rd of January 2009. Its euro rate reached an all-time low of €1.0219 on the 29th of December 2008. On the 5th of March 2009 the Bank of England announced it would create £75 billion of new money, through quantitative easing, to buy assets such as government bonds. Chancellor Alistair Darling had authorised up to £150 billion. By the 5th of November 2009, some £175 billion had been injected. When the final increase came in July 2012, the program peaked at £375 billion, equal to one third of the national debt.
The night before the 2016 EU referendum, £1 bought €1.30. The next day it bought €1.23, a 5 percent overnight fall against the euro. By October 2016 the rate was €1.12, down 14 percent since the vote. Against the US dollar, sterling fell from US$1.466 to US$1.3694 when the result was revealed, and to US$1.2232 by October 2016, a 16 percent fall. Inflation then climbed in 2021, with RPI reaching 7.1 percent, CPI 5.1 percent and CPIH 4.6 percent. From 1971 to 2023, the buying power of a pound fell by 94.4 percent.
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Common questions
Why is the pound sterling called sterling?
The origin of the word sterling is unclear. The Oxford English Dictionary favours an Old English term meaning coin with a star, while the numismatist Philip Grierson proposes a word meaning stout or strong. The word first appears in the 11th and 12th centuries, probably to describe the heavier Norman penny.
Who created the first pound sterling coin?
King Offa of Mercia, who reigned from 757 to 796, introduced a sterling coin made by dividing a Tower pound of silver into 240 parts. That pound weighed 5,400 grains, or 349.9 grams.
Why does the pound sterling use the symbol £?
The £ symbol comes from L, the abbreviation for libra, the Roman pound of weight. A pound sterling was literally a Tower pound of sterling silver. The Bank of England has used only the single-bar version of the sign since 1975.
When did the pound sterling become decimal?
Sterling was decimalised on the 15th of February 1971, when the shilling and the penny were replaced by the new penny. The pound has since been divided into 100 pence, and the word new was dropped from coins after 1981.
What happened to the pound sterling on Black Wednesday?
On Black Wednesday, the 16th of September 1992, Britain was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Interest rates jumped from 10 percent to 15 percent without stopping the fall, and the rate dropped to DM 2.20.
When did the pound sterling leave the gold standard for good?
On the 21st of September 1931, during the Great Depression, the gold standard was abandoned and sterling initially devalued by some 25 percent. Sterling has been a fiat currency ever since.
Which central bank controls the pound sterling?
The Bank of England is the central bank for sterling. It sets monetary policy, issues its own banknotes and regulates note issuance by the seven authorized banks in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
How much has the pound sterling lost in buying power since 1971?
From 1971 to 2023, the buying power of the pound sterling fell by 94.4 percent.
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- 128NewsUK inflation since 1948Simon Rogers et al. — 12 November 2013
- 129Inflation and price indicesOffice for National Statistics — 15 December 2021
- 130The new 12-sided £1 coinThe Royal Mint
- 131Notes recently withdrawn from circulationBank of England
- 132MagazineThe inkjet counterfeiter (Wired UK)Adam Higginbotham — Wired
- 133NewsBritain's £1m and £100m banknotesChris Bowlby — 26 January 2013
- 134Security by Design – A closer look at Bank of England notesBank of England
- 136NewsScottish and Northern Ireland banknotesBank of England
- 140NewsCan I spend Scottish money in England?Mark King — 12 September 2012
- 145NewsMan arrested for using £100 coin in Tesco wins £5,000 in damagesRyan Paton et al. — 29 October 2021
- 147Other British Islands' NotesBank of England
- 148Can I use coinage from United Kingdom Overseas Territories?royalmint.com — 11 July 2014
- 149ReportInflation: the value of the pound 1750–2005Dominic Webb — House of Commons Library — 13 February 2006
- 150JournalConsumer Price Inflation since 1750Jim O'Donoghue et al. — Office for National Statistics — March 2004