THE VIDEO SHELF · english coinage history
Pounds, shillings, and pence: a history of English coinage
Lindybeige gives an hour-long history of English coinage and the problems of maintaining a trustworthy currency. It ends with an explanation of why the pounds, shillings and pence system worked so well.
Why HN readers recommended it
Pointed to as the best explanation of pre-decimal British money, including forgery and the guinea.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Lindybeige
- Topic
- english coinage history
- Format
- explainer
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 3
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2021–2026
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
A better explanation is Lindybeige's video about pre-decimal British coinage: [VIDEO] It goes into the underlying mindset behind this seemingly bizarre system. Basically: - the penny was always the fundamental unit. every denomination was defined in terms of the penny, not the pound or the …
_dain_ on Hacker News · 2023-03
In Understanding British Money: What's a Quid? A Shilling?I agree. [Time sink warning] [Fractions warning] There is an interesting video by Lindybeige that explains the old British coin system. The part about the guinea is at minute 42, and in particular explains why it was worth 21 instead of 20. [VIDEO]
gus_massa on Hacker News · 2026-06
In Spanish traders set the standard forGnuCash database design
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.