The crown (1526-1900) was a large silver coin that was in daily use in Britain from the middle 1500s till 1900. It is the coin most commonly mentioned by Shakespeare: I will stuff your purses full of crowns.
The crown was a bit bigger than an American silver dollar and had almost an ounce of silver: 30.33 grams, reduced 7% to 28.27 grams in 1816. About $13 at the current 2007 price of silver. It fell out of use after 1900.
The crown was less than a pound but more than shilling:
- 1.0 crown = 0.25 pounds = 5 shillings = 60 pence (pennies)
The crown first appeared in 1526 as a gold coin. There were both silver and gold crowns from 1551 to 1662, and then just silver ones after that.
The crown was sometimes called a dollar. Shakespeare calls French ecus crowns. All these coins had a similar value, here given as grams of silver:
- 30.33 English crown (1600s and 1700s)
- 29.50 French ecu (1700s)
- 28.27 English crown (1800s)
- 25.56 Spanish dollar (1700s)
- 24.06 American dollar (1800s)
Rough values of historical currencies in crowns (30 g of silver):
- 867: Athenian talent (-400s)
- 4.2: British guinea (1700s)
- 4.0: British pound (1700s)
- 2.0: Venetian ducat (1500s), Florentine florin (1500s), Dutch guilder (1600s), Byzantine solidus (600s), Arab dinar (600s), Grimm’s piece of gold.
- 1.0: French ecu (1700s)
- 0.85: Spanish dollar or peso or pieces of eight, the silver coin of pirates (1700s)
- 0.80: American dollar (1800s)
- 0.5: Hebrew shekel (-500s), Judas’s piece of silver (maybe)
- 0.4: Indian rupee (1800s), Alexandrian silver tetradrachm (100s)
- 0.3: Babylonian shekel (-500s)
- 0.2: Persian shekel (-400s), British shilling (1700s), American quarter or two bits (1800s)
Smaller currencies in silver pennies (0.5 g of silver):
- 8.67: Athenian drachma (-400s). It was day’s pay for a soldier in Herodotus.
- 6.72: Roman denarius (000s), what the King James Bible calls a penny. See Matthew 20:2 and 22:19. It was a day’s pay for labourers in Jesus’s parables, the coin with Caesar’s image on it.
- 6.4: Spanish real (1700s)
- 6.0: British sixpence (1700s)
- 4.5: American dollar (2007)
- 3.11: denarius of Charlemagne (in common use in western Europe, 800s to 1200s)
- 3.0: deben of Ancient Egypt (-1250)
- 1.68: Roman sesterce (000s)
- 1.6: Athenian obol (-400s)
- 0.250: British farthing (1700s)
- 0.125: British mite (1700s)
Something that I am trying out is to express money as crowns. American dollars are known all over the world and are fine if you are talking about the present day. But if you are talking about the past, dollars are terrible because their value changes too much.
I will use crowns and pennies rounded off to metric values:
- 1 metric crown (c) = 30.00 grams of silver = 60 metric pennies
- 1 metric penny (p) = 0.50 grams of silver
This is very close to the crowns and pennies that Shakespeare and Pepys knew: 30.33 grams and 0.50544 grams.
When I use crowns I will convert it to current American dollars on first mention. Likewise, when I use dollars I will convert it to crowns on first mention. (I try to do the same with English and metric units.)
The value of the American dollar in metric crowns through the years based on the price of silver:
By decade:
- 1800: 0.8017 crowns = $1.00
- 1810: 0.8017
- 1820: 0.8017
- 1830: 0.8017
- 1840: 0.8000
- 1850: 0.8023
- 1860: 0.8023
- 1870: 0.7250
- 1880: 0.9290
- 1890: 0.9817
- 1900: 1.600
- 1910: 1.875
- 1920: 1.598
- 1930: 3.142
- 1940: 2.979
- 1950: 1.296
- 1960: 1.134
- 1970: 0.634
- 1980: 0.1748 *
- 1990: 0.2549
- 2000: 0.2094
- 2010: 0.05134
* I use the 1978 value here since in 1979 and 1980 there was an attempt to corner the silver market. The 1980 value was 0.0632.
By year:
- 2000: 0.2094
- 2001: 0.2372
- 2002: 0.2254
- 2003: 0.2126
- 2004: 0.1554
- 2005: 0.1417
- 2006: 0.08980
- 2007: 0.07747
- 2008: 0.06917
- 2009: 0.07066
- 2010: 0.05134
- 2011: 0.02952
- 2012: 0.03328
- 2013: 0.04357
- 2014: 0.05434
- 2015: 0.06612
- 2016: 0.06047
- 2017: 0.06275 (January 9th)
– Abagond, 2007, 2017.
See also:
- Kitco: Historical price of silver
- Money in:
- c. 1500: Money in Leonardo’s time
- c. 1600: Money in Shakespeare’s time
- c. 1700:
- c. 1800:
- c. 1900: Money in the time of the 1897 Sears Catalogue
- c. 2000: Money in New York in 2007
- American dollar
- Britain
- style guide: number and measure
- PPP – purchasing power parity, valuing currencies according to a common “basket of goods”.
553
Thank you very much for your information on crowns and their value.
I was searching on the Internet to find out how much 80 Ducats from 1555 would be worth today after reading a page on emigration from Spain to the Americas in the 1500’s ( http://libro.uca.edu/emigrants/emigrants5.htm ) (towards the middle) and trying to imagine if it works out to the equivalently vast amount that today’s illegal immigrants pay the mafias to get across borders, usually with great risk to their lives.
Thank you!
Have an excellent day!
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