Did You Know.....Marks and Nobles

Did You know that...…………there were many different ways for describing monetary values especially in probate documents. A frequent question, in particular associated with earlier wills and inventories is what do these terms mean? Most of us doing research are perfectly familiar with pounds, shillings and pence, half crowns and farthings. Groats are more associated with ordinary day to day living, and far less encountered with wills. They were worth just fourpence and so had less relevance to probate and property. But before the civil war, one often encounters marks: being thirteen shillings and fourpence. Also nobles: one third of a pound. In other words this was six shillings and eightpence. This latter continued to be a fashionable, highly usual bequest amount for many centuries afterwards.

Just knowing that these were standard sums is not only important but can be really useful. In trying to decipher a will, say from the mid 1500's, these can be the kind of clues that help one to decipher a document that initially looks impossible. A bit like a jigsaw puzzle. With words like 'son', 'daughter', and actual names appearing before and after these sums, showing how individual letters were formed in any particular document.

Just like today, the value of currency could vary. But in earlier centuries, so too could the composition of actual, official, coinage. The latter years of Henry VIII's reign saw the silver content of a shilling decline, as did its face value to a confused public.

By the early 1600's marks and nobles, which had been in the ascendancy pre 1500, had very much given way to pounds. In between, especially in Tudor times, they are very often found used together.