Performance Notes
This performance was prefaced by a visit from ARTIFICE's Fletcher the Butler (www.wearebutlers.co.uk) who will provide any task such as Level Certification, Aesthetic Purveyance, Missive Carriage, Cognisance Enhancement and General Factotage. A friend had employed Fletcher to deliver me a missive providing extra information on the history of the £5 coin (pictured)
As you will see from when the videos are uploaded, the request for tonight's lecture was on the history of the £5 coin - to follow up on the £2 coin. I took a liberty to extend this to the whole of the history of currency in the interests of, well... interest.
I do get to the £5 coin at the end, by reading and commenting on Fletchers excellent letter.
We also instigated a convention whereby instead of clapping, the audience waves to show their appreciation. This keeps the noise down for fellow performers RashDash (http://www.rashdash.co.uk) who are doing their show Another Someone in the space next door. It also looks very amusing.
Lecture Notes
(I start with these, but they may not represent the actual content of the performance)
- Money has four functions: medium of exchange, a unit of account, store of value and standard of deffered payment. Or as textbooks pre-1970 remind us
- "Money is a matter of functions four:
A medium, a measure, a standard, a store"
- Avoids pure barter in a system where there exists a coincidence of wants.
- Permits the value of goods to be assessed and rendered in terms of an intermediary. In this case - money.
- A measure, that is, it makes sense as a base unit that is unchanging
- This is paradoxical of course, as inflation destroys this idea.
- Without constant correction and monitoring, traditional of "classical" methods of accounting can become void of meaning.
- Money can also exist as a debt - you can have a negative amount of money.
- So money can be saved and retrieved at any time.
- Alternative stores of value include real estate, gold, silver, previous stones and metals, art and collectables, stock and livestock.
Going back to the start...
- Barter has been proven to exist 100,000 years ago.
- There has been no society with pure barter, instead societys tend toward gift economies where real estate, gold, silver, previous stones and metals, art and collectables, stock and livestock can be traded, but also marriage, friendship and social networking.
- Here I made a gag about Twitter embodying the anga fakatunga - the spirit of the Tongan people
- I also went on to say that there is a Kashmiri tale about two Brahmin women who only tithe to each other and become reincarnated as two posion wells
- In folklore, gifts are for giving and giving on, people who try to keep hold of gifts always die.
- I closed the section by mentioning that previous "anicient" societies always considered themselves to live in abundance, and scarcity is a modern concept.
- Eventually a system of commodity money evolved
- Such as the shekel (180 grams of Barley)
- This comes from traders stamping the weights and values of metals or bags of goods onto the stock themselves, eventually tokens that represented these weights evolved.
- Herodotus reminds us that Croesus was the first to use "real coins" (whatever that means)
- This then became representative money as the banks issue receipts for money stored in them - people started trading the receipts as bank notes.
- This is not the first time this has happened. China issues bank notes in the Song dynasty in 960 AD. But banknotes didn't hit Europe until 1661.
- Finally fiat money came about.
- This is where a government declares by fiat that the bank notes they have produced are legal tender, even though they don't neccessarily represent something like the gold or silver standard.
- Fiat money cannot be converted into any other thing but only exchanged for other things.
- Some advice on hyperinflation: always pay off your debts in hyperinflation.
- The Bretton Woods System ensured fair trade on money overseas after the Wall Street Crash
- Where big states of the wiorld negotiated rates and banned Charles DeGaulle's (boo) discriminary currency practices.
- The Bretton Woods System collapsed with Nixon and Vietnam (boo again) and had to be rebuilt.
- Somalia has coins shaped like guitars, motorcycles, cars, wild animals and even 3D objects
- the Ivory coast 1,000 franc coin contains pre-historic fossilised mammoth tooth
- Palau Silver 5 dollars each have a unique smell (scratch-n-sniff)
- Cook Islands have a holographic coin to celebrate the history of the TV
- Liberia has 2.5 inch coins for the World Cup
- Kurdistan spelt their own name wrong on 10 Dinar Coins
- in WW2 Nazis created new current in countries they invaded (but so did the Allied forces when we invaded Iraq)
- The Serbian Dinara was created by printing over the Yugoslavian dinara
- The Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Morava (previously Czecho-slovakia) had its own currency created for it
- Due to a shortage of metal at the end of WW2 Japan produced clay coins for only a couple of days and in Manchuko they produced fiber coins
- Niue has Snoopy on their coins
- Vanatu has Barack Obama
- the Crescent Islands have Day-Glo coins
- and the Isle of Man has a coin celebrating the Lord of the Rings
Finally I got to this. And read Fletcher the Butler's letter. It reads as follows:
The Five Pound Coin
By Fletcher the Butler, from Research by Tony Clayton
Crown coins are generally issued for major royal events. By 1990 inflation had meant that to issue a large coin with a value of 25 pence (5 shillings) would result in a large portion of the income being taken up in minting the coin, and the purchasing power of the first commemorative crown of 1935 was well over ten times that of the 25 pence coin in 1990. As a result it was decided that the futre issues of crown-sized coins would have a face value of five pounds.
It is a misnomer to call these five pound coins crowns, however, as the crown has been valued at five shillings since 1551. They are instead correctly reffered to as crown-sized coins.
A crown's weight is 28.28 grams and its diameter is 38.61mm. It is generally made of cupronickel, although silver and gold proofs are known.
Although technically five pound coins are legal tender, banks and traders are often reluctant to accept them. They are officially known as non-circulating legal tender (NCLT).
So far there have been 24 crown-sized five pound coins issues these are:-
- 1990 Quuen Mother's 90th Birthday
- 1993 40th Anniversary of the Coronation
- 1996 Queen's 70th Birthday
- 1997 Royal Folden Wedding
- 1998 Prince Charles' 50th Brithday
- 1999 Princess Diana Memorial Cornw
- 1999 Millennium Crown
- 2000 Millennium Crown
- 2000 Millennium Dome Crown
- 2000 Queen Mother's 100th Birthday Crown
- 2001 Victoria Anniversary Crown
- 2002 Golden Jubilee Crown
- 2002 Queen Mother Memorial Crown
- 2003 Coronation Anniversary Crown
- 2004 Entente Cordiale Anniversary Crown
- 2005 Admiral Nelson Crown
- 2005 Trafalgar Crown
- 2006 Queen's 80th Birthday Crown
- 2007 Diamond Wedding of Queen and Prince Philip Crown
- 2008 450th Anniversary of Accession of Elizabeth I Crown
- 2008 60th Birthday of Prince Charles Crown
- 2009 500th Anniversary of the Accession of Henry VIII Crown
- 2009 Countdown to London 2012 Olympics Crown
- 2010 Restoration of the Monarch in 1660 Crown
The crowd voted against the Dewey Decimal system to hear about "What Happens to Your Brain When You Dream" as proposed by Zoe Hinks, writer, director and actor from Brighton. This will be presented as The Science of Sleep, 9:30pm in the Bedlam Fat Cat Café, Thurs 26th August 2010
Any mistakes? You will be given credit for corrections.
