To understand properly the information about wergilds supplied to us by the Anglo-Saxon laws, we must devote a little attention to the Anglo-Saxon currency. Our ancestors a thousand years ago used for the most part the same pecuniary language that we use to-day. They generally spoke of pounds, shillings and pence; and the clerkly ecclesiastics who had to translate these words into Latin employed the _Libra_, _Solidus_ and _Denarius_, which have given us the well-known symbols £ s. d. This translation, however, into the terms of Roman currency has done nothing but confuse our own monetary history. _Libra_ as the translation of pound is unobjectionable, but _solidus_--the only coin of that name that obtained wide currency, the _solidus aureus_ of Constantinople--was a gold coin of which 72 went to the pound of gold, and was in intrinsic value equal to about thirteen shillings of our present money. No _scilling_ that any Anglo-Saxon legislator ever dealt with had any such intrinsic value as this. Similarly the _denarius_, the true denarius of the republic and of the early empire, was a silver coin intrinsically worth about eightpence of our present currency. No penny in any Anglo-Saxon coinage ever approached this value; and the translation of denarius by penny has introduced confusion even into some well-known passages of the English Bible. Let us, therefore, for the sake of clearness, wholly disregard the pretended Roman equivalents, and confine our attention to the true, long-enduring Saxon denominations, the _pund_, the _scilling_ and the _penig_. 1. The _pund_ meant a pound’s weight of silver. It was purely a “money of account,” as no coin representing this value was ever struck by any Anglo-Saxon king. According to the present value of metals, it would be worth intrinsically somewhat less than £2 sterling. 2. The _scilling_ was also only a money of account, represented by no actual coin. Its derivation (from _scylan_, to divide) seems to point to the fact that it was originally a portion of a silver ornament, probably a torque or an armlet broken off and cast into the scale, for payment by weight of the trader’s demand. Even so, as we may remember, St. Oswald ordered his beautiful silver dish to be broken up and distributed to the starving crowd, who would take these _scyllingas_ into the market and exchange them there for the needed food. At a later time the _scilling_ acquired a definite value, which, however, varied much in the different English kingdoms. The Kentish _scilling_ was one-twelfth of a pound; the Wessex _scilling_, one-forty-eighth; and the Mercian, one-sixtieth. 3. But however much the _scilling_ might vary, the penny (_pending_, _pening_ or _penig_) seems in all the English kingdoms to have ever borne the same proportion to the pound which it bears at present, namely, as 1 to 240. This enables us to state the varying values of the _scilling_ in the following manner:--