How did people cut "pieces of eight"?

score:28

The usual method was with a hammer and a cold chisel. A large stone would suffice as an anvil. Coins are fairly small and thin, and the silver coins of the period were quite soft, as you can see from the wear on the example in your picture. A blacksmith would be able to do this easily, as would almost anyone with basic metal-working skills and tools. Blacksmiths were more common in period than today, of course, and a higher proportion of people would have owned the necessary tools.

The division of coins into halves, quarters and eighths follows naturally from cutting them by hand. It's much easier to cut things into successive halves with reasonable accuracy than it is to cut tenths.

John Dallman 31010

📝 What was more expensive to lose in a gladiatorial fight: a gladiator or a rare animal?
📝 Can there be hidden ancient archives in Saudi Arabia?
📝 Which 1848 German revolutionaries became key players in the US Republican party?
📝 Why were harvest times in Cyrenaica earlier than in Greece in antiquity?
📝 Was America behind any 'false flag' bomb attacks in Saigon in the early 1950s?
📝 Were WW1 trenches always in a devastated landscape?
📝 What is a mezrag-holder?
📝 How did Japan do era names prior to the reign of Meiji?
📝 Why is Lady Jane Grey called Lady instead of Queen?
📝 Did the University of California and University of Geneva award honorary degrees to Inazo Nitobe?
📝 Names in England during the Tudor period
📝 How was library classification done in English-speaking libraries prior to the 19th century?
📝 Anti-Semitism and Edmund Burke
📝 Caesar's comments on Celts(?)
📝 Identification of ship and seaplane type
📝 Why were kitchen work surfaces in Sweden apparently so low before the 1950s or so?
📝 Were ice buckets used to chill wine in Victorian England?
📝 How many people died in the British Isles from religious persecution between 1532 and 1791?
📝 Which is the earliest surviving inscription of "SPQR"?
📝 What was the exact time of announcement of Indian independence?
📝 Why were some German conquered territories (eg: Poland) referred to as 'Generalgouvernement'?
📝 How did an English person get entry to East Germany during the Cold War?
📝 Why are Germans referred to so differently in different languages?
📝 How many languages did Zhang Shenfu speak?
📝 Scandal at Annapolis in 1934
📝 Was Fascism tied to any Specific Ideology Before Nazism and Italy's Fascist Party?
📝 Why there were no economic sanction wars against Warsaw Pact countries by the West?
📝 What did people of the middle ages call their periods?
📝 What kind of heating did Moscow have in the early Soviet Union (1917 - 1930)?
📝 How did bank transactions (or "data" transactions) work when it took people weeks to travel vast distances?

Source: stackoverflow.com

Travel Tips

Search Posts

📝 How did people cut "pieces of eight"?
📝 How did people cut their nails in the past?
📝 How did people distinguish slaves from free people in Ancient Rome?
📝 How did 300,000 people survive the 3 1/2 year siege of Sarajevo?
📝 How did people wash dishes before dish detergent?
📝 When and how did people begin to consider slavery immoral?
📝 Did active frontiersmen really eat 20,000 calories a day? How does this compare to other highly-active people in recorded history?
📝 How did people put down a drinking horn?
📝 How did people travel to remote islands like Easter Island?
📝 How did people deal with ice on the roads during the horse-and-buggy era?
📝 How did people react to Cavendish bananas when they first replaced the Gros Michel strain?
📝 How did people wake up on time before alarm clocks?
📝 How did people have access to ice in warm areas before the industrial revolution?
📝 How did bank transactions (or "data" transactions) work when it took people weeks to travel vast distances?
📝 How did people realize that America was a different continent?
📝 How did people in the desert stay cool in the past?
📝 If salt was scarce and expensive, how did people "salt the earth" to ensure their enemies would stay defeated?
📝 How did people say “I have to go to the bathroom” before the bathroom and pipes were common?
📝 How did people dress at the Jesuit missions to the Hurons?
📝 How did people and goods move between East Pakistan and West Pakistan?
📝 How much salt did people in agricultural societies eat?
📝 Did more Jews live in Poland than any other country, prior to the Holocaust, because of how Polish laws and people regarded Jews?
📝 How did people apply for university in the 18th century?
📝 How did German racial laws affect people who weren't Jewish but one of their parents wasn't German?
📝 How did ethnic Turkish people embrace Islam?
📝 How did the people of Massachusetts react to the territory that is now Maine being split off from Massachusetts?
📝 How much time did people have to take shelter during the Blitz in 1940-41?
📝 How many Russian people did Tsar Ivan IV ("the Terrible") kill?
📝 How did people ensure that renaissance Papal election bribery was honored?
📝 How did people acquire things in the pre-Roman Celtic world?

How did people cut "pieces of eight"?

More post

Search Posts

Related post