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Bent or Bad Penny

Posted by Pdianek on November 17, 2003

In Reply to: Bent or Bad Penny posted by Shae on November 17, 2003

: : : : I came across a refgerence to a bad penny in a book (The Bone Pedlar, Sylvian Hamilton). The context is a discussion between a father visiting his daughter in her convent in 1210:
: : : : "I prayed for you all the time. I told Our Lady all about you. I bent a penny to her for you. .... It didn't work. You caught a cold. ..... Do you think it might have been a bad penny?"
: : : : I've heard the term, "Queer as a bent penny", and never known its derivation.
: : : : Can anyone give me some informed background on this?
: : : : Thanks in advance. Wal

: : : I'd never heard the "bent penny" phrase either. But I like it.

: : : "BAD PENNY -- The phrase usually is heard in this country (U.S.) as 'A bad penny always turns up,' meaning that a no-good person can be counted upon to come back again and again. The expression was originally English and the unit of currency referred to was the shilling. Sir Walter Scott, in one of his early nineteenth-century novels, whereto: 'Bring back Darsie? Little doubt of that. The bad shilling is sure enough to come back again.'" From Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins by William and Mary Morris (HarperCollins, New York, 1977, 1988).

: : Here's a discussion of "bending" a penny. The penny being discussed is one of Aethelred's silver ones:

: : No-one knows the exact value of an Anglo-Saxon penny, although an earlier tenth-century law code says that you could buy a good racehorse for 120 pennies, a cow for 20 pennies and a sheep for 5 pennies. A silver penny in AD 1000 might buy the same as about £10-£20 today.

: : The small gouges on the reverse of the coin are known as "peck" marks and were made with a knife to test the purity of the silver. The Anglo-Saxons would have had no need to do this, as the bust of Æthelred on the coin was a royal guarantee of its value: this coin could be exchanged for a penny worth of goods. The Vikings, however, only saw the coin for its silver content and *pecked* or *bent* it to find out how soft, and therefore how pure it was.

: : So a "bent penny" might be one with softer metal (lead?) within, coated with silver and not nearly as valuable as a pure silver one -- such a penny would make a raiding Viking *most* disgruntled.

: : On the other hand, bending pennies is often regarded as creating luck. Here's an account (from Sheffield, home of SHU, which hosts this site): On the night of 8th October 1960 the good people of Sheffield turned out in force in the pouring rain to say goodbye to the city's last trams (until supertram came along 30 years later!). On that night many thousands of them put old pennies on the line for the trams to run over and distort to make a unique momento of the occasion. This activity can be seen in many of the photographs taken on that famous night.

: : If the father bent a penny for his daughter's welfare when he prayed to Mary, perhaps what he did was bend one and then keep it or bury it somewhere -- a form of sacrifice, since the penny would then be useless to him as cash.

: I believe the 'sacrifice' interpretation is correct in this case. A tree outside one Irish cemetary is encrusted with coins - mostly pennies - that have been hammered to half their diameter into the bark and the protruding part then bent flat against the bark. A prayer is offered for the deceased, and the 'sacrificed' penny is proof of the sincerity of the prayer. The prayer would not be heard if the coin was a 'bad penny.'

: I could send a picture if somebody told me how.

Oh, the Irish cemetery tree account is a lovely one! Perhaps that's related to hammering nails into trees to cross each other, as proof of one's promise? (Done by Connie and Oliver in "Lady Chatterley" -- the movie though not the book, I don't think. She promises to "always be yours in the wood", and he asks, "Will you drive your nail into the tree with mine, for good and all?". He hammers a square-headed nail -- looks handmade, not a wire nail, and in 1919?; but much more picturesque-looking -- halfway in, then drives the rest onto the bark, diagonally. She does the same, crossing his, so the nails make an X on the bark -- like someone who can't write attesting to a will or whatever. Tender scene.)

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