Who invented tally sticks

Principally there are two different kinds of tally sticks, the single and the split tally. The single tally stick is an elongated piece of bone, ivory, wood, or stone which is marked with a system of notches.

The single tally stick serves predominantly mnemonic purposes. The split tally is a technique which became common in medieval Europe which was constantly short of money coins and predominantly illiterate in order to record bilateral exchange and debts. A stick squared Hazelwood sticks were most common was marked with a system of notches and then split lengthwise. This way both of the two halves record the same notches and each party to the transaction received one half of the marked stick as proof.

Later this technique was refined in various ways and became virtually tamper proof. Marks inscribed in three columns on the handle of the Ishango bone tool found in the Great Lakes region of present day Uganda were carved over 20, years ago.

Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder described the best wood for tally sticks in his Naturalis Historia encyclopedia published circa C. Venetian merchant traveler Marco Polo — reported that otherwise illiterate residents of Zardandan in the modern Chinese province of Yunnan recorded business transactions by cutting notches in each half of a split stick.

Even after parchment and later paper became a more convenient means for recording such information, tally sticks remained in use because of their durability and security. Cheques are paper-based instructions to transfer money from one bank account to another. But if both banks are closed, then the instruction to transfer money can't be carried out - not until the banks open, anyway. But everyone in Ireland knew that might not happen for months. Nevertheless, people wrote each other cheques, and they circulated.

The publican might then use that cheque to pay his staff, or his suppliers. The system was fragile. It was clearly open to abuse by people who wrote cheques they knew would eventually bounce. As May dragged past, then June, then July, there was always the risk that people lost track of their own finances and started unknowingly writing cheques they couldn't afford and wouldn't be able to honour.

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Yet the Irish kept writing each other cheques. It must have helped that so much Irish business was small and local. People knew their customers. They knew who was good for the money. Word would get around about people who cheated. And the pubs and corner shops were able to vouch for the creditworthiness of their customers, which meant that cheques could keep moving.

When the dispute was resolved and the banks reopened in November, more than six months after they had closed, the Irish economy was still in one piece. Nor is the Irish case the only one in which cheques were passed around without ever being cashed. In the s, British soldiers stationed in Hong Kong would pay their bills with cheques on accounts back in England. The local merchants would circulate the cheques, vouching for them with their own signatures, without any great hurry to cash them in.

Effectively, the Hong Kong cheques - like the Irish cheques, like the Tally sticks - had become a form of private money. If money is simply tradable debt, then tally sticks and uncashed Irish cheques weren't some weird form of quasi-money. They were simply money in a particularly unvarnished form. Like an engine running with the cover off, or a building with the scaffolding still up, they're money with the underlying mechanism laid bare.

Of course, we still naturally think of money as those discs of metal in the Ashmolean Museum. After all it's the metal that survives, not the cheques or the tally sticks.