Five crumpets in early British coinage?

Tyrock

I'm a fan of the Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett (Granada TV 1984-1994). In the episode "The Resident Patient", Dr. Trevelyan relates to Holmes and Watson how his "resident patient" set him up in an elegant practice in Brook Street with the agreement of keeping 3/4 of everything the doctor earned. He stated that each day the patient would come into the consulting room and count the days receipts. The closed captioning process stated that he would give the doctor "five crumpets" for each guinea the doctor earned. Crumpets? Knowing something about British coinage I wanted to figure out what Dr. Trevelyan was indeed saying (and it did sound like "five crumpets"). Turns out that what he was saying was that he would receive "five and thruppence" for each guinea he earned (five shliings and threepence). So the guy who was doing the closed captioning thought he heard "five crumpets" when he heard "five and thruppence." Guess the guy didn't know much about early British coinage and it's an English series! By the way, Wikipedia says that "thruppence" is the correct pronounciation for threepence. I didn't know that and I'd never heard it pronounced that way before. Closed captioning can come up with some pretty strange stuff sometimes.

tonyhar

The term 'thruppence' disappeared from use with decimal currency when it became 'three new pence' and then later 'three pence'.

A lot of coinage words vanished due to 15th Feb 1971!!