Source:
In today's selection -- over the last few thousand years, contrary to popular belief,
the predominate form of money was not gold or silver coins, but instead
such things as clay tablets and -- in the case of England -- notched
tally sticks. However, metal coins survive more readily than tablets and
sticks, and so many historians have falsely assumed that most money was
in the form of coins. In the case of England, a lack of understanding
of this led to the wholesale destruction of one of the most important
collections of source material in the history of money -- and indirectly
led to the construction of London's beautiful Houses of Parliament so familiar to us today:
