Because I enjoy your books, I care about piddling mistakes in them. In the second Sharpe book, you refer a few times to a Haideri as a gold coin. It was actually a silver coin of 2 rupees. In your Saxon stories, you let one of your characters pay with a shilling. The shilling as a coin had not been invented yet. The first was struck only in 1504. The name came about in the 9th century, but only as a money of account, possibly as the equivalent of the Roman solidus. Therefore, money traders may have referred to a certain weight of hack-silver (silver objects hacked to pieces to serve as money) as a shilling. This would have been too sophisticated for warriors, though. If you want advise on coins and coinage, please let me know. Always pleased to help. Peter