Money and Sheep

Money is absolutely central to the way we live. So many completely banale activities involve, somewhere down the line, an economic exchange. You pretty much bleed money from the moment you leave the house - and even within your four walls, if you're able to have electricity, or - I don't know - sit and write a blog post online, you are part of some microscopic contract of exchange.

The pound note, perhaps for this very reason, is everywhere we look. The Million Pound Drop would be nothing if it weren't for the heaped bundles of crisp pound notes, shifted from trapdoor to trapdoor and inevitably tumbling down, inches from the camera's - and audience's - eye. Antiques programmes, now, are nothing if they don't show dealers being flush with their cash. And the ubiquitous paper sterling even features on the opening credits of Homes under the Hammer as winking and gurning origami houses (0:12).

However, if paper notes have infiltrated our cultural imagination as objects of our desire, then this raises a few interesting hypothetical questions.

What equivalent was there before paper money? After all, notes are only signifiers of economic potential: sheets with arbitrary values attached, with little material worth.

When gold was the prime token of exchange, did it ripple through society and have a higher symbolic value in art and literature than in the age of paper and plastic?

And even more interestingly: when people traded sheep, did they rear their heads in the TV-show-equivalents of the day, in ways now completely lost on us? Irrespective of religion, could this tell medievalists something about the cultural value of sheep in a society which called its messiah the 'lamb of God'?

Food for thought.