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1 Pound
| Issuer | Commercial Bank of Scotland / Commercial Banking Company of Scotland |
|---|---|
| Year | 1827 |
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| Currency | Pound sterling (1694-date) |
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| Obverse description | The obverse is typeset and engraved in an early nineteenth-century Scottish banking style, with oval guilloche panels at the upper left and right each bearing the denomination ONE and POUND respectively, flanking a central oval vignette of Edinburgh Castle. The promise-to-pay text reads across the centre in copperplate script, with a secondary engraved vignette of a seated classical figure at the lower centre surrounded by further guilloche ornaments. The issuing authority cartouche at upper centre reads COMMERCIAL BANK, with the full title THE COMMERCIAL BANKING COMPANY OF SCOTLAND rendered in script below, the place of issue Edinburgh, and the manuscript date 2 July 1827. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | COMMERCIAL BANK ONE POUND The Commercial Banking Company of Scotland promise to pay to Robt. Paul or Bearer ONE POUND on Demand at their Office here Edinburgh 2 July 1827 By Order of the Committee of Management Cashier |
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| Comments |
The Commercial Bank of Scotland was founded in 1810 by a group of Edinburgh merchants and professionals who felt the established banks — the Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank — operated too conservatively and too much in the interests of their own shareholders. It was a genuinely oppositional institution at its founding, and early note issues reflect a bank still asserting its right to exist in a crowded Scottish market.
Scottish banks retained the legal right to issue their own notes long after English provincial banking was brought under Bank of England control — a distinction rooted in the 1707 Acts of Union, which left Scots banking law largely intact. This 1827 note predates the wave of consolidation that would eventually fold the Commercial Bank into the Royal Bank of Scotland in 1959.
Cotton paper at this period was not a standardized security substrate — it varied considerably by supplier, and early Commercial Bank notes are known to suffer brittleness along fold lines.