1 Pound Sterling

The Commercial Bank of Scotland was one of the Edinburgh-based joint-stock banks that fiercely defended its note-issuing rights throughout the nineteenth century — Scottish banking law, never harmonized with the Bank Charter Act of 1844, permitted authorized Scottish banks to continue issuing their own £1 notes long after English provincial banks lost that privilege entirely. This note dates from well into that protected period.

The Commercial Bank merged with the National Bank of Scotland in 1959, ending a note-issuing lineage stretching back to 1810. An 1886 example predates that merger by over seven decades and falls within the series before the bank's significant branch expansion of the early twentieth century tightened printing controls and standardized issue procedures more rigidly.