5 Pounds

The Commercial Bank of Scotland was founded in 1810 as a deliberate challenge to the established Edinburgh banking houses — the Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank — which had long operated under a cozy duopoly. By 1850, the bank had grown substantially through retail and merchant custom, particularly in the central Lowlands, and its notes circulated freely under Scotland's permissive note-issuing framework, which unlike England imposed no cap on the number of banks entitled to issue.

Scottish £5 notes of this period were high-value instruments in daily terms and rarely completed many hands before returning to the issuing branch. Attrition in circulation was low, but survival rates are poor for different reasons — redemption and destruction policies were systematic, and retained specimens were seldom thought worth preserving.