Silver Threepenny Coin Earrings. English Silver coinage was kept to a high standard from the 1500s, 925 parts in 1000 Silver, Sterling Silver, and was not debased until 1919, at the end of the first World War. That war cost Britain dearly and standards set in place for centuries loosened. That lowering of standards can be clearly seen in the jewellery produced in England in the inter-war years, when, quite suddenly, the market was forced to turn its focus on the worker rather than on the gentry.
That the British Empire did not simultaneously debase the Silver coinage of its great colony, India, was a revealing indication of the colonizers’ sensibilities at  the time concerning the importance of the role Silver coinage played in the fabric of Indian life. The Silver coinage of India was not debased until 1936, and this was one of the nails in the coffin of Britain’s imperial hold over the sub-continent.
Attempts to create a proper Silver standard, in the matters of coin and plate, began to be implemented in the British Isles in the late 1200s, to curtail massive fraud; traders in London, with exposure to the high Silver content of the coinage of the members of the Hanseatic League, quickly showed preference for payment in that Silver coinage, from anyone, not just from the members of the Hanseatic League, and the coinage became known as the “osterling”, the German traders being “osterlings”, from the east, most probably the source of the term “Sterling Silver”.