For love or money

They have evolved from knapsacks to coin purses and to today’s card holders, but does the wallet have a future in our increasingly cashless society, asks Roderick Easdale

- Roderick Easdale

ITEMS known as wallets have been around for millennia. In Ancient Greece, they were a feature of life for mortals and gods alike—after Perseus killed the sleeping Medusa, he is said to have popped her severed head into a magic wallet.

Their use and design has changed markedly over the ages, however. Most of us have little need for something to carry the head of a gorgon in and, if we did, a modern-day wallet wouldn’t be up to the task.

Wallets were for keeping food and possessions in, but, as classical scholar A. Y. Campbell explained, this was ‘no modern lunch basket, out of which came Derby-day salmon and Champagne. The wallet was the poor man’s portable larder’. They were more akin to knapsacks, as Shakespeare makes clear. In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses tells Achilles: ‘Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, wherein he puts alms for oblivion.’

Money was originally kept not in wallets, but in larger purses, a habit that has lingered down the centuries more with ladies than gentlemen. Over time, coins began to be placed in wallets, with other items. Lawrence C. Wroth, writing in the 1950s, gave a portrait of an Elizabethan merchant ‘carrying fixed to his belt… a leather pouch or wallet in which he carried his cash, his book of accounts and small articles of daily necessity’.