When Henry II reformed the English coinage in 1154 and again in 1180 he must have been conscious of providing England with a stable currency that would replace the extremely varied coins that had been circulating through the two decades of the civil wars. In fact, Henry's new sterling coinage was considerably more stable than that of his Anglo-Saxon and Norman predecessors, whose issues changed periodically in design and sometimes even in weight standard and silver fineness as well. What Henry could not have known, however, was that his new coinage was to provide a stable monetary medium well beyond England and his continental possessions, even in lands that in his lifetime were not considered parts of Europe.

Henry, and succeeding Angevin rulers, made no attempt to extend the coinage reforms to the continental Plantagenet territories. The coin issues of Normandy, Brittany, Maine and Anjou in the later twelfth century remained as they had been in the preceding decades – regional deniers bearing the immobilized names of seigneurs of the eleventh century. Nevertheless, the new sterling coinage did circulate in Henry's continental lands, alongside the traditional issues. Of sixty-five coin hoards from throughout France buried between 1180 and 1220, eighteen contain English sterlings of the short-cross type, that is English coins issued after 1180. Of these, seven hoards are from Normandy, six from Brittany, and five from the Loire region. None are from the Capetian realm; only one of the hoards from within the Plantagenet domains is entirely of sterling coins. In the remainder the English coins are mixed with local ones and seldom constitute more than one-tenth of the total contents of the hoard.

A contrast would be offered by the Capetians, who after the acquisition of these lands in the early thirteenth century, adapted the seigneurial coinage of Tours to royal issues. In his coinage decree of 1204, Philip Augustus banned the circulation of most earlier coins of the Angevin territories in his newly conquered lands and limited royal payments to three coins: that of Tours, that of le Mans, and the English sterling. At 160 coins to the mark of silver, the sterling was to be accepted at a value of four times that of the denier tournois, which had 640 coins per mark of fine silver. Nevertheless, sterlings disappear from French hoards soon after this date.