My interest in saving goes back to my childhood. My mother used to save money in jars to pay the bills. There was a jar for the milkman, for the gas bill, for the electricity bill and two savings jars. One of the savings jars was fed with farthings, halfpennies and pennies which came from the purses of my mother and aunt and was given to my cousin and me for holiday spending money.
Although I did not know it at the time this practice of saving small change in a jar is reputed to be one of the reasons that the name Piggy Bank came about. Sealed Jars were fed with small change and broken open when they were full, just as pigs were fed with scraps until they were fat and then slaughtered for their meat so that the farmer could get back the investment he had made in them.
An alternative theory of the name Piggy Bank is that it comes from the word pygg a type of clay used to make storage jars in the Middle Ages. Money was sometimes stored in these pygg jars and these eventually became known as Piggy Jars.
Whichever is the true reason behind the name of the money bank, the practice of saving money using them, gradually became something that was mostly done by children. They became pig shaped because that was an easy shape to model out of clay. Originally they only had an opening at the top, but modern money boxes also have a means of getting the savings out without having to break the bank.
Nowadays Piggy Banks come in all shapes and sizes and are made from many different materials including wood and plastic whilst there are still many pottery ones available.
