I have recently been reading up on the subject of English silver penny, and how silver instead of gold was the standard metal used for most of human history. I’m also currently writing a D&D campaign loosely based on Beowulf, and want to accurately portray the economy of the Danes. Did they also use an 1/240 pence system, or did they use a different decimal system for their coinage?
There's a really great write-up on this subject by Jane Kershaw in Antiquity 91/355: 'An Early Medieval Dual-Currency Economy: Bullion and Coin in the Danelaw' (2017).
As noted by Williams (2007) and Steuer (2002), coin usage in Scandinavia outside of Danelaw regions was actually extremely limited until the 11th Century, and even in the Danelaw, bullion (often in the form of 'hacksilver') was frequently used as a medium of exchange in preference to actual coinage. In Danelaw areas, the coinage that was produced was usually a very highly controlled copy of contemporary English pennies, clearly of sufficiently good quality that it passed stringent checks on foreign coinage in English trading centres (Naismith, 2013). For coinage actually produced in Scandinavia, it was largely based on the Arabic dirham, which unlike in England, had previously been the main source of imported silver and foreign coinage until the 10th century, although evidence suggests that much of this imported coinage was in fact melted down for its bullion weight. Indeed a part-coinage, part-bullion system of exchange seems to have persisted well into the 10th or even 11th century.
Anglo-Scandinavian coinage produced at York in the 10th Century was modelled closely on the English system (Blackburn, 2001) and its this system which seems to have eventually stuck with Cnut's eventual systematic coinage production introduction in the early 1010s, quite possibly as a result of the vast quantities of Æthelredian pennies which had been sent to Scandinavia as gafol. This later Scandinavian coinage was indeed based on the 1 pound -> 20 shillings -> 240d model.