This tradition comes from a nursery rhyme that we commonly recite as ‘See a penny, pick it up; all day long you’ll have good luck.’
In fact the original rhyme featured pins, not pennies: ‘See a pin and pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck. See a pin and let it lie, you’ll feel want before you die.’ This may in turn be derived from the old English proverb ‘He that will not stoop for a pin will never be worth a pound’, which was first recorded in print in Samuel Pepys’s Diary in 1668.
It is one of many ancient sayings to promote the notion that it’s worth taking trouble over small things. People who used the rhyme in the 1600s would also have been fearful of leaving a pin on the ground because of their associations with witchcraft.
Pins were thought to have been used to bind a spell in place or to fix a desire – for good or ill, to an object that represented the person on whom the spell was being cast. If you didn’t pick up the pin, a witch might find it instead and use it in a spell against you.
Pins were also used in hexes, which could be performed to reverse the effects of damaging spells, often held responsible for the misunderstood medical ailments that afflicted citizens of the seventeenth century. Urinary infections, for example, were frequently ‘treated’ by placing pins representative of the patient’s pain into a glass ‘witch bottle’ along with a sample of their urine. The mixture would be boiled to transfer the pain from the victim of the spell back to the witch. The bottle would then be buried or bricked up into the walls of the person’s home to defend them against future curses.
The superstition had more mundane foundations too as pins were an essential tool for needlework, which was a necessity rather than a hobby in the seventeenth-century home.
The switch from pin to penny seems to have occurred in early nineteenth-century America and may have simply been a linguistic slip, although the appearance of the words ‘In God We Trust’ on American pennies is believed in some quarters to have transformed a castaway coin into a token of luck from the Good Lord for those who believe in him.