PETER III

PETER III., Czar of Russia, another grandson of Peter

the Great, was born in 1728, succeeded to the throne in 1762, and was strangled in the same year. (See RUSSIA.)

PETER'S PENCE, the name applied to an annual tribute of one penny formerly paid to the Pope at the festival of St. Peter. In England every family possessed of twenty pennysworth of any sort of goods was considered liable. In the Saxon king, when he went in pilgrimage to Rome about the year 740, paid this contribution to the Pope, partly as alms and partly in recompense of a house erected in Rome for English pilgrims; and the same continued to be paid generally until the time of Henry VIII., when it was enacted that henceforth no person should pay any pensions, Peter's pence, or other impositions, for the use of the bishop or see of Rome.