There's other things you need to think about to make sense of the relationship between the average wage of a labourer and the price of a house. First of all, i

There's other things you need to think about to make sense of the relationship between the average wage of a labourer and the price of a house. First of all, in many places with less expensive land (driven by lower population densities) a 2.5 multiplier between an annual income and a property wouldn't be uncommon even now. You need to consider the relative social position of a labourer. Today that would be very low, almost all employed people would make more and the role of pure physical labour in our society is marginal. That wasn't the case at the time and a labourer in good health would be higher up on the income scale (of people who were wage paid, which wasn't everyone by a long shot) than they would be today. The relationship between the cost of capital stocks and income flows depends on the effective perceived discount rate which is driven by people's perception of risk and the structure of the financial system. Remember that at this time, no-one (and certainly not labourers) had bank accounts. It may be easy today for someone living in England to get a mortgage on residential property at 2.5 their income, it would not have been easy at the time. (Mortgaging income producing farmland would have been much easier) You're also probably implicitly assuming that the cost of housing was the highest cost in most households as it is today. That certainly was not true at the time! Food was a much higher proportion of an average person's income, even for clerics it would be as much as 50% and it wouldn't surprise me if a labourer's household would spend as much as 75% of their income on food. Other manufactured goods (especially clothes) were also vastly more expensive relative to income. We have records of wills from this period which specifically list individual shirts as well as items of land. No-one in the 21st century simultaneously owns land and thinks of their shirts as valuable long term assets to be willed to their heirs. After providing for these necessities of life, the amount left to save up to buy property was much less.