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List of price of medieval items (2006)
- dredmorbius 9y agoSee also Gregory Clark's "The Price History of English Agriculture, 1209-1914": http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Agprice.pdf http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Agpric... Also at UC Davis.
- ionwake 9y agoThis article is useless without 1) En explanation of what 1d actually is, seeing as the letter 'd' appears in most of the prices, but not in the key. Especially odd and udnerstanding prices is the whole point of the article. 2) A current day estimate in dollars of how much a shilling or a "d" - adjusted for inflation is actually worth. Am I missing something here?
- sctb 9y ago> This article is useless without > udnerstanding prices is the whole point of the article Says you! What can you learn from such an article? A list of prices of goods can give you something of a picture of life at the time, by considering the relative cost of things. How expensive was University? Consider it relative the cost of feeding oneself. How was wealth concentrated in population centers? Consider the difference in prices in London vs. elsewhere. You can ask the same sorts of questions about marriage, funerals, travel.
- dredmorbius 9y agoThe measure is pre-decimal English currency, dating to the Norman Conquest (1066) and used until 1971. Generally: pounds (£ or l ) of 20 shillings (s. or /-) of 12 pennies (d.) (240 d. per £) The wages section will give you a sense of spending power. A labourer's wages in the 13th century was about 2£/yr, or about 1.5d/day if working 6 days / wk. In practice, employment was not so constant, so 2-4d/day was probably closer the truth. Remember that prices generally translate to labour required to generate income necessary for a purchase: so many hours, days, weeks, months, or years income for an item. http://projectbritain.com/moneyold.htm http://projectbritain.com/moneyold.htm https://www.milesfaster.co.uk/information/uk-currency.htm https://www.milesfaster.co.uk/information/uk-currency.htm
- buckhx 9y agoIt's not presented very effectively, but my understanding is that 'd' means penny. Pence is the plural form of penny. "The French Livre, sou, and denier are equivalent to the pound, shilling and penny (Latin liber, solidus, and denarius)."
- danarmak 9y agoThe second paragraph ("money goes as follows") explains the notation. 'd' is for pence. Translating prices into modern coins is a hard problem, because you're not comparing like with like. When two countries/markets trade, prices in one can be compared to the other. But across time, when the available products are drastically different, and when the very concept of money and of price was different from today, it's not clear what the comparison would even mean. For instance, the price for very many things (e.g. food, and the wages of many professions) was fixed by law and could stay constant for centuries. If this had not been the case, there would be no meaning in compiling a price list that includes dates across 3-4 centuries, but only one price point for each item listed.
- mortenjorck 9y agoSince a pence is 1/12 of a shilling, does the `d` stand for "dozenth"?
- Tortoise 9y agod stands for denarius, a roman coin
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Symbiote 9y agoThe system was used until 1971 in Britain. I wasn't born then, but it is recent enough that there were things around the house, like books or vinyl records, with prices or price stickers using the system: 9/6 etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd
- ChuckMcM 9y agoWell in #1 you missed the section talking about the various coins, a 'd' represents 'penny' or 'pence' (even today a 4d nail is a 4 penny nail). For #2 it gets to the heart of an important economic concept which is that 'money' is really just an indicator of labor and capital, generally unique to each economy. One of the ways to look at it and try to get a comparison is to look at jobs and wages. So how much did a gardner make per year, a farm worker, a craftsman, a judge, etc. It will never give you prices in inflation adjusted dollars for today, but it will give an insight into how the wealth worked in the economy.
- grkvlt 9y agoYes. You're missing not being brought up in the United Kingdom either before or shortly after decimalisation. pre-decimalisation currency in the UK involved Pounds, Shillings and Pence, based on the old Roman Librae, Solidus and Denarius. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd for details.
- njarboe 9y agoI find it interesting that while wages were very low when compared to today, the price of objects are not so different when priced in silver. Using a bit of googling it looks like a £ in the 1300's was, as the name states, a pound of silver. The exact amount of silver varied a bit over time but this comes out to be about 350g of silver or ~$200. So a War Horse at £80 is $16,000 Axe: 5d = 5(200/240) = $4 Cow: 10s = 10/20200 = $100 Dozen eggs = 1/2*(200/240) = $0.4 Not too far off. Could be just a historical accident, but with the value of silver holding up over the centuries, I can see where the goldbugs might get their obsession with metals.
- megaman22 9y agoThere's a pretty steep boundary in the price of silver right about when the Spanish conquistadors overthrew the Incas and started mining out Potosi. That influx of specie kicked off a world-wide wave of inflation and severely distorted economies around the world; I'm most familiar with the ways that flow of hard currency impacted the Ming and Qing dynasties in China, but it's really a world-wide phenomena. Possibly one of the most transformative events in world history.
- mcguire 9y agoWhere can I learn more?
- gist 9y agoWelcome to medieval times (Jim Carrey; Cable Guy) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdPu6sQ9l4g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdPu6sQ9l4g https://youtu.be/TdPu6sQ9l4g?t=1m31s https://youtu.be/TdPu6sQ9l4g?t=1m31s
- svdr 9y agoIn this article the price of a medieval shirt is estimated at $3500 (2013): http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.html?m=1 http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-l...
- mattmanser 9y agoFrom the article it says a wealthy laborers tunic is one shilling. Somewhere else it mentions max salary for a laborer of £2 (40 shillings). Both around the 1300s. In the UK today a £40k salary is pretty good, above the median and AVG, so at most a decent tunic cost like £1000 in today's money (at most $1500), probably less. So it the right order of magnitude, but over-estimated.
- sgt101 9y agoCloth was relatively expensive, but leather & fur was relatively cheap.
- mmanfrin 9y agoI really wish there was a 'normalized' column for prices using one coin (probably the penny) -- so it were easier to see the differences while scanning rather than seeing different letters and then having to scan up to figure out which one it was. Also the symbols aren't consistent -- in the money section the author lists the symbol for pound as "L" but then uses the actual pound sterling symbol (£) in the charts. Lastly I wish I could get this in table form, so I could fix this all myself :]
- thaumasiotes 9y agoIt's plain text already in table form. You can have it in whatever table form you prefer with less than 30 minutes of work.
- extrememacaroni 9y ago30 minutes is a long time. What if there's a tiny bit of inconsistency in the format, and you spend even more time working around it? Then there's the need to spend time to be sure that the transformed data is still correct. By the time you've realized the thing is going to take much longer than you thought, you've already wasted enough time.
- mmanfrin 9y agoHah, you were spot on. I gave a go at trying to normalize it. I probably spent over an hour getting to this point: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jmdBXVrT6yiXWM3UfWBIJnLtS71WD0prIzb9wtvr858/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jmdBXVrT6yiXWM3UfWBI... The tricky bit is extracting the different values out of the price column. I managed to get a decent way there, but need to fix the algorithm to handle multiple (variable) groups of denominations. Once I get there I can likely do plain multiplications by the columns to get them normalized (and then maybe pare it back down to add them up within one giant function). It's definitely a rabbit hole, easily a few more hours of hacking away at it. Would be quicker to do it by hand but that's no fun.
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- localcdn 9y agoSource [3] is a great read if this article interested you. [3] Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, Christopher Dyer, Cambridge University Press, 1989
- ggm 9y agoPrice of horses highly variable? War. Oxen are better for cartage and ploughing, less likely to be taken by the lord to waste in france. Oxen every time for me. Add a column normalizing the price through a CGI to current?
- SwellJoe 9y agoThat looks like the start of an educational video game from 1984. Always load up on weapons, and we'll loot and pillage our way through the Crusades or whatever the heck the adventure is.
- anakha 9y agoNow I know what source material Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson developed this from. https://www.scribd.com/document/181876432/ADnD-1st-Edition-Gear-List https://www.scribd.com/document/181876432/ADnD-1st-Edition-G...
- Maven911 9y agoWhat is the name for this type of study. I notice the course is called "Medieval Studies", but is it fair to call this branch "economic history" ? I ask because I want to look up other resources as well.
- cozos 9y agoVery interesting that drummers/trumpeters are so well paid, 20pence/day vs archers who only get paid 3pence/day! I guess that performing in the middle of a battle wasn't a top career pick for musicians.