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Medieval Price List
- gosubpl 7y agoWine: Best Gascon in London 4d/gallon 1331 [2] 194 Best Rhenish in London 8d/gallon " " " This is reversed now, German Riesling much cheaper than Bordeaux.
- UncleSlacky 7y agoAt the time, Bordeaux was an English possession (Angevin Empire) so the lack of any complications like import duties would account for the price difference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angevin_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angevin_Empire
- madengr 7y agoInstruction at Oxford is about 5 anvils/year. Think there has been some price inflation since then? Maybe better to compare it to barrels of beer.
- edzillion 7y agoI am not sure what you mean, but an anvil is about as high-tech a device as you get in medieval times. They would be one of the most expensive items in a village.
- azalemeth 7y agoDon't forget that many of the colleges had scholarships for the "poor, stupidly bright" kids going back several centuries: the Oxbridge colleges had traditional links with different areas of the country going back surprisingly far in history. For example, writing of Merton (Oxford, founded 1264) "By 1370 the college had been converted to a predominantly monastic society, but by 1384 arrangements were made for the maintenance of five poor secular undergraduates who were to assist in the chapel and who were to act as servitors to the monk-fellows. After achieving competence in grammar, these poor scholars were to study arts and one or two of them might even proceed to civil law." [1] Whilst it is undeniably true that the predominant occupant of an Oxbridge college was a comparatively well-to-do member of society, I suspect that the disparity of fees mentioned reflects the disparity of charges made at the time. [1]: The History of the University of Oxford: Volume II: Late Medieval Oxford by J. I. Catto and T. A. R. Evans, Print ISBN-13: 9780199510122
- Aeolun 7y agoOr 60ish sheep per year.
- dmurray 7y agoThat's kept up remarkably well: a sheep can go for £150 [0] and tuition at Oxford is £9,250/year[1]. [0] https://www.farmingads.co.uk/black-leicester-longwool-tup-/Livestock/778789 https://www.farmingads.co.uk/black-leicester-longwool-tup-/L... [1] https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/fees-and-funding/course-fees?wssl=1 https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/fees-and-fundi...
- OJFord 7y agoBut the price of tuition at Oxford is politically, not market, linked, and so if you graphed this over time it'd be all over the place even just the last twenty years.
- dmurray 7y agoA fair point, it's not really an invariant. Though the price of a sheep is just as politically linked given that most farm income in the UK comes from EU subsidies, not from selling goods [0]. [0] https://fullfact.org/economy/farming-subsidies-uk/ https://fullfact.org/economy/farming-subsidies-uk/
- ginko 7y agoAnvils just got a whole lot cheaper.
- dredmorbius 7y agoAnvils represented a large mass of wrought iron, weighing several hundredweight, possibly 300 - 400 pounds (135 - 180 kg). Iron required not just mining, but smelting and working. Coal wasn't widely used until after 1700, so instead charcoal was used for fuel and coking, I need to check sources, but charcoal and coke have roughly the same energy yield per unit mass, and the ratio of coke to ore was about 1:1 in the 1950s. Charcoal itself is yielded from four to five times its mass in original wood. So a 250# anvil, one of middling weight, would have required well over a ton of wood fuel alone. I had fun some time back calculating the firepower of a British Ship of the Line in terms of cords of wood, based on both the cannonballs and the gunpowder (charcoal is an ingredient) involved. I believe it out-massed the ship itself by a considerable margin. Metals are extraordinarily expensive for a pre-industrial society without abundant energy resources. Which is to say, all of them.
- dredmorbius 7y ago8-10 tons of charcoal per ton of pig iron: https://www.masterresource.org/smil-vaclav/a-forgotten-case-of-fossil-fuel-dependence-the-iron-age-requires-carbon-based-energy-like-it-or-not/ https://www.masterresource.org/smil-vaclav/a-forgotten-case-...
- dsr_ 7y agoThatcher's daily wage: 3 pence a day. Price for a tunic: 3 shillings. A tunic is two weeks' earnings. Let's say you make $36,000 a year; two weeks' earnings for you is $1500. The invention of mill-powered looms began the Industrial Revolution, completely upending the economies of Europe.
- dana321 7y agoIts not that long ago we still had 3d etc. 1/4 penny, 1/2 penny here in the uk. Thrupenny bit.
- SomewhatLikely 7y agoIt's not that long ago we left the gold standard.
- dan-robertson 7y agoWe still had ha’pennies after decimalisation. Even before, the pennies weren’t worth what they used to be. In parts of the nineteenth century a penny would be worth something on the order of what 50p is worth today. I guess with money stored largely in bank accounts and financial instruments, inflation becomes a more reasonable thing and the fact that it’s annoying to buy things with physical money matters less. Yet even at the start of the twentieth century banknotes could be worth a lot more than anything today (in the U.K. you only go up to £20 normally. Compare to the us where $100 isn’t abnormal, or to 1900 when 100 £20 notes could buy a moderately sized house (but there were also £100, £200 notes, and higher denominations though I doubt they were used much). I think the U.K. should remove every coin less than 10p (ideally I would get rid of everything less than 50p but perhaps there should be a 50p and 25p coin for some time) from circulation and issue some new banknotes (at least a £50 note that shops accept, so maybe a £100 note should exist too). But I guess that isn’t going to happen because no one really cares about cash.
- Symbiote 7y ago> I think the U.K. should remove every coin less than 10p (ideally I would get rid of everything less than 50p but perhaps there should be a 50p and 25p coin for some time) Aim for 5p to be the lowest, to start. Even in the Nordic countries, where there's less wealth inequality, the smallest coins are worth 8.4p (Norway 1kr), 8.1p (Sweden 1kr), 5.7p (Denmark ½kr), 4.3p (Finland 5¢). > issue some new banknotes (at least a £50 note that shops accept They already do accept them where they're common (e.g. touristy places in London) so the problem will solve itself, but in any case, the new £50 will be issued in 2021.
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- rootbear 7y agoFascinating list, but the notation is confusing in places. The pound sterling is denoted by an L: 1 pound (L) = 20 shillings (s) in the introduction, but in the text both the L and the £ are used, sometimes in the same line! University: Minimum £2£L3/year Late 14 cen [3] 75 What have I missed?
- flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago>What have I missed? Perhaps that he wrote "The list of medieval prices which follows is by no means complete or thoroughly researched" in the very first line? It's not a professionally compiled list meant to present to your boss. It's just a list that some guy made and put online.
- rootbear 7y agoYes, I understand that. I’m just confused by the author’s use of BOTH the L and the £ together, on the same line.
- OJFord 7y agoThe symbol £ is merely a stylised L , so you've missed nothing. It's odd therefore to use both in a mix, but probably it just reflects typing up from a mix of sources.
- aetherspawn 7y agoRent: 5s/year. Horse: 50s. Yep. Awesome.
- rajamaka 7y agoSounds like a good opportunity for renting land and breeding horses.
- OJFord 7y agoRent's so variable, but rurally can certainly be as low as £2,400pa (£200pcm) today. A horse today could also easily exceed £24,000.
- MagnumOpus 7y agoAnd indeed those £2,400pa of rent give you a room with plumbing, central heating and hot water...
- rb808 7y agoYeah rent looks suspiciously cheap. Esp with Brass pot: 2s
- ben174 7y agoGreat data. I would love to normalize this and apply an inflation calculator so people could know what things cost in these times. Anyone want to help?
- mysterypie 7y agoYes, I would love to see this in modern prices, no matter how roughly it gets converted. The use of pre-decimalized pounds makes it even more inscrutable. It would make that list a hundred times more interesting if we had some basis to compare with.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoCame here to ask the same thing. I can’t make heads or tails of it otherwise.
- caublestone 7y agoBeer .5 ducat a pint. College starting at 640 ducats a year up to 2560 ducats a year. So formal education started at 1280 times and went up to 6400 times the price of a pint. Which at $6/pint today would be ~$7500 to $36k a year.
- maxerickson 7y agoThe craft brewery here sells one of their cheaper beers for $3 a pint. (they mostly have $4 and $4.50 price points, with some smaller batches costing more)
- caublestone 7y agoHow much is community college where you are? How much is state?
- maxerickson 7y agoThe localest community college is $5,000 in-county, around $7,000 in state. A cheaper state school is ~$10,000 a year (all numbers are tuition).
- zeroonetwothree 7y agoIn the Bay Area beer is upwards of $10+ now.
- siquick 7y agoI will never complain about Sydney's ~$10.5AUD/~$7USD pints (568ml) again.
- artursapek 7y agoThat padded salary doesn't feel too good anymore, does it?
- moron4hire 7y agoYeah, comparing beer prices, it looks like the exchange rate is around 1 farthing = $5 USD (assuming buying direct from producer, not at a bar that is adding overhead after distribution. US booze distribution laws are insane and add tons of cost) So that makes 1 penny = $40 1 crown = $200 1 shilling = $480 1 pound = $9600
- ggm 7y agohttp://projects.exeter.ac.uk/RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.html http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.h... https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval-prices-and-wages/ https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval-prices-a... http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/ http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/
- nabla9 7y agoMedieval pricing and economy is interesting. I just listened a lecture last summer. These were not free market prices. "Fair price" was moral issue within the community. You could not charge too much extra if the customer faced sudden urgent demand. And buyer was not allowed to exploit the seller either. Exploiting temporary scarcity or oversupply when bargaining would get you into trouble with the law, the guild etc. Determining the fair price level was delicate political process.
- hogFeast 7y agoPrices did move based on supply and demand. The main issue dictating this was actually the limitations of transport. In areas with ready access to water transport though, you will find price integration (i.e. local prices moving together) and this is definitely true to a significant extent in the UK (another good example, obviously, are the Low Countries which were heavily integrated into global markets). One thing to bear in mind with the historiography of this is that historians think what you say is true, and it is definitely true to an extent, because food rioting and all the actions limiting the grain trade are highly visible to us. But it is worth remembering that the basis for economic life was quite different. You had the market but, if you were a serf, you were protected against total destitution (except in periods of severe population pressure) so all of this stuff wasn't quite as sensitive as you think (it also wasn't political in any sense that we recognise today, all of this was handled locally). What definitely was sensitive (and often political in a way that makes sense today) were food riots...but that isn't the same thing. Source: http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/market99.pdf http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/market... - there is tons of stuff generally measuring the cointegration of prices in medieval bulk commodities markets.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago> Prices did move based on supply and demand. The main issue dictating this was actually the limitations of transport. In areas with ready access to water transport though, you will find price integration (i.e. local prices moving together) and this is definitely true to a significant extent in the UK (another good example, obviously, are the Low Countries which were heavily integrated into global markets). The UK did not exist in medieval England, and the medieval Dutch weren't known for trading with the Javanese and the Maori.
- inopinatus 7y agoCan’t help but be reminded of that immortal sales pitch: ”I can make whatever you wish for a wee little bit more than me competition.”
- 27182818284 7y agoIgnorant question: What is a pound in this case? It isn't actually a pound of silver in weight, right? I get really confused with modern British currency and what silver the system was based on in the past, etc. If I see that something is 20 shillings, does that mean it cost me a pound of silver by weight out of the ground to buy?
- sonofgod 7y agoYes, it's a weight of silver, around this era. One Troy pound (373g) [of silver] divided into 240 pennies (making a penny about 1.55g). Exactly what a shilling is varies, between 4 and 6 pennies. [ https://regia.org/research/misc/costs.htm https://regia.org/research/misc/costs.htm ]
- zipwitch 7y agoIf I recall correctly, the pound is just a unit of account (I think I'm using that right) during the Medieval era. No one is actually carrying around pounds of silver.
- MagnumOpus 7y agoThe last time that a "pound sterling" actually bought a pound of Sterling silver was 1300. Since then, currency debasement was the name of the game and in the next 300 years the silver content of the currency shrank by a factor of three.
- cmdshiftf4 7y agoLabourer: £2/year max 7 Books: £5 An average labourer in the UK today would make about £17,000pa, making these books the modern equivalent of about £42,500 or £6,000 a piece. Obviously this was at a time before mass printing was available, but this really puts into perspective just how absolutely unattainable information was for the average person back then. Remarkable.
- ip26 7y agoI don't think that's quite right, bound books were a luxury good but you still had much cheaper vellum, scrolls, and so forth.
- dredmorbius 7y agoVellum is more expensive than paper. The cheap alternative to bound books were pamphlets, generally stitched, and often comprised of a single sheet of folded paper. An octavo pamphlet could run 16 pages (8 impressions per side). I don't know if longer materials (32 - 64 pages) were produced, though I suspect these were printed on multiple pages. Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice, a 32-page pamphlet, has printers marks for four sides ('B', 'C', and 'D' noted on pages 9, 17, 25, respectively), as an example, which would likely correspond to two double-sided octavo signatures: https://www.designersinsights.com/designer-resources/understanding-and-working-with-print/ https://www.designersinsights.com/designer-resources/underst... https://archive.org/details/agrarianjusticeo00pain https://archive.org/details/agrarianjusticeo00pain
- ip26 7y agoEven in 1000AD? Low grade vellum could be made by anyone at home. Was paper in industrial production by that point? Paine was not a medieval writer.
- dredmorbius 7y agoThe period addressed by the article is ~1260 - 1520. So 1000 CE is out of scope. Even were it: - The typical person was illiterate Households would not be producing writing materials in any quantity. - Animal products are expensive, period. Non-animal alternatives would be used where possible. - For short-term writing surfaces, wood, stone, clay, and at some point (possibly later in time) slate were used. The Greeks used wax-coated boards (few of which, for obvious reasons, survived). - Woven textiles were a significant form of recordkeeping, such as the Bayeux Tapestry (11th century). - Notable legal documents, such as the Magna Carta, were written on parchment (animal skins). - Other surfaces included fired pottery, birch bark, and (in east Asia) bamboo. It's not so much that vellum was cheap, as that paper simply didn't exist before ~1000. Over the next ten centuries, processes for production and reductions in price increased not only the prevalence of paper, but the total amount of written material. Gutenberg's press coincided with new, cheaper, papermaking processes. Even so, many of the original works printed by Gutenberg were on vellum, including about a quarter of the original Gutenberg Bible. In all of Europe as of 1400, estimates are that there were on the order of 50,000 books. Not title, but volumes in total. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing#/media/File%3AEuropean_Output_of_Printed_Books_ca._1450–1800.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing#/media/Fil...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- teslaberry 7y agohow much was an hour or two of sex? a somewhat standard range unit of specialized labor. sex with your average 18-35 year old .
- Vaslo 7y agoFeels like I’m reading a Dungeons & Dragons item sheet except using British units instead of gold, silver, and copper.
- zipwitch 7y agoAs it happens, I've been putting together notes for a new D&D campaign I'll be running in the near future. I downloaded this exact price list as a reference three days ago.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TomMckenny 7y agoSo a year's rent for a shop in mid London was twice the price of a cow or a pile of silver worth £240 today. edit: or half a year's wage for a laborer, equivalent to aprox £9,000 today. Those ratios seem to have changed: apparently the benefits of greater efficiency in mining, cattle raising etc. have not be evenly distributed.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- infoseek12 7y agoFor anyone else who is wondering what a biciron is, apparently it's a t-shaped iron wedge that a blacksmith uses to shape metal against. The name seems to come from a contraction of iron beak, in all the references I came across online it is written as two words "bic iron". https://www.hobby-machinist.com/threads/anvil-stand-question.16293/ https://www.hobby-machinist.com/threads/anvil-stand-question... https://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/antique-machinery-and-history/peter-wright-anvil-200262/index3.html https://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/antique-machinery-and-...
- lookdangerous 7y agoI read it in the list, at first, as bitcoin, and had to do a double take.
- purpleidea 7y agoThis is super interesting, however I think it would have been more fun to read if it also had a column of approximate price in adjusted $CAD for example. That way it would be easier to get a "feel" for what stuff was worth. Also, why isn't Salt on the list? Wasn't that a crucial thing?
- misterman0 7y agoMy whole life I thought it was spelled "midevil" due to this time period being especially evil. Every day you learn something new.
- haileris 7y agoFrom French médiéval (“middle”), from Latin medium (“middle”) + aevum (“age”).
- haileris 7y agoI'd love to use this data and create some sort of feudal economic simulator and/or build an RPG with these prices as opposed to arbitrary "gp" values.