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Thatcher'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 f
by dsr_ 7y ago
Thatcher'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.
- s0rce 7y agoThatchers didn't do too well, not much use for that profession any more.
- RyJones 7y agoI disagree - I know a thatcher in Holland.
- Aeolun 7y agoI guess you’re well off if you survive the crash and are one of the few remaining. You have a pretty captive market.
- ascorbic 7y agoPlenty of use for them in my part of the world (south of England). According to the National Society of Master Thatchers, there are around 1000 thatching businesses operating in the UK today. https://www.nsmtltd.co.uk/brief-history/ https://www.nsmtltd.co.uk/brief-history/
- LanceH 7y agoThey definitely suffer from a grass ceiling.
- StavrosK 7y agoWell done.
- perl4ever 7y agoWhat? I've heard of at least one that's internationally famous...
- CapricornNoble 7y agoMargaret doesn't count. ;)
- zer00eyz 7y agoToday I can buy a t-shirt for less than an hour at minimum wage (in the USA). The reality is that the loom, for as amazing as it is, is only a small piece of why that item costs so little. Tunic, possibly wool or linen. Both of these items still come at a massive premium today when compared to a cotton or a synthetic. We have made changes and massive progress in the production of the base materials. We have transport issues, it is unlikely that your typical tunic was an imported good. It was probably made and sourced much more locally. Today, due to the nature of production and the structure of tax and tariffs on garments it is likely that your t-shirt is fairly well traveled, with it crossing the ocean more than once (cotton to Asia, woven in one place, made into a garment in another, possibly printed on in a third before even making it to you). There is a LOT more to the story, sewing machines, zippers (YKK is a fascinating company), elastic, pattern making, fabric cutting. The boxes that your products are shipped in, cardboard and steel, the packaging plastic - the inks for it. Dye is a whole field of science and research that has made so much progress in the last 50 years never mind going as far back as a "tunic". The point is there is a massive iceberg under that loom, one you barely see or think about.
- Spooky23 7y agoYou talking undershirt or an actual tshirt? That’s disposable clothing at that price. The miracle of textiles is an artifact of the past. In order to make the insane supply chain make sense, the product is cheapened to the minimum viable level. Most of what happens today is financial engineering. My old ring-spun champion sweatshirts from the 80s:90s are a much better and cheaper product than most stuff on the market today. All made (farmed, spun and sewn) by US labor in South Carolina or New York.
- ctdonath 7y agoActual t-shirt. Not uncommon under $5, sometimes $1, at Walmart. Yes clothing can be disposably priced if you search a bit.
- zer00eyz 7y agoJC penny printed t-shirts $6 us. But, to your point, they are "terrible". You can still find high quality fabrics that have been turned into garments but it is rare and costly. I, as someone who is tall, am mostly locked out of these markets. Interestingly however I am more often then not forced to buy more expensive and better formal items (suits in particular).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zozbot234 7y agoThe Bank of England has an inflation calculator which goes back to 1210: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in... According to that site, £ 1 in 1330 would be £ 1056.57 in 2018. So the 1330 penny would be worth about £ 4.40375 today. That thatcher would make about £ 13.21 a day, and the tunic would cost £ 158.54, or about $205 in a currency we're more familiar with. For that to be "two weeks' wages" implies a yearly wage of about £ 3800, or $4900. (Of course as the linked site points out, that sort of income calculation doesn't account for non-monetary sources of consumption, which were non-negligible back then.)
- scoot 7y ago> or about $205 in a currency we're more familiar with A currency you're more familiar with. Many of us are familiar with multiple currencies, including GBP, EUR, and, yes, USD. To whit – you're comparing decimal GBP to predecimal pounds, shillings and pence. You might as well compare drachma.
- perl4ever 7y agoThe fundamental issue with applying an inflation adjustment over long periods of time, is that societies are so different, that the typical basket of goods purchased is very different and less certain. I like to hold something constant as a reference point, but you have to think about what, because for instance, if you're choosing between gold, silver, bread, beer, chicken, or beef, then you have to consider that they may have changed price dramatically relative to each other so which one you use makes a big difference. I guess an inflation calculator is good if you really know what people bought, but it seems like information would be sparse enough that might mislead you. And like others have said, buying things with money, let alone documenting it, would have been far less prevalent.
- bzbarsky 7y agoAlso important was mechanized spinning of thread. https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.html https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-... cites making a shirt in the middle ages as 7 hours of hand-sewing, 42 hours of hand-weaving, and 500+ hours of hand-spinning. https://thefreelancehistorywriter.com/2015/10/23/was-medieval-spinning-womens-work-a-guest-post-by-katrin-kania/ https://thefreelancehistorywriter.com/2015/10/23/was-medieva... has much higher estimates of spinning rates, but would still result in at least 40 hours of spinning (9000 yards from that first post divided by the 200 m/hr very generous overestimate from the second post; estimates of spinning speed seem to vary _very_ widely). One difference, of course, is that weaving was much more centralized to start with (spinning needed next to no machinery and a lot less training), so the economic impacts were very different.