17 ms·

How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)

271 points by leonry 5y ago

bodhiandpysics1 5y ago
a lovely little factoid is that in elizabethan england, a set of clothes could easily cost more than a house (Shakespeare paid a 60 pounds for the rather large house New Place, while a very fancy set of clothes could cost hundreds of pounds). This makes sense when you consider that the clothes could take more labor than the house!
hprotagonist 5y ago
Something that continually just blows my mind is how new spinning wheels are. The most plausible range of time of arrival of the wheel in European contexts is between the mid-1200s to about 1340, which means that textiles produced previously to that were made with drop spindles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_(textiles)#Hand_spindles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_(textiles)#Hand_spindl... That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ideas like hand-spinning all the fabric for sails for ships, which is a seriously nontrivial amount of time!
- lumost 5y ago
  It’s curious, if you go back in time far enough with all knowledge from the present, you’d surely arrive at a point where you still need to work your entire life to bring one component of one innovation to life. Even then, the innovation would be unlikely to survive your death due to other missing parts of the supply chain. Try building a musket in Ancient Greece, you’d need to start with building the steel supply chain - which means drilling into granite with wooden and bronze hand tools…
  - chopin 5y ago
    I am pretty sure you could build a musket from bronze. Afaik the early cannons where made of it. Sourcing of the ingredients for black powder might have been harder.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Cannons were cast however and musket barrels aren't. It's unclear you could make the barrels thick/strong enough to be useful. (At some point, you end up with something probably less useful than a refined bow design.) In general, with these scenarios, another variable is do you just wake up in another time or do you have time to prepare, maybe have reference books/artifacts, figure out what you can do given technology and material availability, maybe learn the language, etc.
      - xyzzyz 5y ago
        Yes, you very much could build an effective firearm using bronze or brass. Brass barrels were quite commonly used historically. They are less suitable for modern, high pressure propellants, but for black powder firearms, they’ll work just fine.
  - rsecora 5y ago
    Right, and getting the finance to start the journey will be problematic. The elevator pitch for the musket will sound like black magic.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      In ancient Greece, I wouldn't be surprised if a crossbow (a bow that can be used with relatively little training!) wouldn't be more useful than very primitive firearms.
      - smhenderson 5y ago
        Ancient Greece had the ballista as early as 400 BC so this also wouldn't have seemed that magic or mysterious to them as well.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      I'm not sure even with an unlimited budget you could get metals that would work as a musket. A cannon could be done if you know how, but the cost of that much metal would mean you would need the unlimited budget.
      - mywittyname 5y ago
        One could probably build a cannon out of mostly wood, with some banding for strategic reinforcement. It would be fucking dangerous to operate and might not be all that effective. But my understanding is that the early cannons mainly worked by striking so much fear into people, that they surrendered without resistance. The machines used to bore cannon holes into logs (lathes) would probably be nearly as profitable as the cannons themselves. And one could presumably use their cannon production business to finance their lathe-building business. Oh, and there's always dynamite.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        Black powder bronze firearms did apparently exist historically. Note that bronze is a fairly broad term for a range of alloys, some of which I'm guessing didn't exist in the "bronze age."
  - Shaanie 5y ago
    I wonder which modern information would be actually useful a thousand years ago. Things like electricity, cumbustion engine etc wouldn't be very useful, but perhaps something steam-powered? One low-hanging fruit would be sterilization and hand-washing for medical operations, at least.
    - goda90 5y ago
      Humans have been working with glass for a really long time. I wonder how hard it would be to make a microscope and kick off germ theory and antibiotics and such back then.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      As someone mentioned on a different thread, a printing press would make a massive difference. The wine presses of 1022 were people standing on grapes in a box, so that could be significantly improved too. Significant steam power (so not that ancient Greek toy) might prove too difficult for the engineering of the era, but a pressure cooker might be possible as it’s allowed to leak. Screw cutting lathes, and in particular the guided toolpaths to make the output reliable and consistent, would be a big deal. Might be able to bootstrap enough magnets and wires for basic electricity, at which point you can make much better compasses — the Chinese were the first to go beyond lodestones and that was about 1000 years ago — and electricity makes electroplating possible and some acids (e.g. hydrochloric) and alkalis (e.g. sodium hydroxide) basically trivial. Float glass would radically increase the size and quality of individual windows panes. Knowing that lead oxide reduces the melting point would make manufacture much easier. Wikipedia’s list of medieval technology has some interesting surprises: apparently wheelbarrows are only about 850 years old, hourglasses and segmented arch bridges only about 680 years old.
  - showerst 5y ago
    There's a bunch of youtube channels with various takes on "starting from scratch". It seems like a mix of things that are very hard to bootstrap (metal being a big one!), and things that were more coincidental (lathes, saddles and riding gear, spinning looms). Having a modern high school math education would make you the greatest mathematician in history up to about Newton, but more practically speaking I'm thinking that if you understood the principles behind good charcoal, a wood lathe, and how concrete and mortar actually work you could probably kick civilization up at least a few hundred years. I'm envisioning something like this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IShxXtAev9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IShxXtAev9U although they do rely on 18th century metals there you could start from less. There's a great clickspring series where he thinks about what kind of knowledge and tools would be required to build the antikythera mechanism, I think that's a great example of "master tradesman that got surprisingly far by dedication to a few small areas, but then that knowledge was lost".
    - jaclaz 5y ago
      Not the best example (IMHO): >how concrete and mortar actually work Would you tell Roman engineers how to deal with those? (they actually invented it, and - for certain applications - their concrete is still superior to modern one)
      - showerst 5y ago
        I was thinking in terms of ancient Greece like the GP mentioned. That said, Romans invented and pioneered concrete, but they didn't really understand how or why it worked, it was just centuries of excellent trial and error. They also had problems replicating it out of base materials other than volcanic ash. Now that said I have my doubts that there are that many people on earth who could build better concrete for a given application than the Romans with no store to go buy pure materials from, I'm certainly not one of them. That's also why I didn't talk about modern steel -- In my head I vaguely understand that there's a chain from copper to wire to a rotor/stator to electrolysis to oxygen gas to the Bessemer process, but I'd be amazed if there's anyone on earth who could bootstrap it in one lifetime, even with an ancient king's resources.
  - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    Well even that would vary widely. Some places it's easier to extract iron ore than others, or you could just melt down a meteorite and use that iron/steel to mine more ore. Drilling also isn't necessarily so hard. Neolithic Chinese built perfectly circular discs out of jade, an extremely hard stone. They had no metal tools. It's possible that they could have developed more sophisticated equipment for mining rock, if they realized what they could do with it once they extracted it. https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/mysterious-origin-jade-discs-00943 https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/myster...
  - retrac 5y ago
    Yes, you wouldn't be building a steam engine with the tools of Greek artisans in antiquity, not even the ones who built the Antikythera mechanism. But we do know some things that would seem like crazy hacks to the ancients. For example, I know a simple trick. I can multiply numbers, of arbitrary size. And I can do it in a few seconds using just a stylus and tablet. This would have blown the minds of a learned Roman or Greek from that time. For those who find the general idea enticing, there was a book written about 80 years ago on this idea. What if a time traveller got sent back to Ancient Rome? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall A couple friends and I are big fans of the book, and premise. We always figured it was far too optimistic. Most likely you'd die of dysentery or be sold off into slavery. But assuming not, I figure the real path to power wouldn't be brandy, but strong acids and electroplating.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      I bet most STEM related people could work out how to produce lot or trig tables with a little thinking. I wonder if the ancient Greeks would appreciate those. Edit: It turns out they could produce their own for trig functions and wouldn't have been all that impressed by the log table because they didn't have logs.
      - abecedarius 5y ago
        Slides rules, though. Although it'd be nontrivial to make them, and I'm not sure where the demand would come from. For some of the same practical engineering approximations they might use compass and straightedge instead.
        bee_rider 5y ago
        I never had the chance to use a sliderule, unfortunately. In general (I'm sure someone's dug incredibly deep on this topic and can tell me exactly why I'm wrong), the pre-digital/electronic-computer era of engineering seems to have been really focused on doing log based calculations, which makes sense -- a good design has tolerances such that you only have to be right in the order of magnitude, right? This seems like it would much more appropriate to share with ancient civilizations. No need to waste precision when the implementation is going to be done with an hammer and chisel. I will only be useful if you can convince ancient Greek computers to go out to E-15, haha.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    If you have woodworking skills you could make a crude but working spinning wheel in about a week with crude tools. They are simple machines once you understand them, and most of it can be made crude and still work. The idea is what is hard not the construction which is why once one was made it spread fast. I suspect (I think Bret Devereaux would agree) that if the males who were allowed to be creative had thought about women's work at all they would have made one several thousand years before. I wouldn't be surprised is some unknown woman did create something close on her own but society norms meant it didn't spread (if this happened all evidence would have burned/rotted - Luddites of the day may have destroyed it and the inventor). As a modern educated man I'd turn much of my attention to "women's work" first - in large part because there is low hanging fruit there that would make my life better. The spinning wheel and looms would be a great changer, and something I think just having seen one in a history museum and a few weeks to watch how women work would allow me to make things work, then a few months in the woods to make a prototype. For "men's work" things are harder because society allowed smart men to think about improvements. Maybe I could create gunpowder, but I would prefer to focus my war efforts on a good defense. I know good steel has controlled amounts of manganese and carbon in it (I'm sure more than those two), but I don't know how to control those amounts and my visits to museums and chemistry classes haven't given me enough information to think I could create those from scratch. That is before we consider the amount of labor needed to get the ore. (though if metal is available I'd make a steam engine) Note that the above assumes I end up in or near Europe. I have no idea if any of societies on the other continents could support the above efforts.
    - vagrantJin 5y ago
  - aledalgrande 5y ago
    Related to this if you like the topic and anime, watch Dr. Stone.
  - ajuc 5y ago
    There's this "Conrad Stargard" book series about an engineer going back in time to 13th century Poland and starting industrial revolution there. The book is VERY, VERY sexist with a strong dose of ephebophilia, the hero is 100% Gary Stu with Catholic-supremacy mania, but the engineering challenges and solutions are quite well presented. The trick was to get a powerful patron early and adapt the technology to the limitations and the engineering looked pretty realistic to me. For example he makes rails but no locomotives because pulling standarized cars with standarized containers along low-friction rails already brings most of the benefits of modern transport network and is much easier than designing a steam locomotive in 1230s. There's a lot about industrializing cloth production there, too and it's quite detailed. I liked it despite all the awful stuff.
  - pomian 5y ago
    A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. A novel by Mark Twain. it is really fun.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - jewel 5y ago
    There's a book roughly on that topic called "How to Invent Everything" that I enjoyed, but I'm not sure I remember enough of it now to be of any good, so I'm going to be sure to grab it before going back in time. Also along the same lines is "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm", which I also enjoyed and keep a copy around just in case.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Would you? Maybe it depends on how hard you have to struggle merely to survive and how much freedom you have. If you were a helot in ancient Sparta you'd have to be careful not to draw the attention of the Spartiates; they'd kill you for sport if they thought you were too virtuous. What is this about drilling into granite? The Egyptians were drilling into granite a thousand years earlier using copper tube drills and quartz sand, which they probably could have drilled a lot faster if they'd known about emery, but I don't understand where granite drilling fits into the steel supply chain. But with freedom and some way to survive you can get pretty far. In only four and a half years, apparently without using modern materials other than a video camera and writing instruments, John Plant was able to bootstrap from sticks and stones up to celt axes, coarse pants (spun of course with a drop spindle), a centrifugal blower, iron smelting powered by it, fired bricks, several huts, ceramic tile roofs, underfloor heating, cob construction, bow and arrow, atlatl, lime cement, wood ash cement, crawfish traps, rock-heated soup pots, charcoal burning, a pump drill, and a monjolo. He hasn't yet been able to smelt enough iron to make so much as a fishhook, though, and Australian law doesn't allow him to hunt animals for sinew, leather, catgut, bone, and bladder. A thing he's missing so far is metrology, which is very important for chemistry and for muskets and other machines. He also doesn't have much in the way of chemical resources on his land: no saltpeter and no concentrated salt, though he could perhaps purify them from urine. Still, imagine how far he could get in 40 years with all the knowledge from the present and without those restrictions. It's an amazing contrast to what most of us have achieved in modern life with much more resources. https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/ https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology
- slowhand09 5y ago
  A lifetime ago I worked in a textile mill in the US. After a several months I worked my way up to be a machine operator, a weaver. I had upwards of 50 weaving machines I kept operating thru my shift. Each of these produced probably 80meters * 6meters of fabric in an 8 hour shift. And at this rate, mills in southeast asia were able to undercut prices so much the US industry collapsed.
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    It's pretty amazing how much efficient you can build in if you're starting a process from scratch and know what the first mover did. This is precisely how the US pushed the UK out of the textile business. It's no wonder that it happened again after another series of innovations.
  - coupdejarnac 5y ago
    How old were the machinese you operated? I'm imagining turn of the century steam powered weavers. :)
    - slowhand09 5y ago
      They were state of the art MAV Rapier machines, in mid 1970's. They didn't use shuttles, but instead had rapiers that transported the fibers across the weave.
- unemphysbro 5y ago
  I'd imagine creating uniform and robust ball-bearings is not an easy feat.
  - progman32 5y ago
    Fortunately poured bearings (i.e., with Babbitt alloys) are much easier to create! You pour it into a shell with the shaft already installed. It's just tin and lead with a couple percent copper and antimony. Now, getting a perfectly round shaft... also tough.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  How much faster is a spinning wheel (of typical 500-year-old design, say) vs. a drop spindle, in the hands of someone with 20 years of spinning experience? And can the spinning wheel produce yarn that has similar quality? From skimming around online, it seems that expert spinners get extremely fast with a drop spindle, and can produce higher quality yarn. But I can’t find a definitive answer about the comparative speed.
  - nabilhat 5y ago
    Drop spindles don't spin continuously, which gives the wheel an uptime advantage. Even modern spinners who prefer a drop spindle often have a wheel on hand for plying. Spinning a thread out of a blob of fluff can be engaging and interesting, while plying is a tedious process that's hard to get wrong without falling asleep in the middle. There's not really an art or skill to plying. A wheel can knock out this boring part of the spinning process much more quickly.
- morsch 5y ago
  In a similar vein, I was astonished to read how much time was spent on spinning before the invention of the spinning wheel: Consequently, spinning thread may have been the single most frequently performed work-task in the ancient world (the various farming tasks being more varied and more seasonal, while spinning was being done continuously all year round). We tend to think of the pre-modern world as a world of farmers (and it was) but we ought just as well to think of it as a world of spinnners. I had no idea! From https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-iii-spin-me-right-round/ https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t... The spinning wheel started out being three times more productive (at a somewhat reduced quality) and then, within a century or two, ten times more productive than the previous method. Needless to say, a reduction in labor time potentially close to an order of magnitude in the most labor-intensive part (again, c. 80% of the labor time!) of textile production had enormous economic impacts (...). English cloth production tripled (measured by weight) between 1315 and 1545 and cloth produced per capita increased five-fold.
- bsder 5y ago
  > That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ideas like hand-spinning all the fabric for sails for ships, which is a seriously nontrivial amount of time! The problem is that there is push and pull. The Cotton Gin is quite famous about this. Anyone could have invented the cotton gin--and lots probably did. The problem is that nobody needed an order of magnitude more cotton--until they did. And once they did need more cotton--hey, presto--the cotton gin becomes widespread.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Even knitting dates back only to about 1100 AD, which somewhat staggers me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting
  - hprotagonist 5y ago
    Well, yes, but it has very similar ancestors that are a bunch older: naalbinding, for example, is (probably) at least as old as the Mesolithic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding I know some very … enthusiastic … knitters who are keen to tell me how old knitting “really” is, but it smells a bit like “well, obviously…!” special pleading. I have a naalbound and then felted cap. It is absurdly warm: unwearable with regular exertion in temperatures above -9C or so.
Fenrisulfr 5y ago
There's a great book about the progression of clothing, textiles, and fabric being scarce and expensive to commonplace and cheap. It runs through the various technological innovations (think cotton gin, but plenty more), culture, and economics. The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel. Great quote about Viking sail ships: "Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight hours a day with a heavy spindle whorl to produce relatively coarse yarn, a spinner would toil 385 days to make enough for the sail. Plucking the sheep and preparing the wool for spinning required another 600 days. From start to finish, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they powered."
- duxup 5y ago
  It doesn't strike me as surprising that the sail would take longer than the boat. The skill to make a boat is impressive but the mechanics of getting it done aren't enormous. Fabrics and sewing, gathering and prepping those materials and the tedious work seems enormous.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    The sewing of sail fabric is something different. You need to use heavy duty needle and force it through the fabric. It is somewhat similar I would imagine as dealing with leather. Wood work deals with big pieces comparatively.
    - samstave 5y ago
      - edmundsauto 5y ago
        All of human history is the same at its core. Suffering, exploration, profiteering. Yet we have progressed, bit by bit. We have a ways to go, but the arc of history is bending towards less suffering.
        5y ago
amelius 5y ago
Clothing remains expensive, except we don't see the true cost.
- ska 5y ago
  > Clothing remains expensive, except we don't see the true cost. Not really comparably. Lots of externalities and some weird market distortions, sure. But still, we're an order of magnitude or two cheaper now at minimum. Especially if you are comparing day-to-day functional clothing, where it's more likely 3.
  - brianwawok 5y ago
    More like three. Went from $1500 to $1.50. At a minimum wage job in the US, you can buy multiple shirts per hour worked. It would literally blow the mind of ancient people (maybe even moreso than something like a Computer), as it's something they have and work with - but the price is so different.
    - ska 5y ago
      Yes, I'm handwaving that even if you very conservatively estimate factoring back in for the externalized costs etc., you still are a couple of orders at least for cheapest garments. i.e. the GP has a valid point but it doesn't undermine OP article at all. I expanded a little.
    - ch4s3 5y ago
      The idea that someone on a laborers salary could afford the material standard of people in much of the world today would be astonishing. My own grandmother grew up wearing clothes made from repurposed flour sacks, and that was only 90 years ago. The last two centuries of human progress are staggering to think about.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        There's a book called Why the West Rules--For now that basically explores the social development of the Western and Eastern cores since the dawn of civilization. One of the striking things in the book is that the author charts social development as measured by a formula with lots of variables. The kicker is that if you zoom out to look at the whole history, at that scale, the chart is basically flat-lined near zero until a couple hundred years ago.
yboris 5y ago
A marvelous book comparing income and wealth across centuries is The Haves and the Have-Nots - A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic. One way to compare wealth is to see how many people's labor an individual could purchase. It differs across time and countries (labor is cheap in India currently for example). This book is a careful historic look by an economist - using evidence from literature, history, etc. Branko uses a variety of ways to compare individuals across history. https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/branko-milanovic/the-haves-and-the-have-nots/9780465031412/ https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/branko-milanovic/the-haves...
wongarsu 5y ago
> So a linen weaver would need to work for (500 / 2×40 to 500 / 2×20) 6 to 12 days to earn the price of the simplest linen tunic So translating to modern wages (in US/Western Europe) somewhere between $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and $21000 for the finest quality. That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's clothes into perspective.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  >> $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and $21000 for the finest quality. Go look at the price for a nice suit, or a designer dress. Those numbers are not terribly high.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
    "Not terribly high," I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment. It seems pretty high to me. Also you have to get pretty high up into the luxury market before you'll find a suit that costs $7,000. Armanis are synonymous with luxury suits in the public consciousness and they top out at $4,000, according to their website. The cost of those luxury items don't come from the cost of making them. They come from the fact that they are luxury items -- it's the exclusivity and signaling that you're paying for. For more on this phenomenon see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
    - dharmab 5y ago
      > I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment. Wedding dresses?
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
        Normal people don't buy $7,000 wedding dresses. Hell, even a lot of rich people don't.
bocytron 5y ago
If my calculations are correct, that would be ~$700 to $1400 for a linen tunic.
glanzwulf 5y ago
Well, now that would depend on who's making the tunic. Is it a Armanicus? Or was it made by the fabled three stripe master, Adidacus?
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> Robbers in Italy or debt collectors in Egypt often stripped the clothes off their victims’ backs, With regard to debt collection, what is interesting is the Bible requires that cloaks that were taken as collateral had to be returned by sunset so the person could sleep in them. Exodus 22:26 - If you take your neighbor’s cloak as collateral, return it to him by sunset, because his cloak is the only covering he has for his body. What else will he sleep in?
- etskinner 5y ago
  Kind of contradicts the purpose of the collateral, doesn't it? Does the lender retrieve it as collateral again the next morning? Do they only make same-day loans?
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
    My understanding was that the lender would the retrieve it again every morning.
cwoolfe 5y ago
This is helpful context in understanding the saying: "If anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well." (Matthew 5:40) The ethic described in the modern vernacular is to "go the extra mile." (verse 41)
rahimiali 5y ago
This sentence stood out to me most: “executioners often claimed the clothes that their clients wore to the execution”. The word “client” is what shook me.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  seems they'd be a little bloody after the fact
  - bagacrap 5y ago
    if I got blood on a $2k shirt, I'd probably bother to clean it
- tristor 5y ago
  > The word “client” is what shook me. Executioners in the past would often be paid by the people they were set to execute or their families. That payment included the cost of taking care of the body afterwards, and in many cases a fee for services as the alternative to an executioner was usually much more grim and painful, whereas a good executioner guaranteed a quicky and nearly painless death. There's a fascinating video on YouTube by a channel called Weird History with more on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQqdoJ5rfT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQqdoJ5rfT4
rolleiflex 5y ago
Not the author, don't know him, no connection – but I caught a glimpse somewhere on the blog that he is currently unemployed. As an open-source maintainer, I feel like it is my duty to plug him so he can perhaps get some patrons or donations, the blog is great. https://www.bookandsword.com/support/ https://www.bookandsword.com/support/ He is also not a software engineer or in tech in any meaningful way, so his 'tip to total income' ratio is probably off the chart compared to, say, me. As an aside, now that everybody is asking for 'tips' of some sort, it is getting quite difficult to figure out for whom these tips are essential (i.e. him) and for whom they are just gratuities. I wish I had a good answer for this.
- Zababa 5y ago
  > As an aside, now that everybody is asking for 'tips' of some sort, it is getting quite difficult to figure out for whom these tips are essential (i.e. him) and for whom they are just gratuities. I wish I had a good answer for this. That's a good point. On twitter, I see very often people asking for money for a surgery, an accident, or just in general. I feel like I see this way more often than before, but I don't have any hard data to back this up. Just like you, I don't have any good answer to that.
  - AdamN 5y ago
    Your online social milieu is likely getting poorer over time. In the olden days, online meeting grounds like Twitter were elite locations. Now they're commons. I notice this the most on Reddit where I'm sometimes reminded how many blue collar people there are (and also what a wide age range exists there).
    - baxtr 5y ago
      Yeah, that's a trend. I think it's also the main underlying reason why Google results are getting worse (worse for elites like us...).
  - dfxm12 5y ago
    I feel like I see this way more often than before, but I don't have any hard data to back this up. Just like you, I don't have any good answer to that. Maybe your network is growing or, more realistically, the global pandemic we happen to be in is causing issues than normal. IMO, the answer to this would be voting for politicians who support a welfare system where an accident doesn't bankrupt you (regardless of things like employment status).
hcarvalhoalves 5y ago
So, the word "robber" is because they would strip you out of your robe?
- jacobolus 5y ago
  Actually it is the opposite. The word “rob” comes from a proto-indo-european root meaning to “tear” or “strip”, and has apparently been used in the modern sense of taking things by force for thousands of years, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/Hrewp- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/raubaz https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... The word “robe” is the derivative word, originally meaning the spoils of robbery, e.g. a stolen garment. It has only meant a specific kind of long loose garment for hundreds of years. The English words “rip”, “reave”, “bereave” also come from the same origin.
eitally 5y ago
There are a bunch of similar articles describing costs in the Middle Ages. Here's one example (there's another on the bookandsword.com site, too): https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.html https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-...
1-6 5y ago
Must be a slow day on HN when we're talking about tunics.
- dymk 5y ago
  At least it's not another article about web3 or Amazon
jedberg 5y ago
Up until very recently, durable goods were very expensive and labor was very cheap. In some parts of the world, that's still the case today. Just the other day was an article about how Agatha Christie was considered middle class even though she had a live in maid and nanny, because she couldn't afford a car, because the cost of the car was the same as 5 years of salary for both workers.
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
What about the price of materials? Take that off of the 500 to start with, they'd have to work longer to make ends meet.
wanderer_ 5y ago
Nice website, bookmarked
WalterBright 5y ago
Women used to spend all day either tending the stove or making thread, cloth, and sewing. It's no surprised that the Industrial Revolution started with the textile industry.
meerita 5y ago
Nice article. You can read also from Titus Livius, in his work *Ad Urbe Condita, that in many occassions, if not all of them, when an army won the battle they stripped all their defeated army clothing, leaving them only with a small underwear back to their own cities. That was the price of defeat.
bmn__ 5y ago
Also see: • Prices and wages in Medieval England (2014) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882389> 2022-01-10, 119 comments • Medieval Price List <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669787> 2019-12-01, 147 comments • List of price of medieval items <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15680005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15680005> 2017-11-12, 48 comments • List of prices of medieval items (2009) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11613093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11613093> 2016-05-03, 38 comments
K0balt 5y ago
An interesting takeaway here is the wages with and without “maintenance”. From earlier reading, I take “maintained” workers to have been provided food, fuel, and housing. Since “maintained” workers earned half of “unmaintained” workers, we can extrapolate that the pay was approximately equal to the cost of food, fuel, and housing, which would point to discretionary income at a much higher rate vs basic costs of living than contemporary laborers. Many other factors are involved of course, including services and automation which greatly increase quality of life while reducing the need of discretionary spending, and also the comparative wage hierarchy of textile workers, but it is an interesting comparison nonetheless.

271 points by leonry 5y ago

a lovely little factoid is that in elizabethan england, a set of clothes could easily cost more than a house (Shakespeare paid a 60 pounds for the rather large house New Place, while a very fancy set of clothes could cost hundreds of pounds). This makes sense when you consider that the clothes could take more labor than the house!

hprotagonist 5y ago

Something that continually just blows my mind is how new spinning wheels are. The most plausible range of time of arrival of the wheel in European contexts is between the mid-1200s to about 1340, which means that textiles produced previously to that were made with drop spindles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_(textiles)#Hand_spindles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_(textiles)#Hand_spindl... That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ideas like hand-spinning all the fabric for sails for ships, which is a seriously nontrivial amount of time!

lumost 5y ago
It’s curious, if you go back in time far enough with all knowledge from the present, you’d surely arrive at a point where you still need to work your entire life to bring one component of one innovation to life. Even then, the innovation would be unlikely to survive your death due to other missing parts of the supply chain. Try building a musket in Ancient Greece, you’d need to start with building the steel supply chain - which means drilling into granite with wooden and bronze hand tools…
- chopin 5y ago
  I am pretty sure you could build a musket from bronze. Afaik the early cannons where made of it. Sourcing of the ingredients for black powder might have been harder.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Cannons were cast however and musket barrels aren't. It's unclear you could make the barrels thick/strong enough to be useful. (At some point, you end up with something probably less useful than a refined bow design.) In general, with these scenarios, another variable is do you just wake up in another time or do you have time to prepare, maybe have reference books/artifacts, figure out what you can do given technology and material availability, maybe learn the language, etc.
    - xyzzyz 5y ago
      Yes, you very much could build an effective firearm using bronze or brass. Brass barrels were quite commonly used historically. They are less suitable for modern, high pressure propellants, but for black powder firearms, they’ll work just fine.
- rsecora 5y ago
  Right, and getting the finance to start the journey will be problematic. The elevator pitch for the musket will sound like black magic.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    In ancient Greece, I wouldn't be surprised if a crossbow (a bow that can be used with relatively little training!) wouldn't be more useful than very primitive firearms.
    - smhenderson 5y ago
      Ancient Greece had the ballista as early as 400 BC so this also wouldn't have seemed that magic or mysterious to them as well.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    I'm not sure even with an unlimited budget you could get metals that would work as a musket. A cannon could be done if you know how, but the cost of that much metal would mean you would need the unlimited budget.
    - mywittyname 5y ago
      One could probably build a cannon out of mostly wood, with some banding for strategic reinforcement. It would be fucking dangerous to operate and might not be all that effective. But my understanding is that the early cannons mainly worked by striking so much fear into people, that they surrendered without resistance. The machines used to bore cannon holes into logs (lathes) would probably be nearly as profitable as the cannons themselves. And one could presumably use their cannon production business to finance their lathe-building business. Oh, and there's always dynamite.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Black powder bronze firearms did apparently exist historically. Note that bronze is a fairly broad term for a range of alloys, some of which I'm guessing didn't exist in the "bronze age."
- Shaanie 5y ago
  I wonder which modern information would be actually useful a thousand years ago. Things like electricity, cumbustion engine etc wouldn't be very useful, but perhaps something steam-powered? One low-hanging fruit would be sterilization and hand-washing for medical operations, at least.
  - goda90 5y ago
    Humans have been working with glass for a really long time. I wonder how hard it would be to make a microscope and kick off germ theory and antibiotics and such back then.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    As someone mentioned on a different thread, a printing press would make a massive difference. The wine presses of 1022 were people standing on grapes in a box, so that could be significantly improved too. Significant steam power (so not that ancient Greek toy) might prove too difficult for the engineering of the era, but a pressure cooker might be possible as it’s allowed to leak. Screw cutting lathes, and in particular the guided toolpaths to make the output reliable and consistent, would be a big deal. Might be able to bootstrap enough magnets and wires for basic electricity, at which point you can make much better compasses — the Chinese were the first to go beyond lodestones and that was about 1000 years ago — and electricity makes electroplating possible and some acids (e.g. hydrochloric) and alkalis (e.g. sodium hydroxide) basically trivial. Float glass would radically increase the size and quality of individual windows panes. Knowing that lead oxide reduces the melting point would make manufacture much easier. Wikipedia’s list of medieval technology has some interesting surprises: apparently wheelbarrows are only about 850 years old, hourglasses and segmented arch bridges only about 680 years old.
- showerst 5y ago
  There's a bunch of youtube channels with various takes on "starting from scratch". It seems like a mix of things that are very hard to bootstrap (metal being a big one!), and things that were more coincidental (lathes, saddles and riding gear, spinning looms). Having a modern high school math education would make you the greatest mathematician in history up to about Newton, but more practically speaking I'm thinking that if you understood the principles behind good charcoal, a wood lathe, and how concrete and mortar actually work you could probably kick civilization up at least a few hundred years. I'm envisioning something like this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IShxXtAev9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IShxXtAev9U although they do rely on 18th century metals there you could start from less. There's a great clickspring series where he thinks about what kind of knowledge and tools would be required to build the antikythera mechanism, I think that's a great example of "master tradesman that got surprisingly far by dedication to a few small areas, but then that knowledge was lost".
  - jaclaz 5y ago
    Not the best example (IMHO): >how concrete and mortar actually work Would you tell Roman engineers how to deal with those? (they actually invented it, and - for certain applications - their concrete is still superior to modern one)
    - showerst 5y ago
      I was thinking in terms of ancient Greece like the GP mentioned. That said, Romans invented and pioneered concrete, but they didn't really understand how or why it worked, it was just centuries of excellent trial and error. They also had problems replicating it out of base materials other than volcanic ash. Now that said I have my doubts that there are that many people on earth who could build better concrete for a given application than the Romans with no store to go buy pure materials from, I'm certainly not one of them. That's also why I didn't talk about modern steel -- In my head I vaguely understand that there's a chain from copper to wire to a rotor/stator to electrolysis to oxygen gas to the Bessemer process, but I'd be amazed if there's anyone on earth who could bootstrap it in one lifetime, even with an ancient king's resources.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  Well even that would vary widely. Some places it's easier to extract iron ore than others, or you could just melt down a meteorite and use that iron/steel to mine more ore. Drilling also isn't necessarily so hard. Neolithic Chinese built perfectly circular discs out of jade, an extremely hard stone. They had no metal tools. It's possible that they could have developed more sophisticated equipment for mining rock, if they realized what they could do with it once they extracted it. https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/mysterious-origin-jade-discs-00943 https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/myster...
- retrac 5y ago
  Yes, you wouldn't be building a steam engine with the tools of Greek artisans in antiquity, not even the ones who built the Antikythera mechanism. But we do know some things that would seem like crazy hacks to the ancients. For example, I know a simple trick. I can multiply numbers, of arbitrary size. And I can do it in a few seconds using just a stylus and tablet. This would have blown the minds of a learned Roman or Greek from that time. For those who find the general idea enticing, there was a book written about 80 years ago on this idea. What if a time traveller got sent back to Ancient Rome? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall A couple friends and I are big fans of the book, and premise. We always figured it was far too optimistic. Most likely you'd die of dysentery or be sold off into slavery. But assuming not, I figure the real path to power wouldn't be brandy, but strong acids and electroplating.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    I bet most STEM related people could work out how to produce lot or trig tables with a little thinking. I wonder if the ancient Greeks would appreciate those. Edit: It turns out they could produce their own for trig functions and wouldn't have been all that impressed by the log table because they didn't have logs.
    - abecedarius 5y ago
      Slides rules, though. Although it'd be nontrivial to make them, and I'm not sure where the demand would come from. For some of the same practical engineering approximations they might use compass and straightedge instead.
      - bee_rider 5y ago
        I never had the chance to use a sliderule, unfortunately. In general (I'm sure someone's dug incredibly deep on this topic and can tell me exactly why I'm wrong), the pre-digital/electronic-computer era of engineering seems to have been really focused on doing log based calculations, which makes sense -- a good design has tolerances such that you only have to be right in the order of magnitude, right? This seems like it would much more appropriate to share with ancient civilizations. No need to waste precision when the implementation is going to be done with an hammer and chisel. I will only be useful if you can convince ancient Greek computers to go out to E-15, haha.
- bluGill 5y ago
  If you have woodworking skills you could make a crude but working spinning wheel in about a week with crude tools. They are simple machines once you understand them, and most of it can be made crude and still work. The idea is what is hard not the construction which is why once one was made it spread fast. I suspect (I think Bret Devereaux would agree) that if the males who were allowed to be creative had thought about women's work at all they would have made one several thousand years before. I wouldn't be surprised is some unknown woman did create something close on her own but society norms meant it didn't spread (if this happened all evidence would have burned/rotted - Luddites of the day may have destroyed it and the inventor). As a modern educated man I'd turn much of my attention to "women's work" first - in large part because there is low hanging fruit there that would make my life better. The spinning wheel and looms would be a great changer, and something I think just having seen one in a history museum and a few weeks to watch how women work would allow me to make things work, then a few months in the woods to make a prototype. For "men's work" things are harder because society allowed smart men to think about improvements. Maybe I could create gunpowder, but I would prefer to focus my war efforts on a good defense. I know good steel has controlled amounts of manganese and carbon in it (I'm sure more than those two), but I don't know how to control those amounts and my visits to museums and chemistry classes haven't given me enough information to think I could create those from scratch. That is before we consider the amount of labor needed to get the ore. (though if metal is available I'd make a steam engine) Note that the above assumes I end up in or near Europe. I have no idea if any of societies on the other continents could support the above efforts.
  - vagrantJin 5y ago
- aledalgrande 5y ago
  Related to this if you like the topic and anime, watch Dr. Stone.
- ajuc 5y ago
  There's this "Conrad Stargard" book series about an engineer going back in time to 13th century Poland and starting industrial revolution there. The book is VERY, VERY sexist with a strong dose of ephebophilia, the hero is 100% Gary Stu with Catholic-supremacy mania, but the engineering challenges and solutions are quite well presented. The trick was to get a powerful patron early and adapt the technology to the limitations and the engineering looked pretty realistic to me. For example he makes rails but no locomotives because pulling standarized cars with standarized containers along low-friction rails already brings most of the benefits of modern transport network and is much easier than designing a steam locomotive in 1230s. There's a lot about industrializing cloth production there, too and it's quite detailed. I liked it despite all the awful stuff.
- pomian 5y ago
  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. A novel by Mark Twain. it is really fun.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jewel 5y ago
  There's a book roughly on that topic called "How to Invent Everything" that I enjoyed, but I'm not sure I remember enough of it now to be of any good, so I'm going to be sure to grab it before going back in time. Also along the same lines is "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm", which I also enjoyed and keep a copy around just in case.
- kragen 5y ago
  Would you? Maybe it depends on how hard you have to struggle merely to survive and how much freedom you have. If you were a helot in ancient Sparta you'd have to be careful not to draw the attention of the Spartiates; they'd kill you for sport if they thought you were too virtuous. What is this about drilling into granite? The Egyptians were drilling into granite a thousand years earlier using copper tube drills and quartz sand, which they probably could have drilled a lot faster if they'd known about emery, but I don't understand where granite drilling fits into the steel supply chain. But with freedom and some way to survive you can get pretty far. In only four and a half years, apparently without using modern materials other than a video camera and writing instruments, John Plant was able to bootstrap from sticks and stones up to celt axes, coarse pants (spun of course with a drop spindle), a centrifugal blower, iron smelting powered by it, fired bricks, several huts, ceramic tile roofs, underfloor heating, cob construction, bow and arrow, atlatl, lime cement, wood ash cement, crawfish traps, rock-heated soup pots, charcoal burning, a pump drill, and a monjolo. He hasn't yet been able to smelt enough iron to make so much as a fishhook, though, and Australian law doesn't allow him to hunt animals for sinew, leather, catgut, bone, and bladder. A thing he's missing so far is metrology, which is very important for chemistry and for muskets and other machines. He also doesn't have much in the way of chemical resources on his land: no saltpeter and no concentrated salt, though he could perhaps purify them from urine. Still, imagine how far he could get in 40 years with all the knowledge from the present and without those restrictions. It's an amazing contrast to what most of us have achieved in modern life with much more resources. https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/ https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology
slowhand09 5y ago
A lifetime ago I worked in a textile mill in the US. After a several months I worked my way up to be a machine operator, a weaver. I had upwards of 50 weaving machines I kept operating thru my shift. Each of these produced probably 80meters * 6meters of fabric in an 8 hour shift. And at this rate, mills in southeast asia were able to undercut prices so much the US industry collapsed.
- ch4s3 5y ago
  It's pretty amazing how much efficient you can build in if you're starting a process from scratch and know what the first mover did. This is precisely how the US pushed the UK out of the textile business. It's no wonder that it happened again after another series of innovations.
- coupdejarnac 5y ago
  How old were the machinese you operated? I'm imagining turn of the century steam powered weavers. :)
  - slowhand09 5y ago
    They were state of the art MAV Rapier machines, in mid 1970's. They didn't use shuttles, but instead had rapiers that transported the fibers across the weave.
unemphysbro 5y ago
I'd imagine creating uniform and robust ball-bearings is not an easy feat.
- progman32 5y ago
  Fortunately poured bearings (i.e., with Babbitt alloys) are much easier to create! You pour it into a shell with the shaft already installed. It's just tin and lead with a couple percent copper and antimony. Now, getting a perfectly round shaft... also tough.
jacobolus 5y ago
How much faster is a spinning wheel (of typical 500-year-old design, say) vs. a drop spindle, in the hands of someone with 20 years of spinning experience? And can the spinning wheel produce yarn that has similar quality? From skimming around online, it seems that expert spinners get extremely fast with a drop spindle, and can produce higher quality yarn. But I can’t find a definitive answer about the comparative speed.
- nabilhat 5y ago
  Drop spindles don't spin continuously, which gives the wheel an uptime advantage. Even modern spinners who prefer a drop spindle often have a wheel on hand for plying. Spinning a thread out of a blob of fluff can be engaging and interesting, while plying is a tedious process that's hard to get wrong without falling asleep in the middle. There's not really an art or skill to plying. A wheel can knock out this boring part of the spinning process much more quickly.
morsch 5y ago
In a similar vein, I was astonished to read how much time was spent on spinning before the invention of the spinning wheel: Consequently, spinning thread may have been the single most frequently performed work-task in the ancient world (the various farming tasks being more varied and more seasonal, while spinning was being done continuously all year round). We tend to think of the pre-modern world as a world of farmers (and it was) but we ought just as well to think of it as a world of spinnners. I had no idea! From https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-iii-spin-me-right-round/ https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t... The spinning wheel started out being three times more productive (at a somewhat reduced quality) and then, within a century or two, ten times more productive than the previous method. Needless to say, a reduction in labor time potentially close to an order of magnitude in the most labor-intensive part (again, c. 80% of the labor time!) of textile production had enormous economic impacts (...). English cloth production tripled (measured by weight) between 1315 and 1545 and cloth produced per capita increased five-fold.
bsder 5y ago
> That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ideas like hand-spinning all the fabric for sails for ships, which is a seriously nontrivial amount of time! The problem is that there is push and pull. The Cotton Gin is quite famous about this. Anyone could have invented the cotton gin--and lots probably did. The problem is that nobody needed an order of magnitude more cotton--until they did. And once they did need more cotton--hey, presto--the cotton gin becomes widespread.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Even knitting dates back only to about 1100 AD, which somewhat staggers me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  Well, yes, but it has very similar ancestors that are a bunch older: naalbinding, for example, is (probably) at least as old as the Mesolithic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding I know some very … enthusiastic … knitters who are keen to tell me how old knitting “really” is, but it smells a bit like “well, obviously…!” special pleading. I have a naalbound and then felted cap. It is absurdly warm: unwearable with regular exertion in temperatures above -9C or so.

Fenrisulfr 5y ago

There's a great book about the progression of clothing, textiles, and fabric being scarce and expensive to commonplace and cheap. It runs through the various technological innovations (think cotton gin, but plenty more), culture, and economics. The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel. Great quote about Viking sail ships: "Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight hours a day with a heavy spindle whorl to produce relatively coarse yarn, a spinner would toil 385 days to make enough for the sail. Plucking the sheep and preparing the wool for spinning required another 600 days. From start to finish, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they powered."

duxup 5y ago
It doesn't strike me as surprising that the sail would take longer than the boat. The skill to make a boat is impressive but the mechanics of getting it done aren't enormous. Fabrics and sewing, gathering and prepping those materials and the tedious work seems enormous.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  The sewing of sail fabric is something different. You need to use heavy duty needle and force it through the fabric. It is somewhat similar I would imagine as dealing with leather. Wood work deals with big pieces comparatively.
  - samstave 5y ago
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      All of human history is the same at its core. Suffering, exploration, profiteering. Yet we have progressed, bit by bit. We have a ways to go, but the arc of history is bending towards less suffering.
      - 5y ago

amelius 5y ago

Clothing remains expensive, except we don't see the true cost.

ska 5y ago
> Clothing remains expensive, except we don't see the true cost. Not really comparably. Lots of externalities and some weird market distortions, sure. But still, we're an order of magnitude or two cheaper now at minimum. Especially if you are comparing day-to-day functional clothing, where it's more likely 3.
- brianwawok 5y ago
  More like three. Went from $1500 to $1.50. At a minimum wage job in the US, you can buy multiple shirts per hour worked. It would literally blow the mind of ancient people (maybe even moreso than something like a Computer), as it's something they have and work with - but the price is so different.
  - ska 5y ago
    Yes, I'm handwaving that even if you very conservatively estimate factoring back in for the externalized costs etc., you still are a couple of orders at least for cheapest garments. i.e. the GP has a valid point but it doesn't undermine OP article at all. I expanded a little.
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    The idea that someone on a laborers salary could afford the material standard of people in much of the world today would be astonishing. My own grandmother grew up wearing clothes made from repurposed flour sacks, and that was only 90 years ago. The last two centuries of human progress are staggering to think about.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      There's a book called Why the West Rules--For now that basically explores the social development of the Western and Eastern cores since the dawn of civilization. One of the striking things in the book is that the author charts social development as measured by a formula with lots of variables. The kicker is that if you zoom out to look at the whole history, at that scale, the chart is basically flat-lined near zero until a couple hundred years ago.

yboris 5y ago

A marvelous book comparing income and wealth across centuries is The Haves and the Have-Nots - A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic. One way to compare wealth is to see how many people's labor an individual could purchase. It differs across time and countries (labor is cheap in India currently for example). This book is a careful historic look by an economist - using evidence from literature, history, etc. Branko uses a variety of ways to compare individuals across history. https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/branko-milanovic/the-haves-and-the-have-nots/9780465031412/ https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/branko-milanovic/the-haves...

wongarsu 5y ago

> So a linen weaver would need to work for (500 / 2×40 to 500 / 2×20) 6 to 12 days to earn the price of the simplest linen tunic So translating to modern wages (in US/Western Europe) somewhere between $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and $21000 for the finest quality. That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's clothes into perspective.

sandworm101 5y ago
>> $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and $21000 for the finest quality. Go look at the price for a nice suit, or a designer dress. Those numbers are not terribly high.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  "Not terribly high," I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment. It seems pretty high to me. Also you have to get pretty high up into the luxury market before you'll find a suit that costs $7,000. Armanis are synonymous with luxury suits in the public consciousness and they top out at $4,000, according to their website. The cost of those luxury items don't come from the cost of making them. They come from the fact that they are luxury items -- it's the exclusivity and signaling that you're paying for. For more on this phenomenon see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
  - dharmab 5y ago
    > I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment. Wedding dresses?
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
      Normal people don't buy $7,000 wedding dresses. Hell, even a lot of rich people don't.

bocytron 5y ago

If my calculations are correct, that would be ~$700 to $1400 for a linen tunic.

glanzwulf 5y ago

Well, now that would depend on who's making the tunic. Is it a Armanicus? Or was it made by the fabled three stripe master, Adidacus?

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

> Robbers in Italy or debt collectors in Egypt often stripped the clothes off their victims’ backs, With regard to debt collection, what is interesting is the Bible requires that cloaks that were taken as collateral had to be returned by sunset so the person could sleep in them. Exodus 22:26 - If you take your neighbor’s cloak as collateral, return it to him by sunset, because his cloak is the only covering he has for his body. What else will he sleep in?

etskinner 5y ago
Kind of contradicts the purpose of the collateral, doesn't it? Does the lender retrieve it as collateral again the next morning? Do they only make same-day loans?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  My understanding was that the lender would the retrieve it again every morning.

cwoolfe 5y ago

This is helpful context in understanding the saying: "If anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well." (Matthew 5:40) The ethic described in the modern vernacular is to "go the extra mile." (verse 41)

rahimiali 5y ago

This sentence stood out to me most: “executioners often claimed the clothes that their clients wore to the execution”. The word “client” is what shook me.

missedthecue 5y ago
seems they'd be a little bloody after the fact
- bagacrap 5y ago
  if I got blood on a $2k shirt, I'd probably bother to clean it
tristor 5y ago
> The word “client” is what shook me. Executioners in the past would often be paid by the people they were set to execute or their families. That payment included the cost of taking care of the body afterwards, and in many cases a fee for services as the alternative to an executioner was usually much more grim and painful, whereas a good executioner guaranteed a quicky and nearly painless death. There's a fascinating video on YouTube by a channel called Weird History with more on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQqdoJ5rfT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQqdoJ5rfT4

rolleiflex 5y ago

Not the author, don't know him, no connection – but I caught a glimpse somewhere on the blog that he is currently unemployed. As an open-source maintainer, I feel like it is my duty to plug him so he can perhaps get some patrons or donations, the blog is great. https://www.bookandsword.com/support/ https://www.bookandsword.com/support/ He is also not a software engineer or in tech in any meaningful way, so his 'tip to total income' ratio is probably off the chart compared to, say, me. As an aside, now that everybody is asking for 'tips' of some sort, it is getting quite difficult to figure out for whom these tips are essential (i.e. him) and for whom they are just gratuities. I wish I had a good answer for this.

Zababa 5y ago
> As an aside, now that everybody is asking for 'tips' of some sort, it is getting quite difficult to figure out for whom these tips are essential (i.e. him) and for whom they are just gratuities. I wish I had a good answer for this. That's a good point. On twitter, I see very often people asking for money for a surgery, an accident, or just in general. I feel like I see this way more often than before, but I don't have any hard data to back this up. Just like you, I don't have any good answer to that.
- AdamN 5y ago
  Your online social milieu is likely getting poorer over time. In the olden days, online meeting grounds like Twitter were elite locations. Now they're commons. I notice this the most on Reddit where I'm sometimes reminded how many blue collar people there are (and also what a wide age range exists there).
  - baxtr 5y ago
    Yeah, that's a trend. I think it's also the main underlying reason why Google results are getting worse (worse for elites like us...).
- dfxm12 5y ago
  I feel like I see this way more often than before, but I don't have any hard data to back this up. Just like you, I don't have any good answer to that. Maybe your network is growing or, more realistically, the global pandemic we happen to be in is causing issues than normal. IMO, the answer to this would be voting for politicians who support a welfare system where an accident doesn't bankrupt you (regardless of things like employment status).

hcarvalhoalves 5y ago

So, the word "robber" is because they would strip you out of your robe?

jacobolus 5y ago
Actually it is the opposite. The word “rob” comes from a proto-indo-european root meaning to “tear” or “strip”, and has apparently been used in the modern sense of taking things by force for thousands of years, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/Hrewp- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/raubaz https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... The word “robe” is the derivative word, originally meaning the spoils of robbery, e.g. a stolen garment. It has only meant a specific kind of long loose garment for hundreds of years. The English words “rip”, “reave”, “bereave” also come from the same origin.

eitally 5y ago

There are a bunch of similar articles describing costs in the Middle Ages. Here's one example (there's another on the bookandsword.com site, too): https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.html https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-...

1-6 5y ago

Must be a slow day on HN when we're talking about tunics.

dymk 5y ago
At least it's not another article about web3 or Amazon

jedberg 5y ago

Up until very recently, durable goods were very expensive and labor was very cheap. In some parts of the world, that's still the case today. Just the other day was an article about how Agatha Christie was considered middle class even though she had a live in maid and nanny, because she couldn't afford a car, because the cost of the car was the same as 5 years of salary for both workers.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

What about the price of materials? Take that off of the 500 to start with, they'd have to work longer to make ends meet.

wanderer_ 5y ago

Nice website, bookmarked

WalterBright 5y ago

Women used to spend all day either tending the stove or making thread, cloth, and sewing. It's no surprised that the Industrial Revolution started with the textile industry.

meerita 5y ago

Nice article. You can read also from Titus Livius, in his work *Ad Urbe Condita, that in many occassions, if not all of them, when an army won the battle they stripped all their defeated army clothing, leaving them only with a small underwear back to their own cities. That was the price of defeat.

bmn__ 5y ago

Also see: • Prices and wages in Medieval England (2014) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882389> 2022-01-10, 119 comments • Medieval Price List <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669787> 2019-12-01, 147 comments • List of price of medieval items <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15680005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15680005> 2017-11-12, 48 comments • List of prices of medieval items (2009) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11613093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11613093> 2016-05-03, 38 comments

K0balt 5y ago

An interesting takeaway here is the wages with and without “maintenance”. From earlier reading, I take “maintained” workers to have been provided food, fuel, and housing. Since “maintained” workers earned half of “unmaintained” workers, we can extrapolate that the pay was approximately equal to the cost of food, fuel, and housing, which would point to discretionary income at a much higher rate vs basic costs of living than contemporary laborers. Many other factors are involved of course, including services and automation which greatly increase quality of life while reducing the need of discretionary spending, and also the comparative wage hierarchy of textile workers, but it is an interesting comparison nonetheless.