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The expenses of Queen Eleanor of Castile
- fundad 4y ago
- zabzonk 4y agonah, that was the knights
- mellosouls 4y agoSlightly off-topic/meta. I know these submissions from more literary/arty/cultural sources don't always generate the volume (or anything like) of discussion compared to the more usual tech/science/business/etc articles, but I personally appreciate the freshness of the subject matter (and the submitter's effort) especially when - like here - it is outside of my cultural hinterland (mediaeval accounts!) but merges with it via digitisation in a way that would seem alien and magical to the original actors.
- robocat 4y agoI would be interested to see the complete list, and a comparison to the costs of a modern equivalent. I would guess the costs for most things has dropped dramatically, while the cost for professionals has relatively risen. The professionals mentioned were — The queen even had an illuminator in her retinue, Godfrey ‘pictor’, who was responsible for decorating her books and is also mentioned in the accounts — Eleanor granted power to William de Verges, yeoman, to do fealty in her name to Guy, Count of Flanders, for the land that had fallen to her by hereditary right. — The wardrobe account also records payments made to the queen’s own fowler (or bird hunter)
- libraryofbabel 4y ago> I would guess the costs for most things has dropped dramatically, while the cost for professionals has relatively risen. In a sense this is the gist of it: the price of goods is much much lower relative to the price of labor, especially when you compare with the modern West. But that doesn’t really do justice to the immensity of the gulf that separates the pre-modern world from our lives on the other side of changes like industrialization, mass production, chemical fertilizer and mechanized agriculture, and the immense drop in the cost of shipping (railways, containerization, etc). It’s not just that prices have changed; the whole economic game is utterly different. The best example is clothing, which was astonishingly costly in relative terms because fibers and cloth had to be hand-produced at every stage of production. A laborer in the Middle Ages could probably afford only a few items of basic clothing and they would be patched and mended for as long as possible. When cotton production industrialized in the 19th century it was one of the great shifts in world history, for all sorts of reasons: see Sven Beckett’s great book Empire of Cotton. It takes a real effort of imagination (and research) to put ourselves back in that pre-industrial world: you must constantly remind yourself of things like e.g. transportation of goods over any distance over land is extremely expensive, unreliable, and slow (think an ox cart on a rutted track). Indeed transportation of people or even meaningful amounts of information could not happen faster than the speed of a horse. That also utterly changes the economic game in all sorts of ways, if you think about it. Nothing gives the flavor of the alienness of the past like a little economic history.
- pja 4y agoThe figure I've seen quoted for a peasant shirt was that it represented three months worth of labour to produce from start to finish. How many items of clothing would you own if each of them required that much work? The industrial revolution really was a revolution.
- MomoXenosaga 4y agoNowadays European kings get a salary of a few million. Its actually bizarre how poor the kings of Sweden or the Netherlands are compared to their counterparts in Brunei or Saudi Arabia. Constitutional monarchy sucks.
- yywwbbn 4y agoThe British monarchs seem to be doing alright, massive estates and no inheritance taxes.
- robocat 4y agoThe monarchs also bring in huge tourist income - apparently enough to easily cover their taxation costs. Not sure about the land ownership though... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32819367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32819367
- MagnumOpus 4y agoNo they don't. France - right next door - has killed of their monarchs, and now their royal palaces get way more visitors and bring way more revenue than those of the UK. The "tourist income" lie is - surprise surprise - seeded by a PR agency paid by the royals in order to quell republican sentiment. (And breathlessly picked up and spread by ill-informed youtubers like CGP Grey.)
- idlewords 4y agoIf this kind of stuff piques your interest, I highly recommend Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Although it covers a slightly later period, Tuchman goes into fascinating detail about the minutia of daily life, which from our perspective are both familiar and utterly alien.
- kjs3 4y agoMany thanks for the recommendation; picked up a copy. Tuchman wrote Guns of August and The Proud Tower about the times immediately before, during and after the start of WWI. I found both outstanding reads and I can only think A Distant Mirror to be worth the time.
- idlewords 4y agoEverything Tuchman wrote is fantastic, and her interests span so many fields. I hope you enjoy this particular book as much as I did!