You raise some very good points – but I think that looking at the monetary price of wheat is a particularly bad example in England because of the Assize of Brea

You raise some very good points – but I think that looking at the monetary price of wheat is a particularly bad example in England because of the Assize of Bread and Ale [1] which ran from about the 13th century until being repealed in 1836 (!) and later protectionist issues like the Corn laws [2] across "the empire". In many ways these laws directly tied the strength of the currency to the prevailing value of wheat – a very different sort of gold standard(!) – and occasionally caused massive economic difficulties as a result (I remember a story involving the value of silver, Isaac Newton, and shippers directly clipping or smelting coins and moving the metal to amsterdam to sell at a profit compared to the value of the coin, all indirectly powered by the very variable wheat). Your broader point about the pricing of wheat definitely stands though: in the 13th century, wheat drove the economy; as we got better at trading and ultimately the industrial agricultural revolution both served to reduce the variability of the harvest on macroeconomic climes and ever since really the black death we've been in a society where the relative power of the grain (if not its importance!) has steadily declined. [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Bread_and_Ale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Bread_and_Ale [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws [3] https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/219/1/3/1472781?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/219/1/3/14727...