
List of price of medieval items (2006) - benbreen
http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html
======
njarboe
I find it interesting that while wages were very low when compared to today,
the price of objects are not so different when priced in silver.

Using a bit of googling it looks like a £ in the 1300's was, as the name
states, a pound of silver. The exact amount of silver varied a bit over time
but this comes out to be about 350g of silver or ~$200.

So a War Horse at £80 is $16,000 Axe: 5d = 5 _(200 /240) = $4 Cow: 10s =
10/20_200 = $100 Dozen eggs = 1/2*(200/240) = $0.4

Not too far off. Could be just a historical accident, but with the value of
silver holding up over the centuries, I can see where the goldbugs might get
their obsession with metals.

~~~
GnarfGnarf
Your reasoning is correct, but the results don't seem right. The horse is too
high. Cow, axe & eggs too low. Possibly the data covers too wide a time and
geographic span.

~~~
muzani
A cow for $100 seems extremely cheap. Either that or cows where I live are
much too expensive.

The war horse seems about right to me though. For those times, it would be
similar to a luxury car or a bulldozer.

~~~
allhailkatt
Keep in mind, cows were way smaller before they were cross-bred with bison.
The price reflects less pounds of meat on average.

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mmanfrin
I really wish there was a 'normalized' column for prices using one coin
(probably the penny) -- so it were easier to see the differences while
scanning rather than seeing different letters and then having to scan up to
figure out which one it was. Also the symbols aren't consistent -- in the
money section the author lists the symbol for pound as "L" but then uses the
actual pound sterling symbol (£) in the charts.

Lastly I wish I could get this in table form, so I could fix this all myself
:]

~~~
thaumasiotes
It's plain text already in table form. You can have it in whatever table form
you prefer with less than 30 minutes of work.

~~~
extrememacaroni
30 minutes is a long time. What if there's a tiny bit of inconsistency in the
format, and you spend even more time working around it? Then there's the need
to spend time to be sure that the transformed data is still correct.

By the time you've realized the thing is going to take much longer than you
thought, you've already wasted enough time.

~~~
mmanfrin
Hah, you were spot on. I gave a go at trying to normalize it. I probably spent
over an hour getting to this point:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jmdBXVrT6yiXWM3UfWBI...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jmdBXVrT6yiXWM3UfWBIJnLtS71WD0prIzb9wtvr858/edit#gid=0)

The tricky bit is extracting the different values out of the price column. I
managed to get a decent way there, but need to fix the algorithm to handle
multiple (variable) groups of denominations. Once I get there I can likely do
plain multiplications by the columns to get them normalized (and then maybe
pare it back down to add them up within one giant function).

It's definitely a rabbit hole, easily a few more hours of hacking away at it.
Would be quicker to do it by hand but that's no fun.

~~~
thaumasiotes
>> Then there's the need to spend time to be sure that the transformed data is
still correct.

>> By the time you've realized the thing is going to take much longer than you
thought, you've already wasted enough time.

> I gave a go at trying to normalize it. I probably spent over an hour

None of that is something that having the data originally presented in "table
form" (whatever that meant... it IS originally presented in table form as far
as I understand the term) would have addressed. There are plenty of tables /
databases / other collections out there that need cleaning.

The issue of "is this data accurate?" is completely unrelated to the issue of
"does this data come in a .csv?"

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dredmorbius
See also Gregory Clark's "The Price History of English Agriculture,
1209-1914":

[http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Agpric...](http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Agprice.pdf)

Also at UC Davis.

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svdr
In this article the price of a medieval shirt is estimated at $3500 (2013):

[http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-
history-l...](http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-
lesson-in.html?m=1)

~~~
mattmanser
From the article it says a wealthy laborers tunic is one shilling. Somewhere
else it mentions max salary for a laborer of £2 (40 shillings). Both around
the 1300s.

In the UK today a £40k salary is pretty good, above the median and AVG, so at
most a decent tunic cost like £1000 in today's money (at most $1500), probably
less. So it the right order of magnitude, but over-estimated.

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ggm
Price of horses highly variable? War. Oxen are better for cartage and
ploughing, less likely to be taken by the lord to waste in france. Oxen every
time for me.

Add a column normalizing the price through a CGI to current?

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SwellJoe
That looks like the start of an educational video game from 1984. Always load
up on weapons, and we'll loot and pillage our way through the Crusades or
whatever the heck the adventure is.

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localcdn
Source [3] is a great read if this article interested you.

[3] Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, Christopher Dyer, Cambridge
University Press, 1989

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anakha
Now I know what source material Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson developed this
from.

[https://www.scribd.com/document/181876432/ADnD-1st-
Edition-G...](https://www.scribd.com/document/181876432/ADnD-1st-Edition-Gear-
List)

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cozos
Very interesting that drummers/trumpeters are so well paid, 20pence/day vs
archers who only get paid 3pence/day! I guess that performing in the middle of
a battle wasn't a top career pick for musicians.

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Maven911
What is the name for this type of study. I notice the course is called
"Medieval Studies", but is it fair to call this branch "economic history" ? I
ask because I want to look up other resources as well.

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ionwake
This article is useless without

1) En explanation of what 1d actually is, seeing as the letter 'd' appears in
most of the prices, but not in the key. Especially odd and udnerstanding
prices is the whole point of the article.

2) A current day estimate in dollars of how much a shilling or a "d" \-
adjusted for inflation is actually worth.

Am I missing something here?

~~~
danarmak
The second paragraph ("money goes as follows") explains the notation. 'd' is
for pence.

Translating prices into modern coins is a hard problem, because you're not
comparing like with like. When two countries/markets trade, prices in one can
be compared to the other. But across time, when the available products are
drastically different, and when the very concept of money and of price was
different from today, it's not clear what the comparison would even mean. For
instance, the price for very many things (e.g. food, and the wages of many
professions) was fixed by law and could stay constant for _centuries_.

If this had not been the case, there would be no meaning in compiling a price
list that includes dates across 3-4 centuries, but only one price point for
each item listed.

~~~
mortenjorck
Since a pence is 1/12 of a shilling, does the `d` stand for "dozenth"?

~~~
Symbiote
The system was used until 1971 in Britain.

I wasn't born then, but it is recent enough that there were things around the
house, like books or vinyl records, with prices or price stickers using the
system: 9/6 etc.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd)

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gist
Welcome to medieval times (Jim Carrey; Cable Guy)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdPu6sQ9l4g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdPu6sQ9l4g)

[https://youtu.be/TdPu6sQ9l4g?t=1m31s](https://youtu.be/TdPu6sQ9l4g?t=1m31s)

