List of prices of medieval items (2009)

Well the website you link to has several different calculations for £5 1300 in modern money. The "real price" is £3,534 but the "labour earnings" is £69,140 which would certainly enable you rent/buy a property in York.

I don't think the fixed basket of goods is the best measure of purchasing power for this case.

I'd use the income value (aka "economic status") as a comparison, since IMO, you're really trying to scratch at "what is two and a half year's income worth now vs back then?" That figure is £181,600.00 from the same page you link, or £72,640.00/year.

Now, why don't laborers make that much now is an interesting question perhaps. I suspect it's because the relative position of a laborer in 1300 was middle of society and today it's not. Consider how valuable a strong, healthy, reliable worker would have been then compared to today.

There's also a labor figure on that page, which would amount to £27,656/yr, which seems inline (perhaps slightly low) for a laborer today.

With a 50k salary you can afford a 125k house at the same 1300 ratio. This seems about right for a rural area but not, of course, for an urban one. Of course neither the laborer in 1300 or today is able to spend their full salary for 2.5 years straight on a dwelling. They would have to save over a much longer period of time as that 2 pounds a year has to cover food, clothing, coal etc.

Sure both Louis and the laborer didn't have central heating and the internet but Louis could afford whatever WAS available for luxury and the laborer today can afford those 'luxuries' that even royalty didn't have access to 700 years ago.

Not saying social differences aren't huge but they are influenced by perception, social norms, media, and both absoulte and relative levels of comfort/luxury. It's hard to compare directly.

> What's going on? It looks like that 1300's little folk was better off than we are

Not really. Your standard of living went up by a lot. The apartment you have today has air-conditioning, electricity, refrigerator, internet access, cable, indoor plumbing, R-30 insulation, etc. Then you have all your neighborhood/government amenities that you didn't have in the 1300's...

And you can buy houses in plenty of US cities for the price of 2 year's salary.

Housing is more expensive (relative to other goods) now than in 1300 because the population is so much larger. The population of England in 1300 was something like 1/15 of what it is now. Denser population means land costs more -- that's just supply and demand.

Most other things are cheaper than in 1300. Many other things simply didn't exist in 1300.

You mention Louis XIV (who by the way was ~400 years after the time we're talking about). Was he poor? Obviously not. But for much of his life he suffered from health problems that we could probably treat effectively now; only one of his (legitimate) children lived past infancy, whereas now death in infancy is very rare. Medical care of the sort we now take for granted was not available at any price in the time of Louis XIV, let alone in 1300.

Also not available at any price in 1300: Central heating. Running water. Transport faster than, say, 20mph over long distances. Any sort of near-instantaneous long-distance communication.

Do you like books? You can have, for a sum of money a typical professional can easily afford over a few years, a private library better than anyone had in 1300. Do you like music? You can have, for a sum of money a typical professional can easily afford over a few years, hundreds of first-rate professional performances at your fingertips. Do you like fine food? You can have, at prices a typical professional will pay without a moment's thought, ingredients from all over the world that weren't even heard of in 14th-century York. Do you like to play games? You can have a chess grandmaster in your pocket, or buy a thing that fits over your head and creates a very convincing illusion of actually being in a world that doesn't even exist.

Yes, housing is terribly expensive right now. Yes, that's a big problem, it makes a lot of people's lives much worse than they ought to be, and it's easy to imagine ways it could do a lot more damage in the future. But that's pretty much the only thing that's much more expensive now than in 1300, and there are sooooo many things that are much cheaper and/or more available now.

> I don't think I can rent a house in York for a year for that kind of money.

> God I despise this world so much.

The opportunity/better-living delta between big cities and other smaller ones have risen a lot over decades and centuries. There is much greater affordability of food, healthcare, basic education and better employment. But with the rise in population there limits on housing. Everyone wants a piece of same pie and there are economic consequences of that.

The next big disruption would be to break this trend. Use technology with a social/political movement to get the benefit of affordable food, healthcare, education and employment while living in non urban areas.

There's other things you need to think about to make sense of the relationship between the average wage of a labourer and the price of a house.

First of all, in many places with less expensive land (driven by lower population densities) a 2.5 multiplier between an annual income and a property wouldn't be uncommon even now.

You need to consider the relative social position of a labourer. Today that would be very low, almost all employed people would make more and the role of pure physical labour in our society is marginal. That wasn't the case at the time and a labourer in good health would be higher up on the income scale (of people who were wage paid, which wasn't everyone by a long shot) than they would be today.

The relationship between the cost of capital stocks and income flows depends on the effective perceived discount rate which is driven by people's perception of risk and the structure of the financial system. Remember that at this time, no-one (and certainly not labourers) had bank accounts. It may be easy today for someone living in England to get a mortgage on residential property at 2.5 their income, it would not have been easy at the time. (Mortgaging income producing farmland would have been much easier)

You're also probably implicitly assuming that the cost of housing was the highest cost in most households as it is today. That certainly was not true at the time! Food was a much higher proportion of an average person's income, even for clerics it would be as much as 50% and it wouldn't surprise me if a labourer's household would spend as much as 75% of their income on food.

Other manufactured goods (especially clothes) were also vastly more expensive relative to income. We have records of wills from this period which specifically list individual shirts as well as items of land. No-one in the 21st century simultaneously owns land and thinks of their shirts as valuable long term assets to be willed to their heirs.

After providing for these necessities of life, the amount left to save up to buy property was much less.

Well £2 is about £1,322 today. I am willing to bet there aren't many laborers in Britain making that.

It's probably more constructive to compare the price of a property in York today to the median wage today (since medieval laborers were middle class). It's still probably more than 2.5x, but to imply that we're worse off because you can't buy a home for £3,534 is pretty ridiculous.

There are a lot of good replies here regarding the economics, but they've all missed a rather simple and glaring cause of the disparate price: a house was a far simpler construction back then. In 1300, most houses were single story, single room buildings. The walls were simple wattle and daub (i.e. mud and sticks) supported by a frame consisting of a few rough hewn beams of timber. Metal tools were scarce and expensive, so the timber would be split using wedges and sunk directly into the ground (no foundations or basement). There were no chimneys or fireplaces, perhaps only a hole in the thatched roof above a simple stone hearth. The floors would be packed dirt covered in rushes.

A house like that wouldn't meet any of the minimum legal requirements for fire code or habitability in any modern society. Not by a long shot. They're much less comfortable, safe, fire resistant, well lit, large, insulated, private, secure against intruders, and hygienic than modern homes. There's no plumbing or electricity.

All of the raw materials were freely available from the land within half a day's walk of the house. No need to mine iron ore from Australia, ship it to China to refine into steel and shape into hinges. Just tie a rough board over the doorway with a leather thong. And this kind of house could be thrown up in a day or two by a relatively small group of laborers who wouldn't need any specialized skills not generally shared by all members of the peasant classes.

They would also hold up less well to harsh weather, requiring more frequent repair and replacement than a modern house. You could expect near total depreciation on the order of 5-10 years, much more comparable to a modern car than a modern home.

Lastly, demand for urban housing and land was significantly lower in the 14th century. This era far precedes the development of native British textile manufacturing, the first urbanized large scale industry in England that created a demand for centralized labor pools. Most large cities were cathedral or market towns, meaning they were centers for intermittent trading or religious activities, not fixed industrial production areas requiring large warehouses or factory buildings or large labor pools. Thus the populations were extremely small, only amounting to perhaps 10% of the total population of medieval England. York, for example, had a population of around 20,000 in 1300. Land and housing was correspondingly cheaper.

So: (1) significantly lower quality product, (2) much lower raw material and labor costs, (3) faster depreciation of value, and (4) lower demand all contributed to a significantly lower price than in the modern era.

You may hate this world, but believe me, if you knew how people lived in 1300 in York, you wouldn't want to buy a house there.

Even in modern times, only suckers pay retail. That has ever been true, and ever will. Price in economic terms is whatever is paid. The list has for example different prices for ale, wine, and uni education. The descriptions seem to indicate both difference in quality and the affluence (or negotiation skills) of the buyer.

The "market" of uniform pricing systems began around the time the Greek alphabet and coinage was invented and is strongly inherent to western literate civilization.

This uniformity comes from the fundamental nature of the alphabet which is a uniform system of symbols. Later on, the printing press vastly increased this element of uniformity by its precise mechanical design (as compared to the variance of writing by hand). The linear fragmented uniformity of the printing press was the precursor of the assembly line.

Tribal, traditionally not literate(ish) cultures whose primary method of communication is/was the spoken word are more apt to use haggling and/or bartering.

Various people have worked on this kind of thing, such as https://measuringworth.com/gold/ "The Price of Gold, 1257 - Present", their broader purchasing power calculator https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ppoweruk/ or this big archive: http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.h...

Classical studies have reasonably good models of the Roman economy, its inflation and comparative prices for goods and services.