List of price of medieval items (2006) | Hacker News Reader

List of price of medieval items (2006)

medieval.ucdavis.edu

146 pointsbenbreen48 comments

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 = 10/20200 = $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.

There's a pretty steep boundary in the price of silver right about when the Spanish conquistadors overthrew the Incas and started mining out Potosi. That influx of specie kicked off a world-wide wave of inflation and severely distorted economies around the world; I'm most familiar with the ways that flow of hard currency impacted the Ming and Qing dynasties in China, but it's really a world-wide phenomena. Possibly one of the most transformative events in world history.

Where can I learn more?

Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World by Timothy Brook has a chapter on silver that’s a good start. The whole book is well worth reading for anyone interested in early modern globalization.

Thanks!

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created covers it in some detail, along with a number of other interesting consequences of the Columbian Exchange.

https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Create...

Cool! Thanks!

I'll give a second vote for the book 1493 - it's full of fascinating history. The preceding book, 1491, is also well worth reading.

Offtopic: I wonder why the audiobook (CD) of this is $50-80?

It's $35 on Audible, if that helps.

It say "or $14.95 with your Audible membership" for me

Got it with a free trial. It's interesting, if a little dry and rambling in parts.

They skipped 1492? Nothing interesting happened that year, I suppose.

Haha, yeah, the idea was the first book covered the Americas and it's native people before Columbus (and white folks in general) arrived, so 1491. He admits early on that folks had arrived before 1492, but decided it was a more recognizable year.

And then the second book covered how global trade and traffic started changing the world after the arrival of other folks in the Americas, but it wasn't about the arrival itself, so 1493.

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.

He picked the highest price - if you look at the list, you'll see that a high grade war horse in a different source is listed as only £10. The note explains "Horse prices varied dramatically; for instance, they doubled between 1210 and 1310." So it sounds like an £80 war horse is either an exceptionally fine example - like comparing a Mercedes S-class to a Chevy Cruze - or the price was recorded during a period of 'horse inflation.'

Grocers here use eggs to drive foot traffic. I've paid $0.50 for a dozen in the last year and usually pay around $1.

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.

It's the chassis of the medieval tank.

Probably depends on the quality of the cow. Here you can buy one for 200€ or for 2000€.

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

Why is the horse too high? That's the one price we have no modern comparison for. Nobody is breeding warhorses anymore. A regular riding horse was a lot cheaper than this.

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 :]

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.

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.

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...

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.

>> 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?"

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

http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Agpric...

Also at UC Davis.

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...

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.

Cloth was relatively expensive, but leather & fur was relatively cheap.

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?

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.

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

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

https://www.scribd.com/document/181876432/ADnD-1st-Edition-G...

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.

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.

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?

The measure is pre-decimal English currency, dating to the Norman Conquest (1066) and used until 1971.

Generally:

pounds (£ or l ) of 20

shillings (s. or /-) of 12

pennies (d.)

(240 d. per £)

The wages section will give you a sense of spending power. A labourer's wages in the 13th century was about 2£/yr, or about 1.5d/day if working 6 days / wk. In practice, employment was not so constant, so 2-4d/day was probably closer the truth.

Remember that prices generally translate to labour required to generate income necessary for a purchase: so many hours, days, weeks, months, or years income for an item.

http://projectbritain.com/moneyold.htm

https://www.milesfaster.co.uk/information/uk-currency.htm

It's not presented very effectively, but my understanding is that 'd' means penny. Pence is the plural form of penny.

"The French Livre, sou, and denier are equivalent to the pound, shilling and penny (Latin liber, solidus, and denarius)."

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.

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

d stands for denarius, a roman coin

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

> This article is useless without

> udnerstanding prices is the whole point of the article

Says you! What can you learn from such an article? A list of prices of goods can give you something of a picture of life at the time, by considering the relative cost of things.

How expensive was University? Consider it relative the cost of feeding oneself. How was wealth concentrated in population centers? Consider the difference in prices in London vs. elsewhere. You can ask the same sorts of questions about marriage, funerals, travel.

Well in #1 you missed the section talking about the various coins, a 'd' represents 'penny' or 'pence' (even today a 4d nail is a 4 penny nail). For #2 it gets to the heart of an important economic concept which is that 'money' is really just an indicator of labor and capital, generally unique to each economy. One of the ways to look at it and try to get a comparison is to look at jobs and wages. So how much did a gardner make per year, a farm worker, a craftsman, a judge, etc. It will never give you prices in inflation adjusted dollars for today, but it will give an insight into how the wealth worked in the economy.

Yes. You're missing not being brought up in the United Kingdom either before or shortly after decimalisation. pre-decimalisation currency in the UK involved Pounds, Shillings and Pence, based on the old Roman Librae, Solidus and Denarius. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd for details.

Welcome to medieval times (Jim Carrey; Cable Guy)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdPu6sQ9l4g

https://youtu.be/TdPu6sQ9l4g?t=1m31s

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