Prices and wages in Medieval England (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Prices and wages in Medieval England (2014)

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136 pointsbenbreen119 comments

> Mason wage was fairly representative of other “middle class” citizens (merchants, clerks, craftsmen, etc).

Very interesting analysis overall, but my biggest nitpick is that it's easy to call this group middle class, but it's so much smaller of a percentage of the population than we might be used to today. For roughly every 20 farmers, there may have been 1-2 people who were literally anything else. That's craftsmen, nobles, clergy, etc.

What does the proportion of the population have to do with whether it's truly middle-class? Is it not (along a logarithmic scale) a halfway point between poverty and truly rich?

Halfway along a logarithmic scale what a beautiful way to describe it. I am surprised at accurate that image is. Where did you hear this expression?

The earliest usage of the idea of "log utility of wealth" I'm aware of is in Daniel Bernoulli's work on the St. Petersburg lottery [0], but it pops up all over mathematical finance stuff.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-stpetersburg/

> Is it not (along a logarithmic scale) a halfway point between poverty and truly rich?

No. Traditionally the middle class was at least as rich as the upper class. What made them a "middle class" was that they weren't highborn, like the upper classes, but they also weren't poor, like the lower classes.

We often use "middle class" as an analogue to a "normal" experience. But in earlier periods it was clearly the exception.

Actually "middle class" was first used in the 1700s to denote the class between the peasants and the nobles -- i.e. the merchants or bourgeoisie.

As opposed to it being the "normal" experience in the strict normal distributional terms, the reality is (a) income and social status is not a normal distribution -- it is extremely right skewed and (b) given some concepts of class divisions (e.g. peasants, merchants, nobles in previous centuries or blue collar, white collar professionals, and the rick (i.e. those who's earnings from capital returns as opposed to salary) today) middle class has tended to represent the group in the middle (as opposed to the person in the middle.

Thus, even if the bottom group of poor people is very very large, the middle class is not the mean of the population.

This is extremely clear on our usage when we say things like "Guatemala has a very small middle class as it is mostly poor people and some old money rich people."

That sounds like a problem of people not understanding what middle class means. Its even worse than that, its a fairly basic part of history class when talking about things like the American and French revolutions. If your biggest nitpick is that the author isn't using the phrase "middle class" incorrectly, then I don't see anything to complain about.

This is what middle class has basically always referred to until people (mostly Americans) began using it to refer to people who are at like the 50%ile.

Yeah, the "middle class" in the US was rich for all of 50 years after WW2. Things are just moving back to normalcy.

Yes, the word is used very differently in the UK vs. the US. In the UK "middle class" means wealthier than average, a professional (manager, doctor, lawyer, professor, etc), what we used to call a "yuppie", while your average laborer is "working class". In the US almost everyone but the poor and the very well off are called middle class.

In the US the term “Professional-Managerial Class” or PMC is catching on in certain circles to try to represent this. There’s also the term “upper middle class” which really just means middle class in most cases.

One difference in the US and a lot of European countries, to be fair, is that our tax/retirement policies encourage you to acquire significant amounts of personal capital. So there may be a big qualitative difference between PMC members here and elsewhere in terms of actual wealth.

We are too far gone to relabel middle class though, it’s a lost cause. Lots of working class people (even on the low end of incomes) see themselves as middle class.

People with a house and 401k do (justly) expect themselves to live off capital at some point, and therefore are middle class rather than working class.

Though they might also think the underclass like farm migrants are working-class.

Middle class in England used to mean wealthy but without any actual title. Since the US lacks entitled people (meant in a literal way) there was no one for the term upper class to apply too, so I think everything else just had to move around to adjust for that.

Even more importantly, these farmers were, for the most part, slaves. The article is describing a society where for every one "middle class person" just like us, there were 20 slaves working full time to support him. It is then comparing the living standard of that one person surviving off essentially 20 slaves to the living standard of the average person today in a society with no slaves.

Of course, as long as this is emphasized then the article really does do a good job of making it clear how much things have improved for everyone on Earth in the last 500 years.

It's hard to find much substantial or practical difference between a serf and a slave, but to add some nuance a serf definitely had some fairly substantial rights in England, at least theoretically that a slave in the modern sense does not.

And it might be a subtle distinction in practice, but a serf's labor was what was owned by their lord, not their persons.

Some distinctions:

- Killing a serf is murder, killing a slave is property damage.

- A serf can bear witness, and accuse. A slave cannot.

- A slave can be sold and forced to go wherever the new owner wills. A serf cannot.

Do you have a degree in history? How many history books have you read cover to cover?

20 people were farmers in that they farmed, but they also did a huge other number of things that we today wouldn't attribute to farmers. The built houses/bridges. They were woodcutters. And a good number of them were also part-time soldiers, at lease during fighting season. So while most people did farm, that doesnt mean than every other job was rare. Those other jobs were done by the farmers when they weren't farming.

"Middle class" historically did not mean middle income. Middle class was literally that, people who were of the class that sat between serfs/peasants and nobility. That is, guild master craftsmen (not the apprentices and worker bees), merchants, bankers, educated clerks and the like. That is, what we today would consider "professionals".

There's a caveat to the rosy picture this article seems to paint of the past. In the 14th century, the black death and The Great Famine Killed a huge number of people but also is believed to have raised the standard of living for lower class survivors (I wonder if this was an inspiration for Thanos' plan).

The article briefly mentions the plague but doesn't really seem to address that this event strongly changed the economic conditions of Europe for 150 years. Coincidentally, that 150 years heavily overlaps with the period of analysis for this article.

Can you explain how killing people would raise the standard of living? That seems like the lump of labor fallacy.

Because of labour shortage, labour retains bigger share of value vs. aristocracy.

Also, amount of capital per capita increases.

But with fewer laborers, there are fewer consumers. There isn't a fixed amount of work and a variable number of workers, they scale up and down together. Again, this is the lump of labor fallacy.

IIRC these concepts are more relevant in a service-based economy.

In the Middle Ages, _land_ was the primary source of economic value. Fewer people means more land per person, therefore more wealth per person.

Land is still the primary source of economic value. And I don't think land was getting fairly allocated between all the peasants during the late 1300s.

It wasn't but you had the opposite of the effect that you have now. Right now the top 1% are getting a lot of the additional wealth that's being created, while the bottom 99% stay mostly the same, or improve at slower speeds. So yes, this means that we are headed towards a more inequal world, even though the situation improves for everyone.

Turn that now around, and kill a lot of people from the bottom 90% while letting the top 10% survive at higher rates. Suddenly, the world looks way more fair, even though the people at the bottom still have nothing.

When there is fixed amount of capital (crops, land, gold coins in short time scale), the amount of work is fixed.

They don't scale up and down together in lock step, it takes time to adapt to something like a massive plague killing off the working population.

They aren't perfectly in line, but they're perfect enough, and the black plague wasn't instant, it lasted several decades giving ample time to make adjustments. If you planted food to feed x hundred million people and after the plague you're planting food to feed only 60% of that number, you're going to require a lot less labor to plant and harvest those crops. Repeat for all the other occupations like butchers, tailors, blacksmiths, etc...

> after the plague you're planting food to feed only 60%

All land would used as much it could, and if there was surplus after making food and drink of the best produce, it would become feed for animals. They could grow better things like apples, vegetables, and so on.

No one is ever content with what they have.

But more land and fewer workers means less starvation and malnutrition, which were major concerns back then, effectively raising the living standard. When the primary source of wealth is land, you can only have so many workers until all the usable land is gone. In a service and manufacturing based industry, this is far less of a concern.

As you said, workers are also consumers. Each landlord wants to grow his GDP. In a pre-pandemic setting offering higher wages to attract labourers would have been useless to this goal as all of the land was already being farmed and there was nothing the additional workers could do. In a post-pandemic setting, when the lord struggles to get his land farmed, he can suddenly increase his GDP by offering higher wages so that he attracts labourers. This creates a bidding war between lords, increasing wages for labourers.

The english king even passed a law trying to forbid higher wages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Labourers_1351

It’s more complicated as not all land is equivalent. At maximum capacity every bit of land even slightly above break even gets used and quite possibly some that’s a net loss. In such a system more valuable land simply represents a stable income stream to the landowners. Thus fertile land is wealth.

However, after a plague the most productive land is still farmed, but anything close to break even is abandoned. Suddenly with zero changes in technology, skills, or total capital average productivity spikes.

Good point! Picking the low hanging fruit is always going to be more productive :).

If the nobility consumed a disproportionate amount of goods and services, but were less likely to die from the plague, you could see the relative amount of labor per consumer drop.

They could also be trading with areas less effected by the plague. If your village gets 50% wiped out by the plague, but you sell crops to a city, you are still going to want 100% of the crops collected.

Does everything really scale together though? Once land is cleared and known to be arable it's around as supply after people have died. The reverse is not true, you need to put a lot of work in to clear land for organic population growth.

So when the population declines you have a bunch of landlords who have land supporting X people that they want the surplus on. But X/2 people can pick their landlord, so the landlord has to offer something in the deal, like better terms. This works even if the landlord class has halved, there's only one landlord regardless of how many of his family passed.

Note the acoup guy says peasants didn't store profits in the normal way, they preferred to buy social capital by throwing a party.

Hypothesis: laborers weren't consumers. Peasants consumed what they produced with most, if not all, of the surplus going to feudal taxes. The landed nobility were the consumers and commanded most of the economy.

Indeed, and to some extent this still applies today.

Exactly. People here seem to be trying to apply the logic of a global capitalist system to a feudal one and assuming they work the same

The consumers in those times were mainly the aristocracy. Lords needed their land worked and they had to compete with other lords as there weren't enough serfs to go around. Now you can argue that the cost of food would rise too negating their wage increase but I believe part of their payment was a section of the land to farm so they were able to have excess wages that weren't eat up by inflation.

The wages rose so high that the king had to put a ceiling on the wages so the competition would stop.

I say king vaguely because I read into this years ago but I can't remember which country it was. My guess is that it was England or France but my brain is failing me.

It completely changed the balance of power between landholders and peasants. Peasants started being able to actually negotiate on wages (to a degree that was revolutionary at the time), which also drove a market for capital and artisan goods. The merchant class exploded.

Landlords also started dumping money into development of labor-saving tools, which happens when most of your supply of free bonded labor suddenly dies off.

Pretty huge multi-faceted impacts.

What notable labor saving tools and implements were invented during this time period? (1350-1400 AD)

They didn't have to be invented during this time. It became economically beneficial (even necessary) to use them at this time, when it wasn't before.

So which tools were these?

To name a few, heavy plows, padded horse collars, fresh water carp farming, water mill improvements, and ships changed in design. Ships became larger but adapted in shape and rigging to e operated by fewer sailors. I think the stern post rudder came to Europe around this time (not sure of the date range though).

Lynn White's classic study, "Medieval technology and social change", looks at three broad innovations: the stirrup, which led to mounted knights as shock troops and the feudal reorganization of society to support them; the agricultural revolution driven by iron horse-drawn plows and three-field rotation; and the development and exploration of medical mechanical power and devices.

you're the best kind of conversationalist.

lol, yeah, the ones that rake your balls over minute details. A PITA contrarian.

The most important was the horse collar, which was like turbocharging a tractor. The use of horses to farm also exemplified the class changes. Horses didnt die of plague. Thier owners sure did. So the horse became cheaper and lesser classes of people put them to uses that previously would have been benieth thier dignity.

> Second, and to some extent as a result of its depopulating impact, the Black Death encouraged both the widespread adoption of existing labor-saving technologies and practices and the development of new ones. In the agrarian economy, this resulted in the widespread adoption of the iron plow, the three-field crop rotation system, and fertilization with manure, all of which significantly increased productivity.

https://www.medievalists.net/2021/08/the-black-death-and-the...

> It completely changed the balance of power between landholders and peasants. Peasants started being able to actually negotiate on wages ...

... for the peasants who survived and whose breadwinners survived.

I think it's more that, if you need multiple inputs for your output, you'll pay more for the input that's in shortest supply.

I'm a noble. I own this land. I have peasants who work the land, who grow crops for me. The limiting factor on my wealth is how much land I have.

Now the plague comes, and a bunch of peasants die. I have the same land, but my income goes down because there are fewer peasants working it. The limiting factor on my wealth is now the number of peasants I have working my land. So, rationally, I'll pay more for peasants than I would before.

See that orange slice of the pie chart?

When a huge chunk of the productive people are dead the ones who aren't have much more leverage to push back on the usurious mill fee, market fee, ferry/bridge fee, etc. etc. etc. and suddenly your average peasant (farmer) suddenly has a lot smaller cut of their productivity being taken by the local lords and whatnot. That frees them to farm slightly less and do all sorts of other productive things (raise animals, barter labor with each other, etc, etc) more and increase their standard of living.

It's not lump of labor fallacy.

Standards of living rose because the scarcity of labor rose relative to the scarcity of land.

Peasants had to pay dearly to aristocrats for the ability to use land to farm on, often somewhere close to 100% of their surplus production. Number of peasants going down while the amount of arable land stayed the same led to peasants being able to drive a better bargain and keep more of their surplus.

Shocking that the only appearance of the word "land" in TFA is England. Which, of course, itself tells you about the primacy of land for all types of production.

It's also strange that we don't recognize human reproduction as a factor of production. Even if the universe created the physical laws that allow us to exist, we are still reliant on a previous human to give birth to us.

Because it was a zero-sum economy and they didn't have things like nursing homes. Back in premodern times mass death was the biggest thing that would always jolt the economy. What happened after the black death and the fall of Constantinople? The Renaissance.

Remember that the farmers were tied to the land by medieval relationships. After the labor disruption of the plague, and because the demand for their labor greatly increased, farmers were better able to negotiate the relationship for better personal outcomes, including wages.

Being able to leave their current landed relationship and seek better prospects elsewhere was probably the greatest of gains.

The lump of labor fallacy is actually valid in a Malthusian society like medieval England; adding people didn't grow the economy, it just meant about the same amount of work in the end because they had to feed themselves.

As I understand it the the strength of medieval beer was quite weak (barely intoxicating) and was trusted to be from clean water while regular water from the well might not be.

Perhaps this is a little like the way that many people who have ancestry / family that come from places without clean water will routinely order a "coke with no ice".

Post Cold War after Eastern Europe started opening I traveled there a bit.

I was careful what I drank until one night I was foolish and drank something with ice in it.

It got me the next day.

I was surprised to find that they give you a free glass of water with ice in the US restaurants. However, it's very awfully tasting "Chlorine Springs" ;) No wonder people tend to avoid tap water there.

Water quality massively varies by location. It's generally all safe (spare me the low effort comment about Flint or some watershed in WV poisoned by coal, the exception proves the rule) and most of it doesn't taste like chlorine.

The chlorine taste or smell is something that is very subjective and can change for other reasons as well.

I.e. if you are a tourist that is not used to chlorinated water at all, even mildly chlorinated water can smell distinctly. And disgusting.

Get used to it and it's like many things you get used to: you don't notice or mind it much any longer. But even then you might go take a shower and out comes a huge chlorine stink that subsides after a bit.

For all you care water with chlorine smell would probably be the safest (from a microbial perspective - same caveats as you are mentioning about general guideline vs specific edge cases)

But, getting back to the OP's point: water treatment in the USA varies dramatically between municipalities. Some use Chlorine, but others use different processes, be it chemical or filtration, to clean water.

Older water infrastructure can't support chloramine, a replacement for chlorine, because it causes water to leech metals used in pipes. So older infrastructure in poor neighborhoods still use chlorine, but older, wealthy places might use nice filters and no chemicals.

It varies a lot, even with houses separated by a few miles.

The fluoride in US tap water should preclude pregnant women from drinking it regularly.

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31743803/

You also just get used to the taste of whatever other material in your local water. I drink tap water all the time and it just tastes like water. My daughter, who only ever has filtered, asked me why tap water tasted weird when I gave her some from my glass.

The only place in Europe where I had good tasting tap water was an Alpine village in Austria. The owner of the AirBnB said I had to taste it--and he was right. Better than fancy bottled spring water.

This is one of those things that has been really exaggerated. Medieval people were concerned with water quality and protecting wells, rivers, and other water sources from pollution/poisoning. Beer isn't really an efficient way to purify water either, the alcohol isn't strong enough to ensure it won't make you sick. Much like us though, medieval people didn't really like drinking plain water much, as well as beer barley water and various herbal teas were very popular.

My understanding from many of those claiming that the beer was safer than the water at the time don't make the claim on the basis of beer being alcoholic, but rather that the wort production earlier in the beer making process which involves heating/boiling the water used is what kills off many pathogens that might otherwise be present in the water.

This isn't to say that your other points are wrong... I'm not studied enough on the subject to say... just that the beer making process is more the point of those that make the beer-safer-than-water claim than is the alcohol content.

But if you're just trying to sterilize water wouldn't you skip the beer making process for price reasons? Couldn't they just boil the water and then bottle it and you'd have clean water for much cheaper?

Or is the idea that they didn't know that the boiling is what made it safe to drink?

I think it's more the if you've made beer I know you've boiled it. If you tell me you've boiled it you might cut costs even further and just say you've boiled it.

Who is the you in this instance? The typical person in this time period lived in a small rural village, their water would have been fetched from a well, stream, or other source by themself or another family member. If you are dealing with a professional cook then it is someone who was employed by another person/organization as an employee, in which case trying to cut costs like this would be pretty easy to find out.

They didn't understand germ theory at the time. They had no clue that boiling water would make it potable. If they had known that, so many lives would have been saved.

What they did understand was, if you made beer the "wrong way", it would go off. Turns out the "right way" to make beer is to eliminate any competition for the brewers yeast.

It was also probably easier to smell/taste beer and tell that it is safe.

The scent of yeast fermentation is distinctive, and if contaminated before fermentation the off scent can be quite apparent.

So if receiving a liquid from an unknown/untrusted source, beer may have been safer than clear water.

I think they didn’t know. Pasteurization didn’t come about until the mid 1800s. Maybe they suspected heating played a part - Wikipedia says it was a known method of preservation in China since the 1100s, but I think it took longer to get to Europe.

They were concerned to a degree, but they'd also give themselves cholera from time to time by burying their dead near water sources.

This sin't really true. First, there was decent drinking water in most towns and villages in medieval Europe. Most towns had "masters of conduit" and water carriers dedicated to the task. Second, we have brewers journals dating back some 500 years in England and further back in Germany. Beer is made by mashing or steeping grain in hot water and rinsing it out to produce wort, fermentable sugary/protein rich water. Historically this rinsing (sparging) would be done in 2 - 3 runnings with successively less sugar content in each. The 3rd running might produce small beer 1-3% ABV, but the first runnings could produce beer as strong as 10%, or more. sometimes the first and second runnings were combined and diluted. Much like today, beers of various strengths were available. Small beers were popular as a calorie rich energy drink for laborers, but they also had access to stronger drinks. One reason for making beer is the stable storage of surplus grain, and small beer has a very short shelf life.

Before mechanization farm work was in many ways less dangerous, with a few notable exceptions. To list only one example, you can easily drive a horse cart with a fairly strong buzz as it's slow moving and the horse is largely self guided.

Also, farm work comes in bursts. It's not like farmers were toiling away all day, every day in the fields. They'd work their asses off during a few weeks of the year for prep, plant, and harvest. But the rest of the time they needed to tend to animals and do various chores.

Even drunk people shouldn't have too much trouble weaving a wattle fence.

If you read commentary about drunkenness from before modern temperance movements you’ll quickly see that people in Europe and the US considered a fairly large amount of drinking to be normal.

So they had access to less power, but much stronger AI :)

Yes, this was also a thing in the early US as well. Beer was maybe 2% alcohol and was commonly drank with breakfast prior to coffee becoming popular.

It was weak, but it wasn't a replacement for water. It was a replacement for bread.

Beer was first and foremost a way of preserving calories and only secondarily for recreation.

Slightly tangential but since it appears near the start of the article:

As an American I recall being very surprised the first time I traveled to England and realized that “pence” is literally the same as “pennies” - just a different way of pluralizing it. As a kid I just thought it was some obscure division of numbers like “fortnight” or “score.”

I imagined it worked something like “four farthings to a pence and twelve pence to a pound” or something. :)

Both are correct!

Before the pound was decimalized, 12 pence were indeed a shilling, and 20 shillings a pound.

Of you go back far enough, I think it is true that at one time they were three currencies that floated against each other.

Huh? How does that work?

It's just like in fantasy novels, you have your silver and gold coins.

At risk of displaying my ignorance of English history, were they not at one time the currencies of three different kingdoms?

I always think of pence as 1/100 of a £, but pennies as multiple penny (1p) coins.

I’m not sure whether it’s just me.

No I agree that sums it up well - I can't think of a sentence that would sound natural (as in, sounds like a native BrE speaker said it) and have the same meaning with either one or the other.

Sounds like cents would be the American equivalent in that case.

Pence is the usual plural for an amount of money, although it's often replaced with "p" ("pee") when speaking informally.

Pennies means 1p coins, sometimes 2p coins too:

"Mum, I need sixty pence for the train, I've only got pennies and the machine doesn't take them."

"Pennies" without an amount means a small amount of money. "It's only pennies with the amount we use it."

(JK Rowling missed a trick. It should have been one bronze knut, two bronze knuts, and a price of four knets or something.)

"People were far from starving." is an incorrect conclusion, because famines were far from rare.

"The crop price spike around 1320" is probably the Great Famine of 1315-1317, which killed approximately ten per cent of the population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315%E2%80%931...

But it could also be the famine of 1321.

Are there any economists out there? How is it possible that inflation was basically 0 for more than 100 years? Does this imply that productivity and the money supply grew at exactly the rate (Which could imply neither grew at all, which seems implausible to me, but I also have no idea what I'm talking about.)

Edit: I just remembered they also mentioned the textile industry grew so it seems that there must be some productivity gains to be had over the period.

I'm not an economist, but I think that the net zero inflation figure came from:

- gold/silver standards of the time (disinflationary)

- currency in bullion or coinage of a relatively fixed qty (disinflationary)

- low credit supply & banking industry (not inflationary) - labor supply growth (deflationary)

- productivity growth (deflationary)

- war/crises (often deflationary)

There was probably some significant debasement and other funny tricks by the rulers of the day to intentionally inflate (state) purchasing power, and obviously there was some inflation via gold/silver mining and trade from the East. These combined with the above probably netted out of the long time-span.

It's not like they had bitcoin or central banking policy. The West didn't even have paper currency during this era; they didn't have access to inflationary levers to pull.

Not an economist either, but lately I've been enjoying Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century", and he describes how England and France saw very little inflation for most of the 18th and 19th centuries. This monetary regime allowed a "society of rentiers" to prosper – wealthy individuals could live off the income from assets like government bonds indefinitely without needing to really work (lack of inflation meant that income wouldn't devalue over time).

The story changes in the 20th century of course – governments racked up huge debts from world wars and related crises but instead of paying them down gradually over a long time (as England did after the Napoleonic wars in the previous century), they inflated their way out ("euthanizing" much of the idle rentier class in the process).

Historical economics is pretty fascinating – studying the past in this way really makes it clear how exceptional of a time we are living in now.

> Does this imply that productivity and the money supply grew at exactly the rate

Yes, and that rate of growth was probably 0.

England wasn't yet a massive trading empire. And being a small island pretty far removed from the rest of Europe, it probably didn't have a lot of wealth flowing in or out of it. And there was a functional limit to the amount of land a contingent of people could work by hand. Being a small island, all of the workable land was already being worked, so there isn't going to be a long term growth in crop yield without mechanization.

It seems the economy reached an equilibrium and remained there for a century.

Multiple reasons. Along with reasons given by other replies...

During that era, they did not have a monetary economy. It's hard for us to imagine, but most of the things produced by the economy were simply traded (bought/sold). Most food was produced and consumed by the farmers. Most buildings were erected/maintained by the inhabitants. Etc.

Most people were peasants and lived near subsistence level and a large fraction of their surplus was confiscated as rent (i.e. taxes) by the nobility. Most rent was "in-kind". That is, paid for in grain, pigs, and labor. Not to say that peasants didn't buy/sell things for coin, they most certainly did. But that was a minority of their economic activity.

Only the nobility and towns/cities had a monetary economy. But those were a small fraction of the total economy.

Second, there was very little per-capita economic growth during these eras. Barring notable exceptions like the plague and its aftermath. But what you do see is high volatility in prices. How is this possible in conjunction with the fact that most production was not even traded? Simple: prices are set at the margins.

Inflation as a concept didn't really mean much to most people of that era since most people were peasant farmers who didn't participate much in the monetary economy. And even in the cities, monetary wages were only a fraction of total compensation. For example, most servants got room & board as well. Apprentices too.

Long story short, the european middle ages was a very very different economy and many modern economic concepts are only very roughly analogous. Even legal concepts of ownership was sort of different back then.

"What we can learn by looking at prices and wages in Medieval England"

That they lived much better or more fulfilling lives than us.

"Having a “beer break” was a Medieval version of contemporary lunch."

Is that before or after having 10 children because the first 9 died of cholera?

The Church also gave them a lot of days off. Tons of feast days.

I don’t know why, but this makes me feel a bit optimistic about the future, at least in western societies. Our current worries about inflation, the degradation of the middle class, and stagnant wages seems to be more a product of moving to the Information Age, rather than inherently pet of our society; with long term reforms, these can be fixed.

But, it also suggests that problems like wealth inequality are here to stay, or least somewhat natural.

I think wealth inequality is fine; it's a sign of economic growth, which is naturally uneven. I object to wealth inequality on the order of ten billion times. That's not growth; that's strip mining.

I don't think it wise to presume that at all. It's little to do with wealth inequality. Especially not in the current mode. Money and wealth can both fairly readily be converted into substantial power. This is without mentioning the power laws that seem to be in place which tend towards winner take all scenarios, meaning there is a gross aggregation of power in fairly singular institutions. And when you resolve to look at the people running the institutions they're also the wealthy - this aspect is obvious, but the reality is that it yields individuals even more leverage over the system. And it's fair to assume they're working in concert, a la the invisible hand. I reckon this situates them several hundreds of orders of magnitude above their fellows.

What's worse is, by my divination at least: as a general rule, I don't find these people to be exceptional or necessarily well suited to wield such power. And I would also conjecture that the centralization of power in aspects of individual occurrence and institutions creates a behavioral uniformity, which I hypothesize necessarily leads to considerable instability ultimately creating more "too big to fail" situations which ultimately compromises the health of our polite society. And because of the immense leverage, I don't find it to be stepping out of bounds to say that it's entirely probable that our body politic is owned and operated through backroom auction of policy.

I'd also append that, from my experience, I've never seen debts factored into arguments regarding wealth disparities, but I do suppose it should be. Historically debt peonage was a considerable force. I think it would be interesting to look at the wealth distribution charts and seeing how it plays out when they traipse into the negative.

This is literal conspiracy theory drivel. When you get older you realize most rich people are insanely smart, the average person has a very poor aptitude for recognizing exceptional people and that the entire world is made up of independent entities all working for their own ends — nobody is in control and nobody has enough power to ensure their own existence beyond next week. Also, so-called billionaires could spend everything they have building a few bridges. They aren’t really as rich as people like to think.

Much of the inflation is caused by monetary policy (e.g. fiat money and expansion of the money supply).

And several prominent efforts to remove that power from the government’s hands are ongoing.

That would actually mean they can't stop inflation. If you think it's so bad, then you could take down another country by getting its citizens to adopt your new cryptocurrency then inflating it. (More realistically, a small country might adopt a different fiat currency if it's really easy to get because there's a lot of it.)

Luckily most people do want to make transactions in the official currency though; that's the upside of sales taxes.

When the average person says "inflation" they mean gas prices have gone up, which is not caused by the money supply.

The last time people cared about inflation in the 70s it was caused by an oil crisis; this time in housing inflation it's a lack of supply.

Austrians constantly predict there will be extra bad hyperinflation in the US from the national debt; not only are they wrong but they caused the 2008 recession by being wrong.

> natural

A word used - by others, if not the parent - to argue for doing nothing. Currency isn't 'natural', nor literacy, nor the Information Age nor modern healthcare. E.coli is natural, however. We should not be satisfied with natural.

interesting that a laborer is paid approx 50% what master mason is paid, for some reason I thought a Mason would have been paid much more

Yes, and note that a "Craftsman's house" was 2.5x yearly income.

For 7.5x yearly income, you get a "Castle wall tower".

Think it’s 75x not 7.5x

Yes, true.

Alcohol was consumed more often because:

- Water was impure

- Juice could not be refrigerated

Also, the alcohol people consumed most freely back then had very low ABV. "Small beers" were 0.5% - 2.8% ABV, and "table beers" drank by all ages were were typically under 1% ABV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer

Kinda niche, but the closest modern analog I know to table beer that's commonly purchased is some Kombucha brands. Most Kombucha in the US aims for under 0.5% ABV so that it can be sold to people under 21, but some lines, e.g. GT's Classic, are more lax and go up to about 1% ABV. In all but legal classification, these are basically non-alcoholic: you wouldn't substitute a light beer, or even an "extra light" beer, for this. You can't feel the alcohol at such low ABV.

Almost no inflation, and yet wages were growing? Sounds great. It's amazing what a lack of cheap credit can do. Cheap credit does allow upward social class mobility, but at the expense of a rat race economy, inflation, stifling wage growth, and arguably many other negative effects.

>Almost no inflation, and yet wages were growing

and all it took was a global pandemic that killed "30 percent to 60 percent of the European population"[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death

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