Other sources I came across have a bushel at 60 lbs. I’m curious to know where you got your numbers from. I was reviewing your numbers for bread at the end and was verifying it for a project I’m working on. Great article! Thank you for taking the time to write it. So in bad years, the lower earners were badly affected. The thing to note is that the price of wheat was very volatile in the short term, though stable in the longer term. so I worked it out from the price of a bushell of wheat. I imagine this is because people would buy wheat and make their own bread, but I could be wrong. We will immediately notice that the main staple of the medieval diet, bread, is not there. But it’s a bit of fun. The Bishop of Winchester’s income was £4,000 give or take in days medieval according to this site this equates to £2m. It’s a hopeless task of course, because it’s really about buying power. There is a really interesting article from a chap called Vlad here – interesting, but I cannot vouch for the accuracy.Īnd then, very bravely, there is a converter here which tries to convert money values into modern values. There is a little more detail in this other website. The statistics that float around derive often from a monster list put together by a chap called Kenneth Hodges – you can see it on the Medieval Sourcebook. I had a go at calculating the price of a loaf. Bread, by the way, is not on the lists, presumably because most people bought wheat and made their own. A university education would cost £81/2 a year – beyond the means of Master Craftsmen. So, if you were a labourer, a bottle of plonk was a day’s work a mildly fashionable gown a quarter of his annual income. Here are a few to give an idea of how far that might stretch I’ve picked a few out. So a labourer for example, earned £2 a year in 1300, which means 40 shillings, or 480 pence a year – or 2 pence a day…see how the table works? It gets a bit meaningless higher up the social scale an Earl might have between £500 and £3,000 for example.
The French livre, sou, and denier are equivalent to the pound. Old MoneyĪs it says in Kenneth Hodges’ site, the English system is based on the pound, shilling and penny (Latin liber, solidus, and denarius, which is where the English abbreviations “L.s.d” come from). When you look at the below, bear in mind that inflation is basically zero throughout the Middle Ages when inflation arrives with the bullion of the new world, in the 16th century, it’s a terrible shock. However it’s possible to get an idea of scale. I can hear you fighting against this as a write but there are so many vagaries. Just for example – board and lodging would be part of some jobs not of others wages might vary a lot around the country. Medieval prices and wages are basically impossible to know.
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