Comparing Present Money with Past Money June 15, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Medieval, Modern , trackback
Money makes the world go round, but how much? Today the question is relatively easy to answer because we ‘feel’ money: but if you got back in time all your coordinates are gone, it is an extreme version of travelling to another country where they use a different currency. In most other countries you can make reference to the exchange rate: or failing that The Economist‘s Big Mac test. But for the past there is no simple mechanism for this as the scale of values is completely different: though check out this brilliantly original National Archive tool for an attempt to create an exchange mechanism for the past.
For example, if someone wanted a pig in London they would pay, in the fourteenth century, three shillings (or 36 pence). If they wanted a pig in deep England at the same date, Somerset or Dorset, say, they would pay two shillings (or 24 pence). A pair of basic shoes, meanwhile, at about the same date, would have cost just four pence: a pig then costs anything between six or nine times more than shoes. A pig, today, costs anything between fifty pounds and two hundred pounds, shoes anything between twenty and a hundred pounds (at the sensible end of the market). Even with two fairly simple objects the sense of value has been completely thrown off balance. Just to add some sense of how difficult things have become consider this additional data point. c.1350 a guide for a night cost one pence: today paying an unskilled man for a night’s work would not cost less than a hundred pounds.
How can you make sense then of prices from the past? Over the years I’ve come up with a couple of rules of thumb though would be glad to hear of others: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com. First, the job rule. Choose a standard job for the era in question (e.g. a laundry woman for Victorian England, a man at arms in the Middle Ages) and find out how much a worker in that sector would be expected to be paid annually: a useful sum to have in mind is the subsistence income, as everything else stems from that. Second, if you want to know the value of one THING then a useful measure for any period prior to 1900 is the horse, which is central from ancient to late Victorian times. It is true that ‘horses’ include an incredible range of different values, so look for a draft horse where breeding and, even, age is not a massive issue. In the fourteenth century a draft horse could cost anything from ten to twenty shillings, or sixty to a hundred and twenty pence; in the nineteenth century about 60 pounds, which explains the tragedy in Tess of the D’Urbevilles when Tess is responsible for the death of her beast.
Note that the medieval prices for this post were borrowed from luminarium
