The concept of the “Prime Team” did fix one rather silly thing about the old show: Why did the top three or four people on the ship always beam down to the dangerous newly discovered planet? Now they have highly trained, but ultimately disposable, people to handle that for them.

I had found a site that tells the relative worth of current coins in the past, but it only went back to the 1900s.

From all the reading I did, it would seem to me that a typical peasant who made about one silver shilling per day would be like a modern “wage slave”, burger-flipper/store clerk, etc.

This would make that one penny his day’s wages, and for us in modern times, typical day wages are about $48.00 USD if you go with approximately $6.00/hour minimum wage, which may or may not be adjusted for taxes, etc.

$48.00 per day is probably about as low as you go without getting into part-time and waiters/waitresses whose wages are non-standard.

So as you can see, if you base your criteria solely on daily wage, 1 shilling = $48.00 if you want to keep it really simple. I have seen other more professional and thorough research which indicates most peasants were lucky to make half a silver a day (about 5 pence) but for the sake of argument and a nice even number, I think most of the *free* peasants probably made about a shilling a day, some more.

Now it takes 12 pence to make a shilling, therefore (48/12=) a penny (a 12th of a silver shilling) would have been worth about $4.00 USD, which would also nicely emulate the farthing, which were simply pennies cut into fourths, making each farthing worth $1.00 USD.

Going up to the pound or crown, the 20 silver shillings that make up a pound would equate to (20×48=960) $960.00 USD, which you could, without too much trouble, round down to $950 or up to an even $1,000.00 USD.

Obviously, farthings would be your dollar bill, and nearly everything, especially lesser items, costs at least that much, while pence are next up as more or less the $4.00/$5.00 bill, and are pretty common too, with a chicken or a night at an inn or such costing about one shilling.

Although there were other coins in some eras and cultures between and beyond the shilling and the pound, the standard European currency system was: Farthing, Pence, Shilling, Pound.

The Pound, however, was *never* a regularly produced or minted coin, as only royalty or extremely wealthy nobles would ever have the need for it - instead, the pound or as some people think of it, the crown, was actually an artificial “placeholder” or “hypothetical coin” invented by medieval accountants for large on-paper sums, so the typical fantasy game idea of people walking around with bags full of gold or even silver crowns/pounds is, at best, a product of lack of research.

Thank you for the question, I hope even this late, it was of some interest to you! =) -JP