The Real Price of Gold
By Brook Larmer
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/01/gold/larmer-text/3
For all of its allure, gold’s human and environmental toll has never been so steep. Part of the challenge, as well as the fascination, is that there is so little of it. In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. More than half of that has been extracted in the past 50 years. Now the world’s richest deposits are fast being depleted, and new discoveries are rare. Gone are the hundred-mile-long gold reefs in South Africa or cherry-size nuggets in California. Most of the gold left to mine exists as traces buried in remote and fragile corners of the globe. It’s an invitation to destruction. But there is no shortage of miners, big and small, who are willing to accept.

I recall there being a well-known assertion in gaming circles that in any one group’s tabletop RPG fantasy campaign lasting a year, they would encounter and maybe even amass something like 10x the real world historical total of gold ever mined, silver and copper and such probably following this trend. Maybe dragon hoards are from that aforementioned gold from the earth’s crust they mine themselves.

As bountiful as RPG’s make it seem, in reality, gold was used for currency in the form of crowns, nobles, sovereigns and the like, but these were fairly rare, comparatively, as usually only the upper classes and trade merchants and royalty had any need or cause to even SEE a gold coin, everybody else dealt in silver shillings and pennies, or similar systems for different cultures, so even then gold was extremely scarce and was worth an awful lot, and wasn’t the “base” coin for familiar monetary systems – silver was, with a troy pound of silver being where the British Pound and lb. abbreviation comes from, originating from the ancient Libre coin.

A gold Crown was worth about 5 silver shillings, a golden Noble about 10 and a golden Sovereign worth a whole pound (373g) of silver. Considering cows and other expensive livestock and tools still only cost in the mid-silver range, and a skilled farmer or laborer being lucky to earn 1 pound per year and a knight only earning maybe up to 7 pounds per year, it is easy to see even in the case of wages, gold never entered into common use, as it would be too easy to lose or have a Sovereign stolen, and most gold coins couldn’t be easily “broken” to pay for items costing less than a pound sterling or major fraction thereof – they were really just impractical for 90% of at least the feudal era.

Medieval Coins

This post concerns the value of medieval coins, specifically what equivalant amount of modern money they would have been worth at their time.

I had found a site that tells the relative worth of current coins in the past, but it only went back to the 1900s, so I have had to do my own research (and I apologize for not posting the links I used, I just got my info and went to the next site).

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 shilling his day’s wages, and for us in modern times, typical day wages are about $40-$60.00 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.

When figuring the current value of something, in the past, there are a number of methods that experts and scholars use, but besides the inclusion of very complicated currency charts dealing with the price of resources at the time, etc., they still have to develop a baseline, or what one or few items or services on which they will base their calculations. Examples are the Ale Standard, which is how much a pint of ale costs, which is often considered to be fairly reliable throughout history, because work and then stopping off at the pub is almost a natural law.

For my purposes, I started with and was satisfied with, the Daily Wage Standard, because it also included the Ale Standard and Cow Standard as well as a few other items.

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.

Coin = Min Wage (Alternate Min Wage)
1 farthing = $1.00 ($1.25 USD)
1 penny = $4.00 ($5.00)
1 silver shilling = $48.00 ($60.00)
1 pound = $960.00 ($1,200.00)

Now, this is in direct disagreement with the very professional looking MeasuringWorth.Com website, which, via one of their very nifty conversion calculators, indicates that 1 silver shilling in 1400, has the same worth as 20.04 Great British pounds sterling in 2007, 1 pound .from 1400 is worth $400.78 GBP and 1 penny from 1400 is worth 1.67 GBP in 2007.Obviously, the authors of this calculator use a much more sophisticated algorithm to determine buying power, but one which I think is probably a little too analytical, and may be overestimating the plight of the “poor peasants” in the Middle Ages.

Further information, such as prices of food and related items, can be found at http://website.lineone.net/~stetct/berkl/foodcosts.htm and Kenneth Hodges’ oft-referenced Medieval Sourcebook.