Prices in late Middle Ages

Armour of the medieval knight. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

While browsing the ‘net looking for indicators of prices in the Viking Age, I came across a treasure trove of prices for the late Middle Ages. Range of age is from the middle 1300s to the  middle 1500s, with most of the prices in the 1300s, it seems. Items listed are clothing, work tools, food, weapons, and armor. A large number of data points for wages are listed.

As a topic for further analysis, there is more than enough data to compare wages across various skill sets for relative pay. There is also enough data to calculate costs in terms of hours of labor in order to impute current prices.

The data is attributed to Kenneth Hodges at Berkeley.

The listing can be found at two places:

From one stray comment, it seems this material disappeared from wherever it was originally posted and was then posted by these two sites in order to keep it alive.  I made a copy for my use. If it gets deleted from both places, I may repost it.

Not only is there a lot of data, each piece of information is individually sourced. Very cool.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *