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Comment by njarboe | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that while wages were very low when compared to today, the price of objects are not so different when priced in silver.

Using a bit of googling it looks like a £ in the 1300's was, as the name states, a pound of silver. The exact amount of silver varied a bit over time but this comes out to be about 350g of silver or ~$200.

So a War Horse at £80 is $16,000 Axe: 5d = 5(200/240) = $4 Cow: 10s = 10/20200 = $100 Dozen eggs = 1/2*(200/240) = $0.4

Not too far off. Could be just a historical accident, but with the value of silver holding up over the centuries, I can see where the goldbugs might get their obsession with metals.

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There's a pretty steep boundary in the price of silver right about when the Spanish conquistadors overthrew the Incas and started mining out Potosi. That influx of specie kicked off a world-wide wave of inflation and severely distorted economies around the world; I'm most familiar with the ways that flow of hard currency impacted the Ming and Qing dynasties in China, but it's really a world-wide phenomena. Possibly one of the most transformative events in world history.

Where can I learn more?

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created covers it in some detail, along with a number of other interesting consequences of the Columbian Exchange.

https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Create...

I'll give a second vote for the book 1493 - it's full of fascinating history. The preceding book, 1491, is also well worth reading.

They skipped 1492? Nothing interesting happened that year, I suppose.

Haha, yeah, the idea was the first book covered the Americas and it's native people before Columbus (and white folks in general) arrived, so 1491. He admits early on that folks had arrived before 1492, but decided it was a more recognizable year.

And then the second book covered how global trade and traffic started changing the world after the arrival of other folks in the Americas, but it wasn't about the arrival itself, so 1493.

Offtopic: I wonder why the audiobook (CD) of this is $50-80?

It's $35 on Audible, if that helps.

Got it with a free trial. It's interesting, if a little dry and rambling in parts.

It say "or $14.95 with your Audible membership" for me

Cool! Thanks!

Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World by Timothy Brook has a chapter on silver that’s a good start. The whole book is well worth reading for anyone interested in early modern globalization.

Thanks!

Your reasoning is correct, but the results don't seem right. The horse is too high. Cow, axe & eggs too low. Possibly the data covers too wide a time and geographic span.

He picked the highest price - if you look at the list, you'll see that a high grade war horse in a different source is listed as only £10. The note explains "Horse prices varied dramatically; for instance, they doubled between 1210 and 1310." So it sounds like an £80 war horse is either an exceptionally fine example - like comparing a Mercedes S-class to a Chevy Cruze - or the price was recorded during a period of 'horse inflation.'

A cow for $100 seems extremely cheap. Either that or cows where I live are much too expensive.

The war horse seems about right to me though. For those times, it would be similar to a luxury car or a bulldozer.

Keep in mind, cows were way smaller before they were cross-bred with bison. The price reflects less pounds of meat on average.

Probably depends on the quality of the cow. Here you can buy one for 200€ or for 2000€.

It's the chassis of the medieval tank.

Grocers here use eggs to drive foot traffic. I've paid $0.50 for a dozen in the last year and usually pay around $1.

Why is the horse too high? That's the one price we have no modern comparison for. Nobody is breeding warhorses anymore. A regular riding horse was a lot cheaper than this.

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