Historical Prices of Arms and Armor (again)

[sepulchre]

Following the initial point of this thread Plate armor too Cheap? and others considering the relationship of rpg coin values to that of period currency, I am rather confused by the incomplete information available concerning the historical prices of arms and armor. Wondering if anyone could shed light on some of the discrepancies as well as offer additional information or views? I realize the organization of labor (disparate work of individual craftsmen vs. offical royal armories), advances in the art of making armor(mail becoming finer with the passing of centuries), artistic flare (gilding and engraving), and that armor was considered a luxury accounts for some of the discrepancy. Also, I realize the implementation of these prices is a bit of a fiction: 90% of economic exchange is barter, currency is distinctly different from country, province and even city, no overarching price control so prices vary according to demand (hour/season/region),prejudice (dislikes your face) or blood feud; non-nobility can lose their head for acquiring a sword or a horse (note the fine for rape of a neighbor's daughter is 10 to 20 times less than stealing their cow), and that at some level the prices are meaningless, as the value of coin is based on rarity and the percentage of precious metal available to the mint. In short, however, I am just trying to come up with a workable list of historical prices for arms and armor when using historical coin. Here are some puzzling examples, feel free to offer others or resolve some of these. Thanks!

Armor, price, year:
Mail Hauberk: 5-13s or 100s (1200s), 30£ (1316-1415), 67£ (calculation/man hours and middlemen)
Mail with plates (plate mail): 16£ 6s (knights armor 1374), 103£ (armor of the Duke of Gloucester, 1397)
Fitted Milanese Plate 8£ 6s 8p (1441), 100£* (Henry VIII) 268£ (calculation/man hours and middlemen), 250£ (plate armor/English king) 340£ ('gilt and graven'- armor/Prince of Wales, 1614)
*the linen armor worn underneath could cost 200£ or double the price of plate.
Bastard sword 150s (1550)
Sword: 1s (1400s), 2000£ (made in Spain, purchased by Henry V)

Some sources:
Medieval price list
Phillip Mcgregor's Medieval Economics

[Deleted]

Jan 7, 2015 10:43:44 GMT -6 sepulchre said:

In short, however, I am just trying to come up with a workable list of historical prices for arms and armor when using historical coin.

You could use Harn price list which should work for gaming purposes.

Jan 7, 2015 10:43:44 GMT -6 sepulchre said:

Here is a list of puzzling examples feel free to offer others.

www.medievalcoinage.com/prices/medievalprices.htm

medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html

[sepulchre]

Thanks for the links ptingler. I did leverage information from the UCDavis site and Phillip Mcgregor's site; Medieval coinage really speaks to domestic items, but has a nice link for medieval maps. Like Cthulhu Dark Ages (listing a suit of mail at 5-10£ depending on the number of shillings to the pound), Harn's examples are a good resource,but do not go forward enough in time to speak to the ones cited above.

[Deleted]

Not sure what you mean by going forward enough in time. Maybe I misunderstood what you are looking for. If you're trying to create a price list to use in your D&D games using historical coin, then Harn's equipment list can be used as generic medieval fantasy campaign price list. It has all the kinds of armor and weapons you need for a D&D game, you just have to add the prices piece by piece to get a total price.

[sepulchre]

I was under the impression, possibly false impression, that Harn pushed as far as 'plate mail'; looking through the material I have available, that appears to be so. In general, I am hoping to resolve the disparities between some of the historical examples I cited so as to come up with a workable list of prices that reflect a game in which historical coin is roughly in play.

[Deleted]

Jan 9, 2015 8:34:25 GMT -6 sepulchre said:

I was under the impression, possibly false impression, that Harn pushed as far as 'plate mail'; looking through the material I have available, that appears to be so. In general, I am hoping to resolve the disparities between some of the historical examples I cited so as to come up with a workable list of prices that reflect a game in which historical coin is roughly in play.

If you look at the UC Davis link, ready made Milanese armor in 1441 is priced at £8 6s .

Harn doesn't have plate items that cover the hand, hip, groin, thigh, and foot.

Harn has prices for plate armor pieces that cover the skull, face, neck, shoulder, upper arm, elbow, forearm, thorax, abdomen, knee, and calf. If you add all the pieces together for Harn plate you get £7 16s 3d.

The difference between the Milanese ready made armor and Harn listed items is 10 s 5d. Another way to say this is that the Harn totaled items come to 94% of the Milanese price. I'd call that close enough for gaming.

[sepulchre]

The OP concerns the discrepancies in the price of plate armor, mail and even swords. I could certainly run with £7 16s 3d for plate armor, as it meets one example listed, however it does not speak to others cited. My concern is how a suit of mail can cost almost 5 times the above price, that mail and plate is twice the price, or that other examples of milanese plate are listed at 30 to 40 times this price, moreover that linens are 25 times this price. Different historical sources offer radically different examples.

[Deleted]

Jan 9, 2015 23:03:04 GMT -6 sepulchre said:

The OP concerns the discrepancies in the price of plate armor, mail and even swords. I could certainly run with £7 16s 3d for plate armor, as it meets one example listed, however it does not speak to others cited. My concern is how a suit of mail can cost almost 5 times the above price, that mail and plate is twice the price, or that other examples of milanese plate are listed at 30 to 40 times this price, moreover that linens are 25 times this price. Different historical sources offer radically different examples.

I have a degree in Medieval Studies and spend a lot of free time reading books on the period for fun. The middle ages cover 1,000 years of history and multiple countries. The sources for price data are tax records, manorial records, estate records, etc. There will be no one historical source that you can find that will list all the items on a gaming equipment list for one specific year. If that is what you want, then it doesn't exist.

The discrepancies in price are due to the fact that inflation, materials, labor, quality, etc. when compared over a vast spread of time and space will vary greatly. You see the exact same thing today. $100 in 2015 has different purchasing power than in 1974 when OD&D came out. A "car" can be a Camry or a Bugatti.

If you are creating your own list, the best you can do is look at a handful of items from a specific time and place and extrapolate prices from there. In my opinion, Harn has done a reasonable job of doing that. It has the value of plate, mail, swords, bread, ale, horses, etc. all valued in relation to each other in historical coin prices. I haven't seen an academic or gaming item list that would be better to use as a ready made list. You might have to just spend time looking at historical records and create your own if Harn's list is inadequate to you.

[krusader74]

Under conditions of perfect competition (where you have 1000s of producers and 1000s of consumers) and perfect information, any profit-maximizing producer faces a market price equal to its marginal cost: P = MC. Microeconomics courses obsess over this abstract case.

But such conditions weren't widespread in the Middle Ages. For something like plate mail armor, you might have just 1 buyer and 1 seller. This is called a bilateral monopoly. Under these conditions, you don't have a supply curve or a demand curve, and so the analytical techniques they teach you in microeconomics simply don't apply.

Instead, bilateral monopolies are typically analyzed using the theory of Nash bargaining games. The definitive paper is The Bargaining Problem by John F. Nash, Jr. published in Econometrica, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Apr., 1950), pp. 155-162. (Another good exposition is Nash Bargaining Solutions.)

It's important to note that these papers discuss optimal solutions. In real life situations, it is relatively easy for one party to exploit the other.

For some time now, I've wanted to create a mathematical model of Medieval economics that would be usable in an RPG. I'm quite unhappy with the models I've seen so far. They miss too many important details. For example, Saint Thomas Aquinas had a theory of "just prices." There's a good overview on how ancient and Medieval thinkers like Aquinas conceptualized economics here. While it's easy to scoff at the idea of a "just price" today, back then, the Church was very active in regulating guilds, and craftsmen had a real fear of purgatory, and these fears must factor into the model, as shown in this paper on Religion and Economic Organization.

In sum, I don't think there's an accurate "off-the-shelf" economic model available today that you could use to explain the puzzling price data you listed for armor and weapons or to simulate realistic price lists in a Medieval RPG.

[Matthew]

You have absolutely no chance of matching up prices separated by a hundred years or more (or often less) and in different countries. The online resources available for this sort of thing are next to useless. A shilling in England in 1100 is not the same value as a shilling in France, or rather a shilling worth of silver coins minted there. This thread should be useful to you: [AD&D] Campaign Economics.

[sepulchre]

Ptingler wrote:

The discrepancies in price are due to the fact that inflation, materials, labor, quality, etc. when compared over a vast spread of time and space will vary greatly. You see the exact same thing today. $100 in 2015 has different purchasing power than in 1974 when OD&D came out. A "car" can be a Camry or a Bugatti...There will be no one historical source that you can find that will list all the items on a gaming equipment list for one specific year. If that is what you want, then it doesn't exist...the best you can do is look at a handful of items from a specific time and place and extrapolate prices from there...Harn has done a reasonable job of doing that...You might have to just spend time looking at historical records and create your own.

Ptingler, thanks for your observations, and your advice gives me some perspective about taking my next step, may call on you with another question as I move forward.

Krusader74 wrote:

bilateral monopoly: don't have a supply curve or a demand curve...the analytical techniques they teach you in microeconomics simply don't apply...bilateral monopolies and Nash Bargaining games - In real life situations, it is relatively easy for one party to exploit the other. There's a good overview on how ancient and Medieval thinkers like Aquinas conceptualized economics here...back then, the Church was very active in regulating guilds, and craftsmen had a real fear of purgatory, and these fears must factor into the model, as shown in this paper on Religion and Economic Organization.

Thanks for your response, the bilateral monopoly, bargaining and exploitation, the power of the Church over guilds, and Aquinas's theory of 'just price'are a brilliant set of links for understanding the subtexts of medieval economy. I agree, simulation of a Medieval economy might only yield very disparate prices.

Matthew wrote:

You have absolutely no chance of matching up prices separated by a hundred years or more (or often less) and in different countries. This thread should be useful to you: [AD&D] Campaign Economics

.
Matthew, thanks for lending your words to the examples. So your link leads me to surmise one might be able to approximate the cost for an item if:

a. discern which nation has minted the currency which underlies the given price in an historical record.
b. discover the amount of time required to fashion an item (PapersandPaychecks claims 4 months for a full suit of mail), important to note whether the time is base on the investiture of multiple craftsmen/apprentices or work of a solitary craftsmen.
c. obtain a rough date of the item in the record.

[Matthew]

More or less. The devil is in the details, but certainly the most important first step to evaluating historical prices is being certain you understand the price [e.g. the actual silver content of the coin being referred to] and the context [e.g. the price of eggs during a siege is not representative of their normal value]. Once you are relatively certain that you understand the value of the item in a particular list you can compare it to other values to get a rough estimate of its average value. Of course, that carries a certain amount of risk, as one mail hauberk may be quite unlike another, but with enough instances and analysis you can get a fairly reasonable idea. Basically, you need to be aware of the changes in context that can change the value of the item (such as rising prosperity and technological innovations).

To some extent you are better off creating your own internally consistent value list, rather than worrying too much what the actual historical value was. However, there are certain starting points that create a certain level of verisimilitude, such as that the daily pay of a soldier in 1100 was 1d (c. 1.5 grams of silver) and that the value of silver to gold was roughly 10:1. Knowing that an Athenian rower was paid a daily wage of 4.5g of silver a thousand years before is also an interesting analogue.

[Deleted]

Riffing off Mathew's excellent post, ISTR Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court making a similar comparison. That is, what would a typical worker's wages purchase? Could you work a week and buy a decent suit? Or would the same labor barely provide food for your family? I don't know how readily available such information is, but it might help make sense of the differing eras and monetary standards.

[sepulchre]

Matthew wrote:

Basically, you need to be aware of the changes in context that can change the value of the item (such as rising prosperity and technological innovations)...To some extent you are better off creating your own internally consistent value list...there are certain starting points that create a certain level of verisimilitude.

Sometime ago I had anticipated a record of prices during the medieval period in which the same item might have varied a few percentage points or even up to 20% of its original value. I was very surprised and a bit dismayed that prices for items like a hauberk or a suit of full plate armor could be so wildly different within a few decades. In posting this I had hoped for exactly the verisimilitude you suggest. That is, to find some constant ratio between items, I am not sure that can be managed without arbitrarily choosing a recorded price first, i.e. choosing from mail with a value of 10 shillings while another is worth 100 shillings all within a few decades of one another (also many coats of mail handed down from father to son, thus inherited not commodified). Also pinning down all of the contributing factors peculiar to the deflation or inflation of a commodity appears, as you suggest, more time and work than it might be worth (no doubt an interesting exercise in and of itself, but more the work of a masters thesis in my mind). Nonetheless, once this initial leap is made in settling on one of the historically available prices, I could begin discern a rough ratio between wages and that commodity (as well as others). From there it feels tenable to pen the wages and prices I wish to employ without being so beholden to the contingencies of the historical record and yet afford some nod to history's example.

Cameron DuBeers wrote:

I don't know how readily available such information is, but it might help make sense of the differing eras and monetary standards.

Noted, thanks Cameron.

[Scott Anderson]

The setting we use is one of scarce iron in the region, coupled with fairly constant border skirmishes punctuated by larger campaigns. Small quantity supplied and high quantity demanded. Even if armor makers are available (they are- it's a good business to be in in this realm), they pay a high price for the raw steel. Therefore, plate is priced at the equivalent of 4,000 gp, and other armors scaled up in price considerably as well. Not out of the realm of possibility for a 3rd level fighter. Everyone, even wizards, get a free kit of leather to begin, and a very few PCs randomly get chain or plate as a legacy gift from their family or patron.

It also means humanoids and monstrous humanoids are also wearing chain at best, and usually leather.

Upon reading what everyone has to say here, it seems 4,000 is high, maybe by a factor of 10. I shall have to have a vein of good iron be opened up in the coming weeks or months, bringing the prices back down. It shouldn't affect NPCs armor all that much but maybe level 1-2 fighters will be able to afford for a suit to be made.

[sepulchre]

Scott Anderson wrote:

I shall have to have a vein of good iron be opened up in the coming weeks or months, bringing the prices back down. It shouldn't affect NPCs armor all that much but maybe level 1-2 fighters will be able to afford for a suit to be made.

Thanks for sharing Scott, I see you may be applying some of the strains of the thread to your campaign.

[Scott Anderson]

One thing that I forget, both as DM and player, is that even a level 1 fighting man is pretty accomplished.