Historically-Sourced Price Listings

Of the tools I've made, this is by far the one I reference most frequently. I've yet to find a Medieval-era TTRPG whose price list makes any sense whatsoever. This prompted me to make my own, the results (thus far) of which are collected on this page.

For anyone interested, I'll be going into my methodology in some detail in a blog post soon, that I will link to here. For present purposes, I'll just say that relative prices are arrived at by combining a great deal of data from historical studies of inflation in England and Scotland (with a bit of data taken from Byzantium for precious metals). Sources are available below.

That being said, there are some flaws on the table. For one thing, it is by no means complete, much less for a fantasy setting. My hope is to have presented a sufficient diversity of goods that the dedicated can work out prices they're happy with for items I've not been able to dig up sufficient data on. In order to make this remotely possible, however, I've had to speculate, sometimes wildly, on a fair number of goods. Entries in this color are entries I either have no source for, or am otherwise deeply uncertain about. In particular, there were a fair number of goods for which I used to have a source, lost track of said source, and then found errors in my overall calculations. Sadly, I find myself unable to dig that source up again. I've done my best to estimate their price based on my past entries, but cannot vouch for their historical accuracy.

I will continue to update this page as time goes on. Indeed, I currently have several recently-purchased reference books in the mail right now, which I'm hoping will allow me to provide a more accurate Weapons section in the near future.

In an attempt to find a good balance of ease and readability, I use my preferred TTRPG currency system: 1 (P)latinum = 10 (G)old, 1 (G)old = 10 (S)ilver, 1 (S)ilver = 10 (C)opper. While Platinum and Copper coinage are substantially ahistorical, I find that a 4-place decimal system is best for making the charts easy to work with. All that really matters here is relative pricing, so you can translate to your preferred monetary system by reading a given row-entry as a single number (e.g. 12P, 3G, 4S, 5C = 12345), the result being the total cost in your smallest-denomination coin.

For ease of searching, I've placed the following tables, from top to bottom:

Domestic Goods (foodstuffs, furniture, et cetera)

Professional Tools (crafting tools, raw materials, et cetera)

Military Goods (weapons and armor)

Luxury Goods

Miscellanious Goods (camping and exploring equipment, and random things an adventurer might need)

All that being said, the most important thing to understand is that these prices do not arise from a modern setting. They arise from a Medieval setting. This means that some prices may be very surprising - in particular, surprisingly high. It is important to remember that, thanks to profound structural differences between our societies, most people did not buy most things. Nowadays, at least where I come from, labor is expensive, and things are cheap. But in the Medieval era, things were very expensive, and labor was very cheap.

Domestic Goods

Professional Goods

Military Goods

Luxury Goods

Miscellaneous Goods

References

• List of Medieval Items, originally by Kenneth Hodges
• Tables of Medieval English Wages and Prices
• Copper/Silver Ratio: Same Range for Thousands of Years, by Geoffrey Caveney
• The Price History of English Agriculture, 1209-1914, by Gregory Clark
• A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, Volume II, by James E. Thorold Rogers (1866), MacMillan and Co.
• Changing Values in Medieval Scotland, by Elizabeth Gemmill and Nicholas Mayhew (1995), Cambridge University Press
• Medieval Assizes: The Assizes of Bread, Beer, and Lucrum Pistoris, published by the Internet Medieval Source Book, Fordham University