This week on the blog I want to take a brief detour into discussing historical coinage, particularly in the context of modern fantasy and roleplaying settings. In particular, the notions I want to tackle are first how did ancient currency systems work in terms of value (what could you buy with how much) and then second how often were people likely to use physical currency at all? This is going to be a bit of a ‘fun one’ because while we’ll talk quite a bit about how money is used in historical societies, we are going to loop back around to fantasy settings at the end.
Brief Post-Publication Note: Someone opted to throw what I can only describe as a tantrum in the comments, for reasons that escape me. I have purged what I saw, as it added nothing to the discussion, though this may have orphaned some replies. If it starts up again, bans will follow; you may disagree, but you will do it in a polite, respectful, civil manner while you are on my website. If you want to shout and call names, please take that where it belongs, which is Twitter.
And the fantasy conceit that has sparked this is, of course, the ubiquitous general-purpose RPG currency, ‘gold,’ understood to mean gold coins or gold pieces. Now of course in many cases the trope-maker for ‘gold’ as the basic unit of currency is Dungeons and Dragons and folks will be quick to note that D&D coinage has always included smaller denominations: copper, silver, gold and platinum pieces on a decimal-system valuation. And sure, that chart exists in the rule-book and some common everyday things have their value listed in cp or sp, but even a casual glance at something like the weapon table reveals a ‘gp’ based currency system. The 3.5e weapon table, for instance, every weapon with the exception of sling bullets has its value denominated in gold. 5e is a bit better, but not much.
Meanwhile, in Baldur’s Gate III, almost certainly the most widespread and culturally pervasive form that D&D has taken in at least the last decade – far more people, I suspect, have played BG3 than have played any form of D&D tabletop – compresses the system down neatly to just the single currency type: gold. As did Neverwinter Nights before it. Likewise, the Elder Scrolls games, including Elder Scrolls Online and Skyrim have a single currency, called ‘gold,’ represented in game by very obviously gold coins.
(Credit where credit is due: Obsidian’s Eora, the universe where Pillars of Eternity takes place, dodges this problem: every culture has its own currency and you see them regularly as loot. The game then denominates them all in a copper currency unit of account, which is actually a lot like how the sestertius (a copper-alloy coin) is used in Roman accounting. As we’re going to see, the key here isn’t just ‘have currencies other than gold coins’ but also ‘have some sense of how big a unit of account a gold coin is going to be’ and Eora is one of the few settings that seems to have absorbed, correctly, that even a single gold coin is such a large unit of money as to be useless in most circumstances.)
So across a wide range of fantasy products – games, films, books and settings – this tends to be system: ‘gold,’ by which is meant gold coins, are the standard unit of account, values are reckoned in gold and when money needs to be shown, it is typically physical gold coins. If there are smaller units, we don’t see them often. Crucially, characters in dialogue will often use ‘gold’ or the names of gold coin denominations (‘crowns,’ ‘sovereigns,’ etc. shown in the fiction to be gold coins) as synonyms for money. Sometimes there’s a larger unit, almost invariably ‘platinum,’ which is also a pretty silly currency to have given that apart from some evidence that it was alloyed with gold in Egypt and South America (perhaps unknowingly so), no one is using platinum or aware of its existence before the 1500s.
And, as you may have guessed, there are some problems with this: functionally no one used gold in any amount in every-day transactions in the ancient or medieval Mediterranean (or most other places!), because a gold coin at almost any size was such an enormous monetary unit as to be unsuited to most transactions. That in turn conceals some of the sharpness of wealth and class distinctions in pre-modern society in ways that flatten and frankly ‘modernize’ these societies.1 And it also misunderstands the economic systems of these societies, because it doesn’t understand what sort of transactions people would even want to use money for, which further flattens and modernizes these societies.
Instead, what I want to do is lay out a couple of real historical currency systems – we’re going to look at ancient Greek and Roman currency, as well as the medieval pound/shilling/pence (or livre/sou/dinier) system – and talk about how they are denominated and why.
Behind, clockwise: an Attic tetradrachma (c. 449BC), a Roman denarius (41 BC), an Aeginetan drachma (c. 550 BC) and an early Roman denarius (c. 115 BC).
But first, as always, I too appreciate money and always wanted to take up collecting ancient coins (which, I should note, can be legally acquired at prices attainable by mortals, because we have so many – just be sure you are getting something with accurate provenance; any reputable dealer will cheerfully supply you with this). If you want to help me to take up expensive hobbies, you can support this project on Patreon! Amici of the blog at Patreon get monthly updates on my research progress (or lack thereof), while patrons at the Matres et Patres Conscripti level also get to vote on future topics. If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates, or you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) or Twitter (@BretDevereaux) or (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings; I am probably more active these days on Bluesky than Twitter.
Introducing Our Currencies
Globally, both the idea of currency (by which I mean an abstract notional unit of value) and coinage (by which I mean a physical object representing that unit of value) were invented in more than one place at more than one time. These are, I should note, distinct ideas and it is the abstract unit of account which comes first, long before (and we mean centuries before) someone gets the bright idea of using specific objects to represent those notional units.
That said, all of the coinage systems of the broader Mediterranean world seem to spark from a single source, the development of coinage in the kingdom of Lydia in the seventh century.2 The way to understand these coins is this: these societies had already been using metals – measured by weight – to define abstract, notional units of value for accounting purposes and in some cases physical transactions. This is important to note: money in the abstract sense (and debt, for that matter) come first and coinage comes second. In practice, what a coin was simply a pre-measured amount of precious metal, stamped by the authorities to attest that it was the amount it claimed to be.
Note the immediate implication that has: the coin is only worth the metal it has in it. If you reduce the weight of the coin or dilute the precious metal in it (by alloying it with baser metals), you have lowered the value of the coin (and probably committed a serious crime, unless you are the state). This meant that while states could get cute and try to stretch the treasury by issuing coins with less precious metal in them (called ‘debasement’) in the long-run this effectively led to inflation: as folks realized there was less silver or gold or whatever in the coins, they’d raise prices accordingly. But we needn’t get into all of the complexities of minting and debasement here.
What I want to do first here is introduce our currency systems and what they’re called, so we have that on hand for when we discuss how they’re valued and used.
The first coinage in Lydia doesn’t seem to have penetrated very far in society – the coins seem (the evidence isn’t great) to have mostly been used for large transactions, long-distance trade, that sort of thing. Instead, it is in Greece, which adopts coinage from the Lydians, where we first see coins penetrating deep into society and becoming a standard way to do business. Now each Greek polis issued its own currency (except Sparta), so instead of just one set of ‘Greek currency’ you had a whole mess of different polis currency on different weight and purity standards. That said, successful currencies tended to be imitated and so a ‘standard’ (which other Greek currencies might deviate from) emerged: Attic coinage, the mostly widely used, eventually becomes that baseline.
The Attic currency standard was based – as nearly all Greek currencies were – on the drachma (shortened by numismatists to ‘drachm’) a silver coin that weighed around 4.3g and was about the size of an American dime (but a bit thicker). Four drachma made the aptly named tetradrachma, a silver coin of 17.2g, which was about the size of an American quarter (but thicker and about three times as heavy). Meanwhile a drachma could be split into six oboloi – invariably called obols in English. The obol was, apparently, originally a rod of tool metal (copper, bronze or even iron), which may have derived out of simply using a forge-ready billet as currency (although the ones we find don’t seem to have been used that way). However, by the classical period, the obol had become a standard very small silver coin, tariffed at 1/6th of a drachma and thus having a silver mass of just 0.7g or so; they tend to be around c. 8mm across, so a bit less than half the size of the smallest American coin (the dime).
The Greeks also had some larger ‘units of account’ which were not minted as coins, but were used in accounting to express large quantities of money. Thus 100 drachmae was a mina (435g of silver), and 6,000 drachmae was a talent (26.1kg on the Attic standard); note that both the mina and talent were units of weight, so you can have a mina or a talent of something other than silver, but in accounting, it is always silver-weight that is being calculated as value. This is a monometallic standard: basically all of the currency is in silver, there’s very little gold coinage at all (occasionally some electrum coinage and we do see gold coins in big denominations in the Hellenistic). Now all of this is for the Classical/Hellenistic Attic standard; again there were many standards and they changed over time, but this overview will do us for now.
So again: 6 obols = 1 drachma = 1/4th tetradrachma = 1/100th mina = 1/6000th talent.
Next up is Roman coinage and here we’re going to use the currency system as it existed in the reign of Augustus. The Romans pick up coinage relatively late; there are some experiments with big ‘ol bronze currency (the aes grave) but it’s really with the Second Punic War (218-201) that the Romans begin minting in earnest, initially on a bimetallic standard (silver and bronze) and then by Augustus’ day on a trimetallic standard (bronze, silver and gold), though really only the latter two metals are supporting the value of the coin. Now if you are wondering, “wait, how does a multi-metallic standard work if all of the metals have ‘floating’ (market determined) values?” And the answer is that the very fact that the state guarantees the issue of coinage on a set exchange anchors the metals to a set exchange rate, which mostly works because while metal prices did fluctuate somewhat over long periods, the basic relationship whereby gold was more precious than silver, which was more precious than copper, bronze or brass, remained steady.3
The Roman equivalent to the drachma was the denarius, a silver coin of – by Augustus – about 3.9g (it had been 4.5g in 211), which is a near perfect match for the drachma. The denarius could be broken into four sestertii (sing. sestertius); this had been a small silver coin in the Republic, but by Augustus, it was a big ol’ brass coin, around 25g or so and about 32mm across (so a third or so wider than an American quarter). One 16th of a denarius was the as (pl. asses), the Roman penny, a copper coin of 10.9g. Going the other way, 25 denarii made a single aureus, a gold coin of about 7.75g.
So again: 16 asses = 4 sestertii = 1denarius = 1/25th aureus.
Unlike the Greeks, the Romans don’t have jumbo-sized unminted accounting units. Instead, most Roman accounts are totaled in sestertii, with the modern abbreviation HS (soo 100HS is 100 sestertii or 25 denarii or 1 aureus).
Before we move on to the Middle Ages, I want to make one more note to avoid folks making an understandable and predictable error. We have a document from the ancient world, Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices, which has a whole mess of maximum prices for goods and services in it. This is a source to be used with care: Diocletian is issuing the edict because his own carelessness with the money-system has sparked runaway inflation and he’s trying (unsuccessfully) to fix it with price controls. By Diocletian’s day (even before he sparked runaway inflation) the denarius had lost basically all of its silver content and was thus of far lower value than it had been pre-235, so the prices in the Edict are already much higher – potentially orders of magnitude higher – than first century prices. Moreover, it’s an Edict on maximum prices, not normal prices, which may either mean that Diocletian is setting the prices absurdly low (to curb the inflation) or absurdly high (because they’re maximum prices, after all); there’s no reason to suppose it even reflects average prices at the time. So: Diolcetian’s Price Edict has to be used very carefully and absolutely must not be used with first century Roman coinage in mind. In practice, just about the only useful thing to do with the Price Edict is to compare its prices internally (that is, to other prices in the same document).
Now for medieval European currency, things get tricky, because the European Middle Ages are defined by fragmentation and so you have a host of tiny polities potentially issuing currency on different standards. But in Western Europe, one common system were those derived from the Carolingian coinage system, put in place by Charlemagne in the 790s and it is common to see medieval prices denominated in these units, both at the time and in modern scholarship. Importantly, these are the units used by the very popular Medieval Price List put together by Kenneth Hodges, so its worth treating them here.
This system notionally had three units: the livre (or pound, from Latin libra, “pound,” abbreviated L or £), the sou (or shilling, from Latin solidus, a late Roman coin, abbreviated s) and the denier (or penny/pence, from Latin denarius, abbreviated d); please note that while Charlemagne is reusing the names of Roman coins, those coins had undergone massive debasement over the years and so looked nothing like their earlier Roman equivalents.
Instead the system was a monmetallic silver-standard: one livre was 408g of silver, while a sou was 1/20th of a livre (20.4g) and a denier was 1/240th of a livre (1.7g). In practice, only the smallest coin, the denier, was widely minted.
So £1 (or 1 L = pound) = 20 s (shillings) and 1 s (shilling) = 12 d (pence).
Now what makes this system…exciting…is that in the subsequent fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire, everyone is using this system but minting their own coins, leading to different weights and exciting amounts of debasement. Gresham’s Law is the principle, well-established, that if you have ‘good’ (more pure, heavier) and ‘bad’ (less pure or lighter) currency both circulating, ‘bad money drives out good,’ because people hoard the good money and use the bad money; this further complicated the drift of the pound-shilling-pence system off of its notional weight standard. By 1262, the most common French livre, the livre tournois had declined to just 80.8 grams (by 1726, it was just 4.5g…getting us basically back to the drachma!).
That said, as Europe got richer, those notional units of account (particularly the pound) which were never minted came into use and this gives us an awkward picture of the complications of this system where the actual currency weight had become so detached from its nominal value. In France, the livre tournois, notionally 80.8g of silver, was minted as a gold coin in the 1300s of about 3.76g. In the 1480s, the English begin minting a gold sovereign coin equal to £1 – by which they mean an actual pound sterling; it was 15.55g gold coin. Now some quick math and that kind of makes sense: 15.55g of gold representing c. 400g of silver (a c. 1:25 ratio) and 3.76g of gold representing just 80.8g of silver (1:21.5 ratio), but of course exactly what a pound was had changed drastically, though I should note that as far as I know, it was the English who were out of step here. Other popular late medieval gold currencies were the gold ducat (3.5g or so) and the gold florin (3.499g) and we can see those sit pretty close to the French livre tournois.
So when you are looking at Kenneth Hodges Medieval Price List, it is best to understand both that the currency systems in use here are fluctuating quite a bit, making price comparisons across dates tricky, especially in different places but that broadly speaking you might say that in the 1300s and beyond (where most of his data is from) a livre is around 80g of silver, a sou is thus around 4g (conveniently close to our drachma and denarius) and a pence is around just 0.33g in value.
I know that was a lot but I wanted to walk through it so you’ll understand the next bit – even if you didn’t get all of the particulars there – for the key conclusion which is:
A Gold Coin Is an Absurdly Large Unit of Money
For regular people, at least.
Whenever ancient or medieval coinage or currency comes up, the question folks always want to ask is, “what is that in today’s dollars?“4 And I absolutely understand this question, because if it could be answered – spoilers, it can’t be – it would provide the questioner with an immediate benchmark of value to apply.
And the answer is just: it isn’t. The problem is both that the value of commodities changes over time, but in particular that the second agricultural revolution and the industrial revolutions so wildly shifted the values of commodities as to make any possible translation of ancient or medieval currency values into modern ones misleading. I could calculate, for instance, based on labor time, making 1 day of work equal to the minimum wage equivalent (a denarius is worth $230), or by metal weight, so that a gram of silver is equal to its current commodity price (an unskilled Roman might earn c. $4 a day) or by grain equivalent (an unskilled Roman might make $1.62 per day) – all of those answers are wildly different and equally wrong, even though I am assessing the same data point: that a denarius was a reasonable wage for a day of labor in the first century. I have ended up concluding that $1.62 = $4 = $230; obviously something has gone very wrong! The earning and consumption patterns of ancient and medieval people are sufficiently different to our own to make any direct comparison useless and deceptive.
But there are other ways to think about the value of money (and in particular coinage) in the lives of everyday people: by thinking in terms of how much labor it took to get that money and how much it could buy.
Now we should be clear that wages and prices fluctuated in the past just as they do now.5 However, we can use historical price data – which almost always comes in the form of ‘snapshot’ prices that may or may not be ‘normal’ (indeed, prices often get cited in our sources precisely because they are unrepresentative high or low) to get a sense of at least the basic order of magnitude that things might cost.
For the ancient world, from the Classical period through to the early Roman Imperial period, we actually have one really convenient rule of thumb that shows up in a bunch of places: a drachma or denarius (remember, these are similarly sized silver coins) a day was a good wage; not a typical wage, mind you, but a good one. Athenian citizen rowers in the Athenian navy – who, to be clear, are enjoying the advantage of being able to vote themselves good wages from a treasury filled with tribute from subordinated poleis – were paid a drachma a day (Thuc. 3.17.3-4).6 A single drachma per day also appears to have been the standard wage for mercenaries in the Greek East during the Hellenistic period,7 and the pay of the Roman equites – the cavalry drawn from the upper-classes – in the army of the Roman Republic was more-or-less a denarius a day (Polyb. 6.39.12).8 Finally, famously the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) gives the wages of the workers as a denarius for a full day’s work, a generous but not entirely unreasonable wage.
(Also, note how sensitive these wages are to political economies: Athenian rowers are choosing to pay themselves quite generously (as they vote for such things), while Roman citizen-soldiers (by definition, both soldiers and tax-payers, assidui) opt to pay themselves quite a lot less (2 obols = 3 asses a day) – being compensated more in honor and their political role in the Republic. Who you are, politically and socially, matters quite a lot for how well you get paid or if you get paid at all.)
Instead, what I want to focus on is what an enormous unit a denarius or a drachma already is, likely somewhat more than the average daily wage. Now, because the productivity of pre-modern economies is so low, that’s a lot less than what the daily wage would be in a modern industrial economy, but its still a significant amount to the worker who earns it. Grain seems to have run anywhere from 2-3HS per modius (a Roman dry measure, about 6.75kg) outside of really big cities with higher prices.9 A modius of grain is close to a week’s worth of food (around 22,500 calories) for an adult human, so that denarius can buy close to week’s worth of a family’s primary foodstuff in most parts of the Roman world.10
(If you are doing the math and thinking that this sounds like a rate of pay inconsistent with the poverty you’ve been told most people lived with in the ancient world, the answer is that wage labor was scarce and intermittent. You can quickly see how a family whose adults can only get paying work a few days each week would be perpetually teetering on the edge of sustainability. That’s why a steady wage from something like service in the fleet or mercenary work (or jury pay in Athens!) was so useful to the poor.)
So a denarius or a drachma isn’t a unit so big that no normal person would ever use it, but it is a big enough unit that one is hardly going to use it casually: mostly you’d be using obols or asses for everyday transactions and perhaps break out a denarius or two for something like a week’s worth of grain or potentially quite a few denarii for durable goods like a new tunic. Even a slightly larger unit, like a tetradrachma might still be useful for a fairly chunky purchase, and you can imagine a day-laborer working on a week long project getting a tetradrachma and perhaps some change at the end of the job.
But you know what is a coin of such large value that a normal person is never going to use it? The aureus, the standard Roman gold coin. That coin, after all, is worth twenty-five denarii, which (given the irregularity of wage labor) is probably more than most laborers made in a month. Heck, professional Roman soldiers – full time citizen-professionals – in the first century made 900HS (=225 denarii) per year, so a single aureus is more than their gross monthly pay (75 sestertii compared to 100 sestertii for that aureus).11 You can imagine non-elite transactions that would be this large – there’s a tablet from Vindolanda (dates ranging from 85 to 130 AD) which notes the purchase of 90 pounds of iron for 32 denarii, for instance12 – but you have to imagine even the merchant would rather have 32 silver coins he can spend rather than one gigantic gold coin he’s going to have to pay a money-lender to break (also in those tablets, for comparison, a whole live chicken‘s price is a bit less than half a denarius, for reference, but equally a saddle-cloth goes for 12 denarii on its own).
If we consult the classic Medieval Price List, we see pretty similar breakdowns. Daily wages for a skilled thatcher (essentially a roofing specialist) range from 2d-6d (=pence, you will recall) per day (the change likely as much the product of inflation as improved purchasing power); his less skilled ‘mate’ makes anywhere from 1d to 4d. Keeping in mind that by this point the sou/shilling represents a similar amount of silver to the denarius or the drachma and is 12d, our thatcher is making that much every 3-6 days. Some get paid a less; a set of 14th century wages from the list, kitchen servants make 2s-4s (24-48d) per year, though admittedly that is in England where – as you will note above – the value of the coinage has been more carefully defended.
Once again, we see that who you were could matter a lot: from his 14th century wages, knights are earning 2-4s (24-48d) per day, whereas armored infantry earn just 6d per day, so the knight banneret gets paid eight times his infantryman to march in the same army.13 But that’s not the bottom! The bottom are the ‘Welsh infantry’ paid only 2d per day, a third as much as the higher status armored infantry and 1/24th what the knights are getting. Of course, part of the pay differential is that these combatants are expected to bring their own kit and the socio-economic elite has brought heavier (expensive!) armor and expects to be compensated accordingly.
But I want to note what no one is getting paid: any livre or pounds! Even the knight banneret‘s daily wage is 1/5th a livre. Indeed, very few things which are not clearly signalled as extravagances for the elite have their price denominated in pounds. Complete armors, presumably plate (in the 15th and 16th centuries), are priced at £8 and £3 (and change, in both cases), and a 12th century mail hauberk is listed at 100s (so £5). Those likely represent the best practical protection available in those periods and they’re priced in single digit numbers of pounds, which as noted above are equal to or very close to these gold coins (the livre tournais, ducat or florin). The things that do have costs in £ are things like buildings and expensive objects for elites (court gowns, books,14 war horses, the annual salary of a priest (just £4 13s 4d a year!)).
And that brings us to our first major conclusion: in most pre-industrial settings, a gold coin of any size is an impractical unit of exchange for ‘regular people.’ Instead, what your aurei or ducats or florins are for is facilitating the storage is substantial amounts of wealth and enabling large-scale transactions by merchants and elites, either of bulk goods or luxury goods. They could also, of course, function notionally as units of account (like the Greek talent or the Carolingian livre). Day to day currency was almost invariably minted in silver or copper (or copper-alloys).
But there’s a second implication here which is going to matter for the next section, which you may have already noticed in some of the prices and values being quoted: in these pre-modern, agrarian societies the economic divide between regular people and the wealthy elite was vast and functionally unbridgeable (and the coinage was designed for the elite first). As a result, often the wealthy landholding elite in these societies had access to entire classes of goods that might simply not be available under almost any circumstances to the commons, because they required quantities of money that might be relatively trivial to the elite but which were unobtainable for the masses. Blowing £5 to equip a heavy infantryman was not a huge expense for a baron who might bring in ~ £500 annually, but for a common laborer or peasant, £5 was going to be solidly out of reach.15
All That Glisters
So if it doesn’t make much sense to reward your Dungeons and Dragons adventuring party (let’s be honest why we’re all still reading this) with gold, what should you reward them with?
The relatively easy answer would be to rename your currency ‘silver,’ calculate assuming one or two silver coins is a reasonable wage for fighting, adventuring or other high-skill or high-risk professions and then retariff all of your other prices accordingly, keeping in mind that these are societies were manufactured goods are very expensive, but unspecialized agricultural labor is very cheap. And that’s not an entirely unreasonable thing to do. While you are at it, relatively few languages use ‘gold’ as a synecdoche for ‘money,’ but a lot of languages use their word for ‘silver’ that way: Latin argentum, Greek ἀργύριον, plata in Spanish, argent in French and so on.
But part of the reason these coinage systems work they way they do is that they operated in societies in which a lot of economic activity was non-monetary or at least, non-coinage. And here, we should go back to our ‘money’ vs. ‘currency’ or ‘coinage:’ remember, money came first. So let’s say you live in a small community – like a peasant village working beneath a large landholder’s manor – and you need to transact some things, but you don’t have any actual silver because coins are scarce and valuable (and being a subsistence farmer, you grow most of what you need yourself), how do you do it? Well, one way is to do it ‘on accounts’ – you need wool and so when the shepherds come down from the hills, you trade for some of their wool during the shearing with a family you know and both you and they make a mental note that you owe them for the wool. You might express that amount of debt in silver (as a unit weight – see how we get to coinage as a pre-measured weight of silver?) but there’s no reason to measure out silver (even if you had any) because you see these folks every year and next time they’ll ask you for some grain and so on.
Note that this is not the same as the concept of ‘barter’ – there is, in fact, a notional ‘money’ intermediary, it’s just not a physical coin or bill, its expressed as an account, a purely notional unit of value.
Meanwhile, that small farmer also owes ‘taxes’ or rents to the state or the Big Man who owns their land – the line between ‘rents’ and ‘taxes’ in pre-modern states is very fuzzy – are also likely to be paid in kind. What that means is instead of paying in coin, a certain slice of the harvest or a certain amount of grain or a certain numbers of days of corvée labor is owed. That obligation too may have a notional monetary value, enabling fines or repayments for services to be docked against tax liability, once again removing much of the need for a physical currency.
Finally, you also have a ‘gift economy’ which is entirely non-monetary (almost by definition). We’ve talked about one form of this: the horizontal ‘banqueting your neighbors’ economy whereby small farmers create and maintain non-monetarily defined relationships of economic dependence: I banquet you when my harvest is good, so you help me out when it is bad and vice versa. You can also have vertical relationships of this sort: the Big Man, you will recall, is collecting lots of rents, but also has access to a lot more capital – tools, work animals, surplus labor and so on. Most of that capital is going to go into his own interests (politics or war, usually), but often the customs in these societies are that some of it are ‘gifted’ back – so, for instance, it was typical for the owner of a manor in a manorial medieval system to banquet the village on particular days (often the days where he collected rents).16 Access to those tools, capital and resources could thus potentially be ‘gifted’ downward, which might matter, as a single village might well not create sufficient economic demand to employ certain specialized craftworkers (blacksmiths, for instance) whose products are still necessary – but the Big Man’s much larger economic footprint can support such a worker. And of course the Big Men also have their own horizontal Big Man to Big Man gift economies, which you can see in the giving of elite gifts in works like the Iliad or Beowulf.
The result is that the basic normal condition of the pre-industrial countryside is generally non-coinage (if not non-monetary). “Monetizing” the countryside (an awkward term which really means ‘currency-izing’ the countryside) is typically something states have to intentionally do. The reason a state might want to do this is simple: the big advantage coinage has is to make transactions with unfamiliar parties (people you can’t trust to pay you back later) easier and the state often does a lot of business with unfamiliar parties, especially if it operates at scale. Consequently, it is often good for the state to be able to collect taxes in silver so that it can pay for goods and wages in silver. This is, of course, especially true if the soldiery the state relies on expects to get paid in silver: one of the huge challenges that the successors of Alexander the Great faced was that they inherited an army (the Macedonian one) that expected wages paid in silver coins, but subject economies (in Egypt, Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia and the Iranian Plateau) which were not meaningfully monetized (again, meaning ‘not using a lot of coinage;’ yes the term is awkward, but it is the term used). For the Seleucids, the solution was to create market centers (usually cities or colonies of Greek military settlers accustomed to regularly using coinage), which could buy up agricultural surplus so that the local populace could be taxed in coin (and then minting a ton of coins to circulate in this system); for the Ptolemies, the solution was actually to keep Egypt a mostly closed currency system, but to sell the grain taxed in kind abroad and use that silver revenue (reminted on the lighter Ptolemaic standard) to pay their soldiers.17
That said, in the pre-modern world, comprehensively ‘coined’ economies exist but are the exception. If you are wondering where such economies tend to be (for your fantasy worldbuilding), they’re almost always urban, because it is cities, with their large populations of non-farmers, that create the organic demand for markets in bulk staples for the common population of the city to buy with the small-denomination coins they can earn from irregular wage-labor.
Outside those cities, however, the Big Men magnates in the countryside – ‘feudal’ lords, large rentier landholders or tribal Big Men – aren’t usually receiving money in rents, but bulk agricultural goods. They can sell these goods to get silver with which to buy things, but they can equally opt to support producers in their households out of the rents (in agricultural goods) they receive. This is, for instance, the classic model of the Bronze Age ‘redistribution’ or ‘palace’ economies: rents in agricultural goods flow into the palace, which doesn’t usually sell them, but rather uses them to support specialist producers, whose goods are then pushed back down as gifts or entitlements (for instance, the king graciously equipping his soldiery with weapons).
Rewarding Your Dungeons and Dragons Party
And so we can at last loop back around to the initial quandry, the tyranny of ‘gold’ as a standard reward for your fictional adventuring party in a Dungeons and Dragons (or similar) campaign or setting.
As you can tell, basically no one is going to hand a party gold for defeating a bunch of goblin raiders or getting that Aboleth out of the lake. But because different kinds of people in different pre-modern economies engage with coinage and money in different ways, they’ll probably try to pay in different ways.
The population most likely to want to pay with money are the burghers (townsfolk): as noted above, urban centers that have lots of non-farmers and populations too large for everyone to just know everyone else are ideal for the use of coinage and tend to be where coinage catches on most quickly and completely. There is thus something of an irony: the town will want to pay you in coins, which you will be best able to spend…in the town’s market. Remember: relatively little of this coinage is circulating back into the countryside (unless you have a state extracting rents and taxes in coin!), but then of course the town is likely to have all sorts of producers happy to convert your pretty silver coins into things you actually want. That’s well enough, you hardly want to travel with lots of coinage anyway: the weight is trivial and the coins are liable to get stolen in any event.
The villagers for a small rural village might be able to scrape up some silver coins – they probably keep some silver for dealing with merchants, craftsmen and so on – but that is a limited supply and they’d much rather pay in something they have in abundance: food (and other agricultural goods). That may seem silly, but remember looking above how large a chunk of a worker’s regular earnings just getting food and lodging could be: a big feast18 and then a two-weeks supply of grains (as much as you can carry, effectively) could actually be a pretty decent chunk of value.19 If they need something with a higher value-density, they might actually offer the other thing produced regularly in households: textiles. Good cloth was valuable, portable and useful; in the 14th century one price datapoint we have put high quality wool at 5s per yard. Of course there are going to be real limits to how much a rural village can even pay on these terms: for any larger problem, they’ll have to rely on their vertical contacts (in practice, they’d have relied on these first) and go up to the Big Man.
Now the Big Man on the hill, like the burghers in the town, has resources: he can pay for military service. Indeed, in a sense, his job is paying for military service: he holds his position in no small part because he takes the surplus production of his rural tenants/subjects (extracted through rents and taxes) and uses it to pay for military force with which he holds and enforces his claim to rents and taxes, both against any peasant’s dream of independence, but equally against other Big Men. And assuming this is a setting where coinage has been invented, the Big Man certainly has access to a sufficient amount to pay simply pay in cash for services rendered dealing with that Owlbear his retainers kept failing to track.20
But the Big Man would probably rather ‘pay’ your adventurers differently. After all, remember that the Big Man is running a business which converts agricultural surplus (extracted in rents) into military power (men, horses, weapons, armor) and legitimacy (often conferred with extravagant gifts: jewelry and such). So while he could simply transact business and pay you in silver and send you on your way, it would be a lot easier to compensate you with what he has as well: he might gift you a sword or set of armor from his armory, or a horse from his stables.
That gift isn’t just easier for him, it comes with broader social implications which are also better for him and for you. Whereas payment in money might not incur any great obligation, the exchange of gifts here – you have solved a problem, he has given you something in return – creates a social obligation, a bond between you, especially if the value of the gift exceeds the value of the service. You are now obligated to help out again, in the future, should he ask, out of ‘gratitude’ for the ‘gift’ (and for such services, you will receive more ‘gifts’). Meanwhile, remember up top about how much one’s place in the political economy matters for how well one is paid – just being a more important kind of person in these societies21 could radically change how you were compensated and thus your station in life?
Well, unlike a few coins, those gifts can change who you are: a man with a strong arm is a peasant; a man with a strong arm, gifted mail and a weapon is a man-at-arms, whose station entitles them to better treatment. That same man, gifted a horse and a lance, by the Big Man is a knight (or substitute the culturally appropriate moniker for minor mounted military aristocrat). That’s great for you – far better than just a few coins that make you merely a momentarily rich peasant – but also great for the Big Man who just bought himself a minor military aristocrat (remember: you’re obligated to be grateful for his generosity and to respond if he calls), minted out of stores of weapons he was keeping for just such an occasion. Indeed, Tacitus describes how the gift of weapons was what enabled a young man to take a full place in public life among Germanic tribes – a custom that we see echoes of in other non-state communities and so may assume did, in fact, occur – “But it is unusual for anyone to wear arms before the civitas has recognized their right to them. Then before the council, one of the principes or a father or a relative equips a young man with a spear and a shield. These are to them what the toga is to us: the first honor of a youth.”22
The other thing, of course, that the Big Man has in abundance is land and peasants (possibly serfs, possibly tenants, possibly slaves). Even better than a gift of status-changing weapons, he might offer instead to take you into his household, pulling you into his permanent retinue, with a promise of maintenance (food, clothing, equipment) equal to your new, elevated station. Alternately, he might try to ‘settle’ you to establish a permanent, lasting obligation: give you some land and peasants in exchange for a formal expectation of service (an oath of vassalage or homage in a medieval context). While there’s a tendency to think about this in terms of grand estates, such settlements could be ‘relatively’ small: Hellenistic military settlers in Ptolemaic Egypt often got plots that were 25-30 arourai (17-20 acres) for infantrymen – hardly a massive estate, but enough that the rents alone could maintain the infantryman and his household without having to do any actual farming himself.23 In at least some societies, such a gift might not even necessarily mean the end of adventuring; in medieval European vassalage-based polities, it was often possible to owe service to more than one liege and freelance some military activity on the side (though more effectively centralized states are more jealous about their military manpower).
To wrap up: in some ways pre-modern economies could be more complex than ours, because they hadn’t yet reduced nearly all transactions down to monetary exchange.24 ‘Gold’ isn’t going to be terribly useful in most contexts, but even where more common silver coins are available, its often going to be in an individuals interest to instead embed themselves into economies of patronage and gift-exchange which are non-monetary or to understand transactions as abstractly monetary, without physical gold or silver changing hands. But the most important gifts and payments in these societies were ones that changed a person’s status, which could often be as simple as a gift of proper weapons or a horse, perhaps appropriately witnessed by other elites.
And that sort of thing: working one’s way up from helping peasants who can’t pay with anything more than a good meal and supplies to the road up to gifts that come freighted with deep social significance and change a person’s very status in society – that’s a much richer tapestry to weave a story out of than ‘gold.’
And also, and I must stress this again: gold coins were enormous units of currency no one used on a daily basis. If I have to pay 100 ‘gold’ for a sword, that sword had better be jewel-encrusted, gilt, made of the finest steel imported from India.
- Which, to be clear, is fine if what one wants to do is simply tell a modern story in which people, for some reason, have swords. But I think fantasy, as a genre, is often more interesting when it is used to explore different societies, rather than just putting a bunch of characters with fundamentally modern outlooks in shields, swords and wizard robes.
- Metal coinage in China is, as far as I know, basically contemporary (perhaps just a hair later) but an entirely independent development.
- On that shifting relationship, see M. Treister, The Role of Metals in Ancient Greek History (1996), which has some price data over the relatively long run.
- I’m in the United States, so its dollars, but I imagine it must be the same question everywhere, denominated in the local currency, with just extra intense confusion if the local currency is still called the pound or the dinar or what have you.
- On this, see W.T. Loomis, Wages, Welfare Costs and Inflation in Classical Athens (1998).
- Athenian citizen soldiers, drawn from a somewhat higher socioeconomic class, were paid two drachmae a day, Thucydides notes, to account for the enslaved servant they’d invariably bring.
- On this see G.T. Griffith, The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World (1935), 294-307. It’s probably a mistake to view this as a single mercenary ‘market’ (such recruiting instead seems very localized) and very clearly a mistake to assume that Carthage’s sort-of-kind-of mercenary armies were drawn from the same sources (they were not). More on both things another day.
- But it is necessary to convert his figures, as he gives the salary in Greek units (obols) but it would have been paid in Roman units (asses); that conversion gives us nine asses a day for the cavalryman (triple the infantryman’s three asses a day, importantly signalled by Plautus, Plaut. Mostell. 357, which on the sextantal as standard of the time (10 asses to a denarius) would have made for just short of a denarius a day.
- Price data from G. Rickman, The Corn Supply of Ancient Rome (1980).
- Calorie requirements vary a lot for humans depending on their work level and size, but 3,500 calories for an adult male doing strenuous labor makes a good upper limit; an adult female who is still quite active might require around 2,500 calories. In practice, most families will have fallen below these figures from time to time.
- And it should be noted that they weren’t just handed 75 sestertii every month: amounts were deducted for food, replacement equipment, clothing and also to pay for certain festivals in the camp.
- Discussed L. Bray, “Horrible, Speculative, Nasty, Dangerous’ Assessing the Value of Roman Iron,” Britannia 41 (2010).
- Except, of course, the knight banneret isn’t marching, he’s on a horse.
- We’ll talk later this year as to why those are so staggeringly expensive – but staggeringly expensive!
- Though not entirely out of reach for a skilled craftsman – it might represent something like half a year to year’s pay and we know that towns often expected such men to self-equip as heavy infantry, see for instance Verbruggen, The Art of War in Western Europe during the Middle Ages (1997), 170-1 on the heavy infantry burgher militia of Bruges.
- You may be saying, “wait a minute, that’s just a form of minor tax remission: he’s giving them back what they just gave him.” And you’re not wrong, but it might not be understood that way. If the Lord or Temple or King who has nominal ownership or overlordship has a legitimate claim, often backed up by God or the gods to their position, they’re not giving you your grain back; it was always their grain, with which they are now displaying their generosity and magnanimity (which is, of course, the mark of a good King, Lord or Priest). Again, everything depends on legitimacy. If you want to see this in action, actually, go watch Downton Abbey sometime and note how many of the ‘downstairs’ subplots are resolved by an act of ‘generosity’ from upstairs which the show happily frames as magnanimity despite the fact that this is a family that subsists entirely off of hereditary rents extracted from poor farmers.
- The reason the Ptolemies can’t mint their way out normally is that Egypt lacks major silver deposits. On these monetization strategies, see Aperghis, The Seleukid Royal Economy (2004) and S. von Reden, Money in Ptolemaic Egypt (2007).
- In which meat, dairy and perhaps fresh fruit and vegetables are available. Humans require more nutrition than just grains can provide, but for the non-rich in the pre-modern world, access to more expensive foods was intermittent – so you might be getting a non-trivial amount of your protein requirement from that feast.
- This bit in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) where the villagers promise to pay the samurai in rice is thus not entirely unreasonable – they’re paying with what they have. Also, Seven Samurai has got to be one of the ur-texts for your D&D adventure group.
- As an aside, we’re brushing past the larger problem in the classic ‘adventuring fantasy’ framework, which is of course this Big Man has a retinue of armed violence-dealers who themselves look very much like an adventuring party. These guys get shoved into the background of most settings as ‘guards,’ but the knights of a baron’s household or the retinue of a Gallic princeps are going to be every bit as capable of handling the local Minotaur problem as an adventuring party. In practice, of course, the stories these settings are based on – like Beowulf, for instance – feature men who are already members of a retinue (like the titular Beowulf, a retainer of Hygelac, king of the Geats, at the poem’s opening) essentially ‘freelancing’ in their spare time because they’re very good at violence or alternately feature men from the ‘retainer class’ who are freelancing in the hopes someone will hire them permanently (this is the role of the classic ‘knight bachelor’).
- And, sadly, also our society.
- Tac. Germ. 13.1
- Cavalry allotments were much larger, typically 100 arourai (c. 68 acres). For comparison, a self-sufficient farm for a single family unit (5-7 individuals) is going to be around ~5-10 acres (on Ptolemaic land settlements see P. Johstono, The Army of Ptolemaic Egypt (2020)). So these plots are jumbo-sized precisely so that they can be rented out and subsist the soldier in a life of leisure on the rents. Note by contrast, Roman veteran settlements are typically smaller (sometimes much smaller), because the Romans expect citizen-soldier-farmers to actually do some farming and seek to maximize the number of conscription-liable individuals.
- Which, to be clear, is often better: coinage and other forms of physical money can substantially lower transaction costs in these pre-modern societies, enabling more economic activity and thus more prosperity.
Planescape: Torment, with its copper currency, wins again!
More seriously, this was a fascinating article. I’d like to add Hebrew to the list of languages with כסף (Pronounced: Kesef) which can mean either silver the metal or money in a more or less interchangeable fashion. But I’d also like to throw in a question. At least in the Gemara, a very common unit of monetary calculation is the שָׂכָר which is literally a ‘hire’, but in practice means 1 day’s wage for an unskilled day laborer. Which probably varied from time to time and place to place depending on what the labor market looked like, but the various people using it don’t seem to mind all that much, and purchases for various goods or services are given in terms of that amount. I’m wondering though, is that a term used elsewhere to compute value?
Interestingly, שָׂכָר (sakhár), salary, is also very close to שֵׁכָר (šēḵār), in arabic سَكَر (sakar), a common semetic word for an intoxicating beverage. I’ve heard some people hypothesize that this is related to an ancient practice of being paid in beer.
Or perhaps the practice, still common today, of drinking up your paycheck.
“Sakhar” is also the literal pronunciation of Сахар, the Russian term for sugar (and the root of Sakharov family name, best associated with the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and later a dissident prominent enough to have the European Parliament dedicate Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to him.) That term itself came from the Greek σάκχαρον (sakkharon) – and that is itself traced to a Sanskrit शर्करः (śarkarah). (Interestingly, modern Ukrainian term for the same, Цукор, is a lot closer to the German “zucker” than the Greek or Russian names for this sweet substance.)
Not going to speculate on how this could be connected to salaries, but it seems like food for thought.
I think this is a coincidence since the languages are unrelated.
Ironically, Planescape: Torment, where most of the action takes place in a giant extraplanar city that serves as a major trade entrepot for interdimensional travelers, a lot of whom are wizards or the equivalent and have access to places like “that one spot on the Elemental Plane of Earth where there are literal cubic miles of gold” is exactly the kind of game where having the default currency for the commoners be denominated in gold might make sense.
About the only other place where it makes sense is when a literal “gold rush” is going on, as in California in 1848 and in the Yukon around 1898. Those are places where a largely unskilled worker CAN go up into the back country and find gold, often with no more effort than they’d normally expend planting and harvesting a crop… and so the prices of the tools and supplies the miners need will inflate enormously to take advantage of that.
The great and cruel dragon Baumol has cursed his treasure very thoroughly indeed.
Where’s the fun in that? Poul Anderson could get away with it in *Three Hearts and Three Lions* because it was a novel. Nothing will anger the players more than being deprived of their just reward because you want your economics silver-based.
The fun being that it’s a reference to Baumol cost disease. If people can go and dig up gold, then for them to do something else, they have to be paid more than they expect to earn from gold-digging. Thus — in addition to mining tools getting expensive — other forms of economic activity also get more expensive or cease altogether. This makes resource extraction boomtowns outright nasty places to live; but this is, economically speaking, correct because they do “get paid for the nastiness” by extracting and exporting more of the resource. But this (and general inflation) can be attributed to a curse instead.
A thought: could tomb-robbing have similar consequences to a literal gold rush? A pretty normal activity in D&D games is to delve into the tombs of ancient monarchs, generally pretty powerful ones. If there are a bunch of adventurers digging up royal tombs, then maybe you’d see the price of adventuring supplies increase by a couple orders of magnitude.
This is indeed canon in some old editions of D&D
That is, what 4gravitons describes is canon in some editions
Dark Sun: ceramic
One of my two preferred systems (Dungeon Fantasy RPG) has all prices in copper pieces, with 20 copper pieces being worth one silver piece and 20 silver pieces being worth one gold piece. A character starts with an impressive 1000 copper pieces to buy equipment for, but that is still only 2½ gold pieces.
I imagine this could be especially fun in a fantasy setting, where getting the gift weapon puts you under an enchantment to either come to the Big Man’s aid or return the weapon. Just in general, anything where you can use magic to buttress obligations is probably going to have interesting implications for your society’s informal “credit” economy.
I suspect in practice it’s unlikely that magic would be used to enforce the informal “credit” economy as much as enforce actual oaths, because a big headache for rulers in medieval times was keeping their vassals happy enough to actually turn up to war. If the ruler can compel the vassals to turn up, that gives the ruler more freedom.
OTOH, that would make the vassals less happy, and they’d do a lot to try to evade the magic.
To be fair, that sounds kind of fun in a fey-like rules-lawyering way. Yes, you have to abide exactly by the words of your oath…but of course, words can be interpreted in many different ways.
I expect such a world would quite rapidly discover Asimov’s Three Laws, and the issues inherent within them.
Unless the vassals can use magic to negate the oaths as well.
In a game, it is probably required to use “magic,” embodied in some sort of restraints on a character’s ability to do certain things, to replicate the effect of customs and expectations which no longer bind us. Imagine the “magic” that game designers in 2500 will have to invent to replicate the effect that social customs have on us.
One option, encouraged in settings like Glorantha, is to enforce period social norms via… society.
You can act like a modern person if you want, but it’s going to leave a bad impression on everyone you meet, they’re going to react accordingly, and for all the jokes there are only so many (self inflicted) problems players can murderhobo their way out of.
The problem is that then the murderhobo players get unhappy with the DM.
It also allows for something akin to the D&D warlock’s patron relationship (albeit with a mortal patron, rather than an infernal or fey creature).
In CM Waggonner’s The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry the creditors put a “hard promise” on debtors – after the due date expect pustules (on the face … mostly).
Put a teleportation enchantment on the weapon itself. When they call, the weapon goes home, the wielder gets to choose whether to go with it.
So you give a hero a sword that can vanish in the middle of a fight with a dragon, giving the hero the choice between fighting bare-handed or abandoning the princess.
Sounds like something a hero would refuse.
A quick note: the RPGs Pathfinder and Ars Magica use silver as a base. The former is essentially derived from D&D, but the latter is especially interesting for a medievalist.
Pathfinder 2e is interesting, because the standard setting is profoundly different from any society in our history. Individual power scales much higher, and magic is a significant part of the economy.
Combat power in PF2e roughly doubles every two levels. Professional guards and soldiers run about level 4 or 5. Mythic heroes run as high as level 20. This means that a single mythic hero could theoretically defeat 250 professional city guards in a fight. (This is a wider margin than even Gimli and Legolas at Helm’s Deep.) Similarly, that level 20 hero might be capable of physical feats even Hercules would need to work for. And this has all kinds of complex military implications. (The fantasy series “Beneath the Dragon Eye Moons” spends a bunch of time on similar issues.)
Economically, even small villages in PF2e have access to basic magic. Low-end healing potions are just something you can buy. This is really not medieval Europe.
As for wages, 1 gp/week officially provides a “comfortable” living. 4 sp/week is “subsistence.” But then there’s a big jump to “fine” living at 30 gp/week, which I guess is where you see the split between well-off commoners and the upper class. Still, a gold coin is real money—a comfortable week’s wages. It’s also slightly more than the price of a short sword (9sp). A knight’s armor might run as high as 35gp. But an actual knight would probably want an enchantment on that sword, bringing the sword up to 35gp, too. The total cost to outfit a level 5 knight gets steep, quickly—a player character of that level would be expected to have 270gp in total assets, most of that gear.
It’s harder to do this kind of analysis for D&D 5e, because gold is weird at high levels. The PF2e system, on the other hand, has a pretty tight internal logic, but that logic implies a very different world than ours.
With respect to Pathfinder (second edition), silver/copper is the base for things “normal” people use and for the equipment and armaments you are likely to buy when you make your character. Once you get into the rarefied market of purchasing magic, you’re dealing in gold.
OK, so the gold is way more money than I’ve ever seen before, but what’s this frankincense and myrrh worth?
As with many biblical things the relevance of the gifts of the Magi is less their value (although all are high-status items to give as gifts) and more their symbolism: gold represents kingship, frankincense (burnt as an offering to the gods) represents divinity, myrrh (an embalming oil) represents mortality.
I know this is kind of a joke question, but stuff like that was often worth its weight in silver, mostly because it had to be transported long distances or was very difficult to refine from the raw plant or animal materials it came from.
There were specific places in medieval Europe where 100 grams of pepper was worth something close to the value of 100 grams of gold, remembering that “100 grams of gold” is quite possibly “more money than a medium-sized peasant village could plausibly earn in a year.”
Not all kinds of incense and not all kinds of spices were equally expensive this way, of course. Some spices were laboriously transferred through the hands of a dozen or more far-traveling middlemen (each of whom worked up quite the expense account!) from places as far away as Indonesia is from France, moving at the speed of “sailing ship” or more often “man on horse.” Others cost practically nothing because two thirds of the peasant households in the village were growing them in the back garden.
Most of it the journey from Indonesia to France would have been by sailing ship at least until the Mongols created a unified overland trade route. Indian coastal kingdoms carried on a lot of maritime trade. (See William Dalrymple’s latest book.)
Of course, in many cases in a fantasy RPG, the payment *is* in the form of a gift, such as a magical weapon or armor. Generally this omits the “obligation” portion of the transaction, as the setting generally wants the player to go from quest-giver to quest-giver. But non-monetary rewards for killing the local troll are pretty common.
Indeed, I think this is one failure of a lot of ‘D&Desque’ fiction is failing to realize that the proper character arc in a story is ‘quest-recipient to quest-giver’! This is most obvious in a lot of longer form Royal Road style stories. By the time you are really quite powerful you should be hosting tournaments, not fighting in them!
This was actually something that D&D used to have; Gygax and the 1st/2nd ed. rules assume that higher level PCs are naturally going to have followers, even leading small companies. 2nd Edition goes so far as to say that for Fighters at 9th level would naturally establish a small castle, lead a mercenary company, and “collect a monthly revenue of 7 silver pieces for each and every inhabitant of the freehold due to trade, tariffs, and taxes.” Likewise, high level clerics are assumed to become religious leaders occupying a fortified abbey or monastery, similarly for monks, and wizards can establish a holding similar to fighters.
Wizards get a tower. Even though they never wanted to climb it to observe the stars.
TBH, old style D&D sorta had that built with how establishing strongholds and other types of domain level play was kind of integral to the higher levels.
And the new edition is bringing back opportunities for that with the bastions system
The traditional reward for killing the troll is to loot its lair.
And a good thing, too. A mere 100gp for a sword? You can’t even get a +1 sword for that. Try 1000!
The traditional reason for the greatly inflated D&D treasure is so the DM can give the dragon a properly impressive hoard without letting the PCs buy the known universe, cash down. The traditional justification was that adventurers keep going out and getting gold, gems, silver, etc. and spending it, creating inflation.
Also, dwarves mine gold in quantities that, well, dwarf what human miners can dig up. The value of gold will be increased somewhat by dragons adding it to their hoards, but then adventurers (and tricksy hobbits) go and put it back into circulation.
A lot of this is downstream of the very first edition of D&D, where characters gained 1 XP for each gold they found. Because you want to have an exponential curve for leveling up requirements to prevent people from genociding the goblin race in a quest for godhood, that meant gold rewards also needed to increase exponentially.
They eventually figured out that XP shouldn’t track treasure directly, but by that time the prices were pretty ingrained and they never went back to fix the fundamental economic model.
All that would require would be to make it one per silver piece — even allowing that the XP was a good idea.
Er, no they cannot. Particularly in the eras with lots of small issuers (poleis, nobles) most coinage is going to circulate fairly locally, with a relatively fixed stock of it. How large an area does the monster prey on, how thoroughly do they manage to hoover up coinage, how long has there been a replacement inflow? Keeping in mind that for high values of intensity & duration, the locals would have expanded non-coin payments and ersatz token coins (which system they probably drive off a cliff very quickly, unless we are nearly on the verge of the Industrial Revolution, and somewhat frequently even then).
Relatedly, the future members of the Fellowship of the Ring loot swords, not money.
In general a D&D setting is in a permanent high middle ages (or really an impossible permanent non-industrial early modern), with thousands of years of history where the local mint was the same size it is now operating at the same level each year for the same number of consumers.
There you go, assuming that the loot was looted from the locals. If so, the gold would just circulate and not cause inflation. In fact, there are so many monsters that hoard gold that they would cause an even worse shortage of coins than there was.
In reality we get inflation, so the monsters are getting gold elsewhere. Indeed, one hypothesis was that the dungeons were an Underworld operating by unearthly rules — doors would open spontaneously for the monsters where players had to pick the lock — and gold would manifest on its own.
They do loot the money, or rather, they bury it in order to come back for it later.
Coins made of precious metals don’t circulate locally, though. Roman coins have been found in Indonesia. A moneyer working for Offa of Mercia copied an Abbasid dinar, complete with an inscription of “Muhammad is His Messenger”, because the Arabian coin was trusted.
Increases in the supply of silver from one area could have a big impact on inflation around the world. Increases in silver supply from Central Europe and then from Potosi (now in Bolivia) contributed to inflation known as the “Price Revolution” of the 16th and 17th centuries.
I need to proofread better. The first sentence should read “Coins made of precious metals don’t *just* circulate locally, though”.
Big piles of gold are aesthetically nice, though. We all like the image of a dragon lounging upon a heap of gold; in order for that to be at all feasible, you need a comical amount of gold.
It seems easy enough to say that gold is cheaper in a fantasy world. Maybe alchemists can turn lead into gold at scale, and have done so in the past. Maybe the gods create it miraculously. Maybe there’s just more of it in the ground, or it’s easier to mine.
I’ve seen some interesting treatments of economics in D&D-esque fantasy. I’m fond of the way Doomed Slayers provides a social niche for wandering adventurers to occupy, and the D&D fan writers “Frank and K” had some cool ideas for a multi-layered fantasy economy. Essentially they classified the coin-light peasant economy and the coin-heavy elite economy from the real world as the Turnip Economy and the Gold Economy, then introduced a magical Wish Economy for the supernaturally powerful.
I mean, the point is that it’s not the currency itself that matters- a currency can eb anyhting- it’s the ability to exchange that currency for what you want that matters, and historically very few people actually ever needed to transact business in gold coins, meaning that they were more useful as accounting terms than actual currency. Just because the elite economy is absolutely swimming in gold doesn’t make those coins trickle down to the peasant economy any more than before- hence why it generally required state action to spread coinage to monetise the economy.
To be fair, if the members of the elite are slinging around gold or ‘gold’ coins in the quantity you see in a fantasy setting, it’s very likely that SOME of that will trickle down to the peasant economy by default. First, because it’s so convenient for the state if peasants are at least theoretically capable of paying their taxes in coins.
Second, because the primary reason historical peasants didn’t use currency was because the stuff was hard for them to get- you spend the better part of a year raising a chicken and go to the trouble of taking it to market, and you are rewarded with, say, one silver coin. Granted that raising one chicken doesn’t take up all your time, but you’re still trading a lot of hours of labor for each silver coin, and you have a lot of other necessary labor you have to perform too (such as planting and harvesting the crops that will literally feed your children).
Sure- it’s just that it won’t be enough to make an appreciable difference to the commoners except possibly change which coin they use. To actually monetise the countryside, you need to create extra demand for payment in coin, whihc typically requires state action.
I knew a guy whose explanation was that the metal they call “gold” in Faerun is shiny and yellow… and also as light as aluminum and as common as quartz.
I feel a lot of people alive today don’t see the sheer ludicrousness of the “pile of gold big enough for a dragon to sleep on”, simply because we don’t have *any* understanding of the value (or weight) of gold.
And I have to include myself in that category. When seeing the gold hoard of Trier in person, my thoughts were more along the lines of “That’s a small pile” than “Whoah, that’s enough gold to buy somebody a seat in the senate ten times over”.
Comically large amount of gold?
Yes, until you end up with the Hobbit movies, where Smaug is sitting on a hoard of literally more gold than humanity has mined on Earth.
Since realistically this social niche would be “utterly expendable troublemakers who should and do die like flies”, one could imagine that the campaigns consist of one wise and powerful guide (the GM’s avatar) keeping the party alive in spite of themselves until they gain the experience, strength and equipment to have some chance of surviving. The Ur example of course is The Hobbit.
I’m also reminded of King Solomon’s Mines, where Allan Quatermain explains that it’s highly unusual for someone to have his years of experience because almost all elephant hunters get rich and retire after five to seven years, or else get killed first.
Doomed Slayers does a nice job of reconciling the “utterly expendable troublemaker” side of adventuring with the “world-saving hero” side, if you ask me. Slayers are respected, valued, important…but the word “doomed” is in the book’s title for a reason.
Possible Typos:
“the weight is trivial and the coins are liable to get stolen in any event.”
Did you mean “non-trivial” here?
“a good meal and supplies to the road”
Did you mean “for the road”?
And yet again, I am going to nudge you to look at “King Of Dragon Pass” or the related “Six Ages” game, where you are sort of playing the Big Men* of a clan in a fantasy world with feasts, favors, and trade is more often in cows or horses for preference, or “goods” which include lots of portable valuables like jewelry, clothing, cool things, etc.
* And Big Women
Seconding the request for a KoDP bit. I’d especially love to see our good host’s take on the event line where an emissary from Tarsh hires half your weaponthanes for some mercenary work, and when it’s all said and done, pays in silver coins. This is very upsetting to your people, who expected to be paid in cattle.
It gets better – if feeling stubborn, you can force him to turn around, ride home, and drive back a herd of actual live cattle.
As a man of honour, he’ll turn up again with hundreds of exhausted and roadbeaten cows, sweaty and dusty and griping about stubborn rustics.
You can then browbeat the poor man to retract his ‘stubborn rustics’ remark. Doing so earns favour from the ancestors – you defended the honour of the clan.
A trade savy member of the clan’s council will be aware of the value of the coin’s for trade, while insisting on being paid in cows will result in half of them dying on the way from Trash to your clan (and anger the Tashian noble sent to facilitate the exchange).
True but as I recall that event, the oral contract explicitly said cows. And goods (including coins) are not easily converted into cows. One thing the game is really good at is keeping you obsessed with your cow herd. If you have a 1:1 cow to person, your clan is in trouble. 2:1 is doing quite well, 3:1 is getting a bit much, better recruit more people or split into two clans.
Sort of. Someone on your ring will note that he speaks a strange dialect that your people have trouble understanding. I suspect that if we could delve into the fictional linguistic roots, there’s probably some proto-orlanthi word for ‘value’ or ‘wealth’ or something like that, which has taken to mean ‘cows’ in Dragon Pass where things are much closer to the pastoral origins of Orlanthi, and has come to mean ‘money’ over in Tarsh where you have a real state and the economics it implies.
Simpler than that; your good counter is denominated in “cows worth of goods” and he delivers coin worth as many cows as promised, so clearly he was just using cows as a unit of value. However, you’d rather have a cow than a pile of silver notionally worth one cow, because cows reproduce and provide milk, or in the case of bulls labor. And Dragon Pass has limited markets, so you need to undertake multiple significant trade expeditions to exchange your silver for cows, and if you don’t have a good negotiator you may get worse than the theoretical rate.
Also, while it’s not mechanically represented your weaponthanes are mad about getting it in coin form; they’d rather have jewlery they can wear when you distribute the annual cow’s worth of gifts to each weaponthane.
The key difference is that digital artists don’t really have the capacity to set unit prices. It’s trivially easy to copy them and redistribute. So from what I’ve seen of people seriously pursuing digital art as a career, they work on a comission basis where they charge someone a substantial upfront cost to produce a made-to-order art piece, or they use Patreon. They may supplement with monetized streams of the process.
Then there’s AI art, in which investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a machine that makes terrible art. It neither has artistic vision nor the capacity to implement a provided vision, but it’s great at spamming the internet.
Value for trade is all well and good, but you can’t eat silver coins at the feast.
That’s incidentally a spin-off of the Runequest RPG setting, which is in an era where the main currency is silver Lunars from the Lunar Empire.
Thirded. I would love to see Bret take on KoDP/Six ages.
Something that this post ignores a little bit is good ol’ classic dungeon crawling, where a big part of the in-setting lure was that you could actually get enough raw money by exploring monster-filled holes in the ground to jump the gap between poverty and not-poverty. Granted, there isn’t much of a realistic basis there, but it would make sense that economies near “megadungeons” would be more monetized purely because you’ve got adventurers who are willing to (over)pay for supplies due to having more coinage than they really know what to do with.
For anyone who wants to stick to “monetized” fantasy settings, a nice way to approach it that’s simple enough for players is to effectively have overlapping economies. So you’d have your copper, silver, and gold coins, but silver is the only coin that everyone will accept.
There actually are a few historical analogs to the adventurer, but most that work anything like the fantasy depictions are more modern and related to people finding huge coin or metal stashes in sunken ships or tombs, mostly after modern excavation and diving techniques were developed. You could make insane bank for a snapshot of time in the late 19th century or early 20th by finding a sunken treasure galleon or pulling a mask out of some Egyptian tomb, ethics aside.
In a world with a progressing magic tradition it isn’t that absurd to take the analogy and adapt it, which is why dnd characters owe as much to Indiana jones as they do to the knight errant of medieval literature. They’re professionals delving into ridiculously dangerous locations enabled solely by the wonders of modern magecraft. Water breathing spells are their nautilus, stone shape their TNT, scrying their ground penetrating radar. There isn’t an analogy to someone showing up with ten thousand gold coins in medieval economics because dnd has never really depicted a medieval world. Magic makes it more like a modern one, with medieval clothes.
But if course that’s one interpretation of many.
I think an important influence is also the Varangian Guard, and specifically how that practice felt in Scandinavia. Most who went to the Guard never returned, and in fact you could have a funeral before you left, but the few who did return came back rich.
A good historical analogy for this (a very-high-risk, high-reward adventure) is going to sea or participating in some colonial venture. Before quinine, European presence in Africa was limited to a few coastal trade stations, which transacted with native Africans for high-value local goods. These were staffed mostly by young men from Europe working there for a few years at a time, with most of them dying from tropical diseases before they could go home; they signed up for this because you could earn a life-changing amount of money by doing so.
I never considered this, but it’s a great analogy. I still think it’s hampered by the class gap, in that “getting rich” in the fantasy-adventure manner was a merchant-level (or merchant-investor aka noble) outcome. I assume the change in life for the average seaman was more along the lines of buying a small plot of land, or a small business, or maybe just going home to their parents farm but being able to spend all day at the pub drinking and telling stories 🙂 I don’t know any tales of seamen buying nobility (or at least gentleman-level leisure) just from their adventuring… but if it happened I suspect it’s a pretty epic tale.
For sailing and colonial voyaging, getting to go from ‘commoner’ to ‘nobleman’ was usually the province of extremely successful breakout cases. Just about any of the conquistadors who accompanied Hernan Cortez or Francisco Pizarro and didn’t die were going to get to live like princes. Francis Drake started out as a quite common farmer’s son, as I understand it, but did so well for himself by being apprenticed to a sea captain, then a captain himself, in various quasi-piratical undertakings that he died rich, prestigious, and in the upper echelons of political power in England.
To incredible controversy I might add! These figures were often hated with a fiery passion as social climbers by the nobility, even as they received praise by the kings whom they enriched. It’s a small but significant part of the puzzle of how the state grew in power throughout the age of colonialism leading to the eventual breakout of the European monarchs from being accountable to their aristocratic peers to being able to wield effectively absolute power.
Of course the other side of this is that the primary good these social climbers were using to become fabulously powerful was slaves. There were others-precious bullion and spices-but being a slaver was a cornerstone of extracting either.
Drake stole more money than England made in a year from its regular state revenues.
There was a French baker’s boy who ran away to sea, jumped ship in India, worked his way up through the Army of Hindostan and retired to buy a title and a chateau in Burgundy.
When a new-broom Governor General of Bengal (Sir John Shore) proposed to reduce the perquisites of Company officers they mutinied, pointing out that they had taken a chance on death or riches – and mostly died before reaching a rank where these were valuable.
Arguably deliberate: It’s been pointed out that Gygax draws a lot of stuff from american colonial history rather tahn the middle ages.
Should note that there is of course another time honour way to Get Rich Quick: War. Not only is there the “honourable “way of rising in the ranks, maybe getting ennobled, or at least a good job with a decent salary and maybe a payoff… There’s also the “Be among the first into the city and be able to actually loot those gold coins that are so rare and then run as fast as you can before your own sides accountants get you…”
One classic explanation of the gold was that dungeons created it in order to lure adventurers.
I’ve heard a claim that coin hoards were useless – because archaeologists have dug up so many of them, they were clearly never used. But if a coin hoard did it’s job and the owner dug it up after some disaster and used the money to start again – it wouldn’t leave any trace. Is there evidence of how effective coin hoards were and how often they were used successfully?
That sounds like the “armor the part of the plane that had the most holes in it when it got back” error.
I think it’s more not realising that most coin hoards are likely either grave goods or religious offerings- that is, where retrieval was not itnended- not nessecarily hidden because they feared the coins getting stolen.
Yes. The natural human response today when one is convinced that the money will just get stolen eventually is not to hide it, but to spend it. Teaching saving of money requires two massive infrastructures, establishing a stable rule of law on the one hand and universal education on the other. People in the past were still human, they wouldn’t have gathered the money together and put it in the ground; they’d believe that would just delay it’s theft to no real purpose. Instead they’d get brighter clothes, more meat, inebriants, and also try to buy some divine favor.
people in the past are not so dumb that they never had any idea about saving money for later uses (for themselves or their offspring, especially when there was a crisis going on) withoutt universal education.
A fair number of coin hoards are from areas where feud was common and compensation was paid in money. You bury the coin so that when you kill that bastard Ethelred you have the money to buy off his family (in one saga two families keep swapping the same purse as each killing sparks another in a cycle of revenge)
A lot of currency hoards were nether retrieved, because the owner did not survive the event they prepared for by hiding their money.
It is a kind of reverse survivorship bias.
Great piece! I had two thoughts.
1. Being paid with a gold piece in the olden days would be like a modern-day American worker who earns the federal minimum wage for full-time job being paid once a month with a $1,000 bill.
2. The first Dungeon Master’s Guide has a couple of pages about economics, 90-92 (see https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/rpg.rem.uz/Dungeons%20%26%20Dragons/Premium%20Editions/1st%20Edition/Dungeon%20Masters%20Guide%20%28Premium%20Edition%29.pdf)
that addresses the discrepancy between real-world mechanics and fantasy world gameplay.
First, it says:
“There is no question that the prices and costs of the game are based on inflationary economy, one where a sudden influx of silver and gold has driven everything well beyond its normal value. The reasoning behind this is simple. An active campaign will most certainly bring a steady flow of wealth into the base area, as adventurers come from successful trips into dungeon and wilderness. If the economy of the area is one which more accurately reflects that of medieval England, let us say, where coppers and silver coins are usual and a gold piece remarkable, such an influx of new money, even in copper and silver, would cause an inflationary spiral. This would necessitate you adjusting costs accordingly and then upping dungeon treasures somewhat to keep pace. If a near-maximum is assumed, then the economics of the area can remain relatively constant, and the DM will have to adjust costs only for things in demand or short supply — weapons, oil, holy water, men-at-arms, whatever.
“The economic systems of areas beyond the more active campaign areas can be viably based on lesser wealth only until the stream of loot begins to pour outwards into them. While it is possible to reduce treasure in these areas to some extent so as to prolong the period of lower costs, what kind of a dragon hoard, for example, doesn’t have gold and gems? It is simply more heroic for players to have their characters swaggering around with pouches full of gems and tossing out gold pieces than it is for them to have coppers. Heroic fantasy is made of fortunes and king’s ransoms in loot gained most cleverly and bravely and lost in a twinkling by various means — thievery, gambling, debauchery, gift-giving, bribes, and so forth. The “reality” AD&D seeks to create through role playing is that of the mythical heroes such as Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Kothar, Elric, and their ilk. When treasure is spoken of, it is more stirring when participants know it to be TREASURE!”
Of course, it later says:
“The bulk of such treasure will be copper pieces and silver. Perhaps there will be a bit of ivory or a cunningly-crafted item worth a few gold pieces.
“Electrum will be most unusual, gold rare, and scarcer still will be a platinum piece or a small gem! Rarest of all, treasure of treasures — the magic item — is detailed hereafter (PLACEMENT OF MAGIC ITEMS). If some group of creatures actually has a treasure of 11 gold pieces, another will have 2,000 coppers and yet a third nothing save a few rusty weapons. Of course, all treasure is not in precious metals or rare or finely made substances. Is not a suit of armor of great value? What of a supply of oil? a vial of holy water? weapons? provisions? animals? The upper levels of a dungeon need not be stuffed like a piggy bank to provide meaningful treasures to the clever player character.”
As a tangent, anyone who enjoys D&D but has never read the 1e books really should give them a go sometime. Gary Gygax has his own voice as an author which really stands out from the editions which came later. It feels more like “some guy making cool stuff because he loves it” and less like “some guy making stuff for his employer”, to me at least. I really enjoy the books even though I have very little desire to actually *play* D&D 1e.
Gygax was a terrible person in a lot of ways, and there’s places where it shows up in his writing, but he was very imaginative and very passionate about building a world (or a set of rules for creating worlds) that could make those imaginings come to life.
It absolutely is a big eye-opener to read Gygax’s sourcebooks if one is used to corporate-generated content like many modern tabletop RPGs have.
I don’t know what he was like as a person, but Wikipedia gives this gem:
“Despite his commitments to his job, raising a family, and attending college, Gygax continued to play wargames. It reached the point that Mary Jo, pregnant with their second child, believed he was having an affair and confronted him in a friend’s basement only to discover him and his friends sitting around a map-covered table.”
You may want to remove the piracy archive link. I frankly do not much care about IP laws personally, but let’s not cause any headaches for Dr. Devereaux
Good point. Sadly I can’t at this point.
Despite Gygax spending all that ink trying to create verisimilitude, the fact is that in early edition D&D the accumulation of monetary treasure was a mechanic. Experience was handed out for finding treasure as a rough proxy for accomplishing a goal, the default goal in the earlier levels being to accumulate wealth; this would, for example, give you 80-90% of the experience from an encounter if you managed to acquire the treasure without fighting its guardian.
Prior to achieving “name” level, usually around 10th, the bulk of your gold was going to be spent on training (magic items were not for sale). And it was entirely possible that a character would not have acquired enough gold to fully pay for the training, in which case the character would owe his tutor a debt, which was a hook for various other adventures.
At higher levels, by design the game switched to “domain” play. Training became relatively less expensive, with treasure now being diverted to the construction of stronghold, and the hiring of retainers and mercenaries.
The weight of coins, at 1/10th of a pound per coin, was also a mechanic; treasure was heavy so that it would be challenging to move, which drove interesting choices. How much gear are you willing to throw away in order to carry more coins? On your journey out of the dungeon, do you risk ditching your 25 pound Zweihänder in order to carry an additional 250 gp?
It is less important that the game’s economic system mirror reality, than that it functions internally to the rule set in order to achieve the desired gameplay experience. The same goes for the encumbrance system (see the aforementioned Zweihänder). The is something WotC got very wrong at the beginning of the 5e period, when there was nothing to spend gold on that was useful in the game, at which point acquiring monetary treasure and keeping track of encumbrance become purposeless bookkeeping tasks.
From a game design perspective, in most games character wealth still functions as a “XP value”, it’s just been disconnected from the main XP advancement track. It’s the XP track to advance your character’s equipment level, whereas standard XP advances your character’s skills level.
This was said all but explicitly in the D&D 3E “expected wealth per level” tables, and by the various “you have to be this tall to beat this monster” requirements of “can only be damaged by +$VALUE$ magic weapons.” (To pick one example out of many).
And I find that D&D 5E’s stubborn refusal to support non-barter magic item acquisition, or even to have meaningful outlets for high level adventuring party amounts of money to be game-mechanically annoying.
Thanks for that! The subject of fantasy inflation reminds me a bit of Caverns of Xaskazien II, which is a fairly unique representation of what attempting to take on a massively complex demonslaying crawl all on your own would look like in a DnD-adjacent world.* It has great number of random events which can occur as you enter a dungeon floor (some really annoying, a few quite helpful), and one of them is “Inflation” – which doubles prices of any merchants on the floor specifically as a response to the gold getting pulled out of the dungeon.
I’ll note that the game generally falls into the same tropes Bret is criticizing above: the main currency is gold, silver is much rarer and defined mainly as “worse gold”, and there is also platinum as “better gold”. It DOES have a twist where you don’t really collect most of that gold for yourself, but offer nearly all of it at the temples, as that is a reliable way to obtain the all-important experience and level up without having to exclusively engage in (frequently extremely risky) combat. Merchants (and skill Trainers) are implied to be trying to scalp you as much as possible when charging literal gold.
Further, gold is actually REALLY HEAVY: the amount of it you can carry at any given time is a 1:1 with your Strength stat – i.e. 30 Strength = 30 Gold units. The amounts scale linearly with depth, so to avoid leaving gold on the ground and missing out on rewards as you scramble to leave each floor in time you ought to invest in Strength linearly as well – but then you also need investments into Dexterity (far more important for combat if you don’t want to be stuck at 10% accuracy vs. everything) and likely Intelligence (since magic can be VERY useful), and balancing the three is a constant struggle.
The thing is here, in case anyone’s interested. It is completely free. (It is also a roguelike, and so can get brutally hard.)
https://virtua-sinner.itch.io/caverns-of-xaskazien-ii
* (For one thing, it places as much premium on traversal as combat, to the point traps are at least as lethal as the already tough monsters and it’s quite likely for that a character who neglected swimming or magical alternatives to it would eventually die to a deep underground river.)
Hmm, I am not planning to play that game; however, that sentence made me wonder…
Do player characters have the option to hire porters to bring with them? That seems like a solution to the problem of finding more treasure than you can carry, even if they demand enormous risk premiums.
Though, now I wonder whether such a thing had actually ever been included in such a game.
It depends!
There are generally rules that allow it, but much depends on the labor market where your party goes, and that’s all in the DM’s purview.
No, not really. While that particular game includes a lot more non-combat stuff than a typical example of the genre, it is still meant to be quite abstract altogether, with a lot of simplifications in order to make for a more engaging moment-by-moment gameplay (i.e. rust traps immediately destroy a random weapon or piece of armour as soon as they are triggered – even if it was wood or leather and staying on any floor for too long causes it to flood it with water, lava or poison gas to ensure you cannot grind indefinitely with things like the Generate Gold spell.)
Thus, this limitation on carrying gold is explicitly meant to be the main way to incentivize levelling up Strength when the success in combat is generally far more dependent on Dexterity. (That is, when your character fails to keep up in the Dexterity arms race against your enemies, their accuracy plunges, potentially to a dismal 10%. Greater Strength doesn’t matter much for Dexterity-scaling weapons, and though it lets you wear heavy armours that reduce enemy’s hit chance, finding those in the first place and having enough inventory space to avoid sacrificing too many potions, etc. for their sake is a separate challenge.)
The one way to carry items (not gold!) from level to level is to find a magical chest which has a 10% chance of showing up on a floor. There is also a magical chest which allows to carry over items between RUNS (remember, this is a roguelike, where once a character dies, their run is over), but it only has a 1% chance per floor – unless you follow a god one of whose boons to loyal followers (all paid for by “Faith”, awarded for doing what he approves and avoiding what he is against) can summon that chest at any time.
Coins are (and were) a poor form of money. The specie value of the coin seldom coincided with the stated value–almost invariably lower, due to wear if not debasement. Sovereigns could create some value out of thin air by taking the coins for taxes. But they couldn’t take this too far. Seignorage created liquidity value, which left a gap between the coin and its specie value. This gap was exploitable, especially in long-distance trade, where the king was not feared. As Keynes said: “The Semitic races [“merchants” in our less racist times], whose instincts are keenest for the essential qualities of Money, have never paid much attention to the deceptive signatures of Mints, which content the financial amateurs of the North, and have cared only for the touch [i.e., assay] and weight of the metal.”*
If a coin must be weighed and assayed for large transactions, it is not itself money.
It was only the switch to fiat money that finally repealed Gresham’s law.
* A Treatise on Money, page 12.
Generally speaking, high quality coinage (known to be close to the stated weight and of good purity) could hold its value even well outside the political sphere it originated from. Arabic silver shows up right through Scandinavia in the Viking Age (and even into England on occasion) in contexts that indicate it was likely to be circulating as coinage at face value.
> It was only the switch to fiat money that finally repealed Gresham’s law.
Categorically not so – Gresham’s law is still very much in effect. Just ask the proprietor of a local cash-heavy establishment what they do with any suspect coins or notes they end up with in the safe after a night’s takings: the answer is invariably “spend them off to someone else as soon as possible”.
> Categorically not so – Gresham’s law is still very much in effect. Just ask the proprietor of a local cash-heavy establishment what they do with any suspect coins or notes they end up with in the safe after a night’s takings: the answer is invariably “spend them off to someone else as soon as possible”.
Indeed, it isn’t too hard to imagine that even official fiat currency (not counterfeit or anything) follows the same rules. If you live on the border of Stabletopia and Inflationland, and accept cash from both countries, you’re going to always prefer to keep the Stabletopian currency while spending the Inflationlish currency. It makes no sense to do otherwise, as you can count on the one storing value way better than the other.
In the early age of banking, the notes of high-quality banks traded at a premium to specie. The verification costs of commodity money are generally higher than those of bank money.
Jonathan Sumption notes in his history of the 100 Years War that while England had an effective tax system, raising money in France meant long negotiations with multiple local parlements, so it was simpler to devalue the coinage in times of real need. This did not raise prices (at least in the short to medium term) – everyone just shrugged and got on with it. Probably because the main use for coins was paying taxes.
Bret’s description of Rome backing its currency regardless of the amount of actual precious metal in it kind of sounds like a fiat currency.
Related: I’m not sure that the debasement per se was the cause of inflation during this period. It sounds like the reason for the debasement was to mint more coins from a given amount of precious metals, because the state wanted more money to spend. This would create a more or less permanent increase in the money supply (coins not wearing out very quickly), which in the long term would cause inflation, particularly if every new emperor also wanted to mint more in order to spend more. And when a new emperor minted a shiny new coin with his face on it, did he do that by melting down old coins, or would these have been new additions to the money supply?
> And when a new emperor minted a shiny new coin with his face on it, did he do that by melting down old coins, or would these have been new additions to the money supply?
In the context I’ve personally studied (Anglo-Saxon England), this would primarily be done by re-minting the existing coins.
This is quite a profitable exercise for the state. Every so often you update the coinage and issue the decree that old coins must be exchanged for new ones. That exchange is one of _weight_ for _value_ – Anglo-Saxon Pennies were nominally 24 to a pound of silver, so you would provide a pound of silver to the mint and receive 24d in return. But they were typically minted slightly underweight, more like 26 (for a good king), 28 (for a questionable one) or 30+ (when they desperately needed money), meaning that the mint collected a few pence of profit on the process. That in turn was paid up to the king.
Generally the A-S kings were pretty good about not debasing the silver coinage with other metals – when they need to stretch the silver supply it’s done by minting to a lighter weight standard.
The usual form of money was a tally-stick – either local (with the ale-wife) or issed by an authority. When Henry II sent a craftsman to inspect and repair gear at Nottingham, he was issued tallies by the Exchequer, used to pay for lodging on the 5 days’ journey from London to Nottingham, andmore to pay for materials on site. At each stage he obtained an acquittal, and five oath-takers (liable jointly and severally) attested to payments at Nottingham.
Pounds, shillings and pence are of course very familiar to probably anyone who lives in the United Kingdom and wasn’t born in this millennium. We decimalised in 1971, so my parents grew up with twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound, the thruppenny bit and the ten-bob note, and I learned my times tables up to twelve at school despite being born a decade after decimalisation. I’m slightly confused by the notation you use: I’m familiar with £sd, but what is the p in “2p-6d”? I couldn’t find anywhere you brought it up in the text, it’s not defined in the Medieval Price List, and the only p I know is the decimal penny.
I don’t know that the times tables limit has anything to do with currency; the USA has had decimal money for centuries and it’s typical here to learn times tables to 12. Why 12 and not 10 when 10 is all you need to do long multiplication and division, IDK. We do still use feet with 12 inches per, so maybe that’s it.
Also, many things are bought and sold by the dozen retail and by the gross wholesale, so you’ll want to be able calculate for those things too.
And you buy e.g. eighty-something years as “four score and…”.
A bit of a tangent, but “why 12 and not 10?” and similar questions are an absolute rabbit hole (and ends up involving things you’ve probably never thought about like “why is time measured in multiples of 12?” or “why does English say eleven and twelve instead of oneteen and twoteen?”).
Humans apparently have a preference for counting things by 10s, 12s, and 20s, so there’s also that.
12 is convenient because it can be easily divided into thirds or quarters.
And of course 12 is no more arbitrary than 10, which is an accident of our having five fingers on each hand.
It’s actually surprising hand-counting doesn’t use the 4×3 “board” of fingers*phalanges, with the thumb as the pointer.
I’ve trained myself to “tally” using 4×3=12 on one hand (so 144 using both), and I just recently saw a similar technique whereby you can do 5×4 on one hand by counting the joints and phalanges separately (so 4000 using both).
This is apparently a historically-attested method, so in theory we could have had a world in which “metric” was duodecimal based.
I’ve seen a mathematician suggest that because statistically quantities are more likely to be just over an order of magnitude, it’s efficient to be able to reckon in elevens and twelves as approximations without having to work them out from scratch. (He was reacting to a proposal by the then UK secretary for Education Michael Gove that all children should learn times tables up into the teens; the mathematician thought learning tables higher than twelve was an inefficient use of memory.)
If you know how to count on your knuckles like a Sumerian, your 12x tables can be quite useful!
I think it’s a typo, and should be “2s-6d” (or “2/6” if you want to confuse everyone)
Fascinating stuff! I’d like to see some follow-up discussion concerning the problems of counterfeiting and coin-clipping in these early monetary societies (and up until recent times).
Well, there was the guy who had the bright idea of putting ridges on the EDGES of coins to make clipping even more obvious — milling
His name was Isaac Newton.
Another form of high value “currency” we often see in both D&D and fantasy are gems and jewelry. These often seem to fill the role you describe gold as filling in the real world. Characters are understood not to be typically conducting transactions in gems, but to treat them as a store of wealth. A few gems (or rings studded with gems) are easy to carry around and keep as your most secure possessions, and then you expend them for the really big purchases.
How does that compare to real life? When would people store value in gems rather than gold, and were gems considered Gold ++, the extra large store of value you’d use for such a high amount of wealth it’s too much for gold? Or is the fact that you can’t simply weigh gems like you do gold to determine their value too big of a frustration, so people didn’t like using them as a store of value?
Well, “gems” is a very broad category. At the high end you have things like gem-quality diamonds or rubies that were big deal stuff to just about anyone who didn’t have the income of a literal prince. Often, these were precious stones that were only actually being extracted from a handful of sites on Earth at any one time in the ancient period. The supply was irregular and as a currency they’d be completely impractical.
At the low end you have things that ‘circulated’ a bit more, semi-precious stones like jade or chalcedony, which were common enough that you could plausibly see carved ornaments made out of them and someone could conceivably have used beads of them as a unit of currency the way gold and silver were used.
The trouble is, then, that it would be a lot harder to standardize the quality of any kind of gemstone, especially in the absence of modern scientific crystallography and jewelers’ tools. It’s relatively easy to convince someone that a pound of gold from one hoard is equivalent to a pound of gold from another hoard. It’s harder to convince someone that two chunks of agate are equivalent to one another if they’re not literally identical.
“especially in the absence of modern scientific crystallography and jewelers’ tools.”
they have magic though
Most kinds of RPG magic don’t really help with “make a standardized amethyst gem that can universally be agreed to be worth exactly 10 pounds of gold.” One can imagine a magic for doing so, granted.
Fantastic post, thanks. Thank you especially for dipping into the wild world of numismatics.
I notice that mentioning Lydia and coinage you didn’t mention the (presumably mythical) King Cresus. As in ‘as rich as’. Even though I’m assuming there is no real evidence he really existed, I think that the way we still use the phrase is telling. Is there any way of quantifying the economic advantages that the adoption of coinage would have brought?
Also, as a Brit, I grew up with all of my elderly relatives saying “Everyone has got so bad at mental arithmetic since decimalisation.’ so maybe that’s another benefit of the shilling.
Oh no, Croesus was an actual guy. Our host is correct in mentioning that it’s possible for us everyday folk to purchase and own ancient coins, but his coins are an exception, being rare and desirable and hideously expensive.
https://www.austincoins.com/ancient-coins/lydian-coinage/king-croesus/
Those are a little disappointing, because they don’t say “Croesus rex” or the equivalent in some Anatolian language. That said, they aren’t *that* expensive, as in there are cars that cost more. (But maybe the cars impress girls more than the coins?)
Depends on the girl.
I recently read through the Lord Peter Wimsey books (written and set in tween-the-wars Britain) and the rich and complicated tapestry that is the british monetary namespace is on full display in them; complete with adding bobs and pence and summing up and breaking down guineas and poundses and “four and two” etc is fascinating. (And almost comprehensible to this American born post-decimalization, but that only because I played in a Warhammer Fantasy RPG, where the currency was explicitly pre-decimalization £sd)
Yes, Kroisos or Croesus was a real-life king of Lydia who lived in the 6th century BC. He is thought to have been the first ruler to issue coins.
The ‘different types of people intrinsically pay differently’ rule is a good one, also from a gameplay perspective, although of course you”d have to balance the ‘currencies”
Also another nice example of how feudal economies are just very different usually being far more unequal but also far more two-way and emotionally complex. As in this case, where a nobleman directly rewarding a warrior adventurer in gold coins would be demeaning for *both of them*, and a gift of a sword would enhance both their status, simply for having happened.
This principle would have been recognised from at least 500 to at least 1400 in Western Europe alone, making it substantially more long lived than European financial capitalism, to date.
Amusingly Iain M Banks, in one of his rare non-Culture sci-if books, has the Dwellers, a fantastically ancient and quite advanced race use ‘kudos’ instead of money and it works far more along the feudal lines than capitalist ones. The (capitalist) humans and other aliens find it borderline incomprehensible
Or balance it that the poorer ones are mostly in supplies, while later rewards tend to be more valuable. Might also explain why a high-level adventurer might take smaller jobs alongside bigger jobs- if while dealing with a dragon annoying the King you do some jobs for the peasantry in exchange for food as nessecary…
There isn’t a need to balance the currencies if you treat it as part of advancement. A party of adventurers might start off in the “copper and silver in town, food and favors in the village” economy and end up “outgrowing” mere money over time.
Gifts of cash were entirely acceptable to medieval knights. Of course a sword or a robe carried more emotional freight, but there are plenty of instances of a prince handing over a purse as a reward.
This is absolutely amazing, it’s something I’ve been bothered by in fantasy for a long time but never able to quite find the resources to understand it properly!
D&D economy was always messed up, but Gygax was explicit that his vision was of a frontier, wild west set up, with beating up monsters and stealing their treasure taking the place of gold rushes or robbing banks or trains. The real economies of Europe weren’t part of his thinking.
He also had 10 coins to the pound, just to make things even more ridiculous. A sword cost several pounds of gold…
IIRC that was mostly an encumbrance hack, right? The DM can award ridiculous gold hoards because in actuality the PCs are limited in how much of that hoard they can physically carry away. This post and discussions shine a bit of a light on how much of the modernized “improved” rules systems (formulaic encounter levels, magic-item crafting, etc.) are still bound by having to factor in inflationary-currency economics.
Of course, even within First Edition AD&D, there are a number of practical solutions to the problem of “how do we carry all this loot.” The trouble is that the solutions tend to create their own problems.
For instance, suppose that a party of eighth level adventurers decides to travel in the Ogre Forest to reach Dragon Mountain, kill the dragon, and steal its treasure. Being eighth level adventurers, they can be reasonably confident of passing through the forest alive and in one piece. After all, the ogres would need to muster an army or get some help from seriously dangerous allies (like giants) to stand a chance of stopping them.
But if the adventurers are going to need a train of pack mules and some experienced mule drovers to retrieve the treasure, in the first place, then getting through the forest becomes rather more complicated! Eighth level adventurers strong enough to have a hope of slaying a dragon may be confident of being able to survive the Ogre Forest, but the mule teamsters are going to be going “wait a minute, aren’t ogres the ones that are nine feet tall, can bench-press a horse, and eat people?”
The kind of hazard pay you’re looking at for something along those lines is… considerable.
Hence Tenser’s Floating Disk…
I’m still proud of the look it put on my players’ faces when one of their hired guards got eaten by a dinosaur.
“the line between ‘rents’ and ‘taxes’ in pre-modern states is very fuzzy”
Modern states too. If I can’t pay my rent to the amorphous corporate conglomerate that owns my house I get thrown out into the street, but if I own a house and can’t pay my property taxes to the amorphous agency that runs the government I get..thrown out onto the street. If I resist the same degree of state backed force is likely to be used in either case, as evidenced by the fact that rent evictions and foreclosures routinely involve police and often turn into firefights.
The difference between state and corporate power is that the state acts as the enforcer for both itself and the corporations, and is democratically elected in at least part while corporation leaders aren’t in any meaningful capacity. But the mechanism of their economic powers are nearly identical, a similarly extractive system of obligations backed by state force based on the idea that vital commodities can be withheld to compel economic activity.
It’s still the same system, still blurred, it’s just more impersonal. The landlord just uses the states army instead of their own men to compel compliance.
This isn’t meant as a signative value statement about this system, that isn’t the point of the post; rather I feel the need to clarify it because it seems implied by the prose we are past such archaic systems of compulsion, when in truth they’re just more subtle and clinical.
It’s more that historically, your rent and taxes were to the literal same guy, as the local Big Man was the one you owed both to.
These days, the Government and your landlord are usually at least different people, even if you’re right the m,echanisms of enforcement are fundamentally the same.
IOW, it’s more that historically, the difference between “rent” and “taxes” was nomenclature, as both went to the same person. These days the difference is they go to different people.
And most people pay taxes to the same entity for their whole lives, but change rental arrangements many times.
Do they? I think that both removes complexity from medieval tax arrangements and adds it to ours. For a lot of low income renters they effectively never pay real tax, *their landlord does*. In the same way in the past nested feudal relationships meant that a peasant might be paying to a knight who was given the land by a lord whose legitimacy in turn was recognized by a king for service.
Of course many more people currently pay taxes, rents and service fees to many different entities, but that’s merely increased complexity and activity. It’s not like medieval people didn’t have complex tax structures either-a farmer might be paying to three or four entities in total accounting for various excise and sales taxes. It was just *less* because state power was lessened and government has to be simpler. Plus society was simpler, poorer, and less monetized.
Also, if I buy a house I have choice in who I mortgage with, in that the same handful of corporations will end up owning it anywhere in the country and I’m esotericly picking which through a system I have no knowledge or control over. If I instead rent, at least where I am, I have two choices, either multistate company A or multinational company B. They have a bunch of fancy affiliates, but the ownership is binary.
So ultimately I pay to the same handful of people as a renter or homeowner all empowered by the government by it’s recognition of their ownership rights and contracts. I just also pay directly the the government too, in addition to the owning class, because I have a good job and exist in a real tax bracket. But like in the past that just makes me a town person, along with most citizens now, not a peasant.
Basically, the system is bigger, more impersonal, more monetized, and richer, but a lot of the interactions are the same, and similarly moderated by empowered intermediaries backed by government force.
you may “pay” for different things to different Lords who may have different rights to your community
Lord A may hold the right of low justice. Lord B to the mill….
Abstract examples
Harry Turtledove has a series of historical novels that follow a couple of traders out of the city of Rhodes, in that period while it was trying to maintain its independence while the various successors of Alexander were jockeying for power. One of the cousins is the captain, while the other one tracks all the goods, and — very importantly — knows what weights the different cities coin to. Sometimes they eke out some extra profit by not specifying whose drachmae they need to pay in, and use some coins struck to a lighter standard.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/779839.Over_the_Wine_Dark_Sea
They are a good read
I imagine a big thing is what your setting is and others cause big gold piles means the richest of rich Aristocrats , the top 1% of 1% nonsense.
and know and acknowledge that your characters are actually messing around in those circles and are not just Plucky folks type of thing.
an yeah the adventuring Party that can Kill literal Gods is a Huge Beast of a issue cause you just Murdered that Dragon that could have literally destroyed all of my land casually, Marry my daughters and allow me to Adopt you PRONTO because I want your service is a whole thing.
more use should be done thought that the regular forces are more then good enough to like, destroy the Normal Goblin Raids and the like, that your “Beowulf” character actually IS that big of a Deal thing.
we can handle the normal problems of Bandits, Low level Monsters and what have you, but THIS stuff is bloody insane out of the Norm type stuff.
this of course means low level adventures should be more thought of as Low Mercenaries trying to make it up in the world then not, perhaps having to join a greater collective for funzies… alas.
Maximilian to the Fugger, i want to be Kaiser can you loan me the money for the bribes
Ah I see! So carrying around gold coins is like the equivalent of carrying around a bunch of diamonds in your purse and expecting to be able to pay for your weekly grocery shop with them.
A little more akin to buying a stick of gum and trying to pay with a hundred in a small store.
Heck, there are places where pulling a $200 bill (or even a $20 bill!) out of your wallet for a small purchase would not be greeted pleasantly.
“No $50 or $100 bills accepted” is a fairly common sign around here. Partially because accepting them would risk too much if it was a forgery, but partially because it would wipe out their cash drawers to make change
When I was in my teens I got paid for a week of odd job work in £50s once and immediately assumed the person I’d been working for was a drug dealer 😀
I was curious about modern gold coins and if they actually circulated or were only used for large-scale transactions, so I did some math:
From when the United States started minting gold coins in 1795 until they stopped in 1933, just over 5000 tons of gold coin was minted, with a peak year in 1904 of about 170 tons, about 250 million dollars face value.
This was about 10% of the total amount of circulating currency in 1904 (which the FED says was 2.5 Billion dollars in 1904), and of all the gold coins minted over 70% were 20 dollar double eagles, each containing 30 grams of gold, worth something like 700 dollars today according to an inflation calculator. In other terms, a double eagle was 5% of the median yearly income, which would correspond to 2000 dollars in todays money.
So effectively, the most common gold coins were something like 2-3 weeks of an average persons income, more earlier, and a cursory search of the internet shows that double eagles weren’t used in personal transactions.
> far more people, I suspect, have played BG3 than have played any form of D&D tabletop
You are off, perhaps by an order of magnitude
The upper estimate for BG3 sales is 27M lower at 5M
https://gamertweak.com/bg3-statistics/
In France alone, a survey give 4.8% of respondents having played once
https://data.sciencespo.fr/file.xhtml?fileId=1475&version=5.1
Cumulatives sales for old edition in english is around 8M
https://www.enworld.org/threads/behold-a-final-and-perhaps-definitive-graph-of-d-d-vs-ad-d-sales-over-time-from-ben-riggs.690396/
Forbes gave an estimate of 50M currently active players
“D&D coinage has always included smaller denominations: copper, silver, gold and platinum pieces”
I won’t stand for this electrum erasure.
But seriously, I’ve always figured that the world of D&D and other fantasy games had far more gold than our world, causing significant inflation. After all, people are constantly pulling wagonloads of the stuff out of old tombs, dragon lairs, and maybe even the Elemental Plane of Earth.
Minor quibble, but I think that more people have played D&D than BG3. In part this is motivated reasoning because I hate BG3, but also because BG3 has apparently sold 15 million copies, while the active player base of D&D is estimated at 12 to 15 million players and the game is 50 years old. Odds are pretty good that there are at least 3.1 million inactive D&D players out there to put D&D ahead even using low estimates (and the high estimate is 50 million lifetime players!).
This also makes me wonder- the bribe that Herod gives to Mark Antony in HBO’s Rome (20,000 lbs of gold), is it plausible that a ruler of Herod’s status could even have that much money to hand out?
Would I be right in assuming that the estate needed to support a knight (whose armor and horse(s) are much costlier than a Greek cavalryman’s equipment) would need to be much larger than that 68ish acres? Like perhaps 100-250 acres?
As I recall, a “knight’s fee” is on the order of 1000 acres. This is a little out of Bret’s primary competence, involving medieval and early modern Europe, but an interesting topic would be the sizes of typical landholdings: how much land did a “forty-shilling freeholder” own? the owner of a “mantal” in Sweden? Mr. Darcy? a Prussian Junker? Etc.
I would also be interested to know how much land a “big” landholder would have. If small is 5-10, is “big” in the hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands? Obviously, this would vary a lot (Roman aristocrats of the Late Republic and Empire would put any Medieval and probably most Early Modern landholders to shame), but a baseline for “you must be this rich to be a big landholder” would be nice.
It generally varied, because the breakpoint is likely where you can live off the rents instead of having to farm yourself. Which them depends on what % of the harvest the rents are. But the minimum seems to be in the hundreds of acres.
It’s hard to know, because usually any time a system was devised with standardized fiefs, they weren’t a standard number of acres; instead, they tended to be a standard annual income in goods…denominated in silver.
Understood that units like a forty-shilling freehold are by definition measured by value, not acreage, but cropland doesn’t vary that much, so it should be possible to specify meaningful average sizes.
FWIW, my desultory research has come up with answers similar to Finnish Lurker’s answers below, although I have no idea about Junker holdings. My Swedish ancestors farmed 1/6 mantal, or maybe 15 acres, so they were richer than Bret’s ancient Mediterranean peasants on 5-acre plots, but much poorer than 19th century American farmers. I guess that’s why they moved.
My impression was that cropland can vary a whole lot, in a region and between them. Rainfall (not so much in a region), soil quality, slopes, which way the slope is facing vs. sun and typical winds…
A mantal’s farm is big. In Finland, most old, bigger farms were typically half or quarter mantal farms. I would say a mantal implies 40 to 60 hectares of field, and corresponding forest holdings. Though these mantal numbers are misleading, because they were set in the 16th century, mostly, or even earlier, and later, the taxation was no longer based on these numbers which only had some minor significance.
I recognised the word “mantal” but did not know the meaning of it. So I looked it up on the Swedish-language version of Wikipedia. It is described as a measure used to calculate how much tax you had to pay. This based on how much land suitable for growing cereals you owned. I don’t know how long this system was used in Finland (which was part of Sweden for centuries). However, here in Sweden it was replaced by income tax in the early 20th century.
Forty-shillings’ land is estimated in this Scottish 1872 source to be a bit more than 100 acres, i.e. about 50 hectares. https://www.sizes.com/library/Great_Britain/Scottish_land_measures.htm
This seems, though, an absurdly large farm for a rent of 2 pounds at post-Columbus prices of silver. For medieval times, when silver was more scarce prior to South American gold flow to Spain, the rent might make sense, though.
One of the people in my current D&D game HATES electrum. so much, that he refuse to take any when the DM hands some.
Interesting! I’ve got a small worldbuilding project on the go, and one of the cultures there has a taboo against handling gold. I can imagine a fair few enterprising folk having a foreign retainer on hand to receive any payments in gold and transfer them to an appropriately foreign business associate.
Has he considered paying a lackey to follow him around and conduct his electrum trading?
I would only pay this player in electrum, but I’m also a Chaotic Evil dungeon master.
Alternately, your world has a much greater supply of precious metals, so the threshold values are lower ?
After reading about the Potosi Silver mountain and its effect on prices, I inflicted on my players of the time a system where I kept track of all prices in CP, but didnt quote it like that to the players – instead, every time a large hoard was sacked/liberated, the value of gold and silver would fall, effectively increasing the price of all goods (and in years when none was, prices fell, a bit). Not sure it was really worth all the effort, but it did cause the players a lot of thought
Five years ago I would never have been interested in lengthy articles about medieval economics, and now I literally cannot get enough.
Yet again, Tolkien seems to have got it right. When the hobbits’ five ponies are stolen at Bree, the only animal available for sale is Bill the Pony:
“Bill Ferny’s price was twelve silver pennies; and that was indeed at least three times the animal’s value in those parts. It proved to be a bony, underfed, and dispirited animal; but it did not look like dying just yet. Mr Butterburr paid for it himself, and offered Merry another eighteen pence as some compensation for the lost animals. He was an honest man, and well-off as things were reckoned in Bree; but thirty silver pennies were a sore blow to him, and being cheated by Bill Ferny made it harder to bear.”
No surprise there. One of the many advantages Tolkien had over his would-be successors and adaptors is that he was steeped in the knowledge of medieval society and how it worked and thought.
Unfortunately, most of his would-be successors and adaptors think they understand the medieval period, and they really, really don’t. (Hi Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens!)
Dakota (or Lakota, two ways of saying the same name) is another language where the word for currency derives from silver. The word for currency is mazaska (“white metal” more or less) and owes its use to colonial-era silver coins as the culture’s first exposure to coinage in trade. Even though there are gold deposits and not silver deposits in the area where the language is spoken, gold was such an afterthought in actual transactions that the word for gold is just a variation on the word for silver.
Maybe in all these fantasy settings gold is way more common than it is in our reality?
That could be, but then why use them as money? A key factor of currency is that you can hold large value in a small *and easy to carry* substitute for cows, bushels of corn, jars of oil, etc. When you have to carry hundreds of coins to shop – it’s a hassle and a security risk.
So, if gold is more common in a setting, a realistic-human-behavior would be to find a scarcer commodity. Maybe gems, or mithril, or unobtanium, etc. My favorite is always the giant two-ton stones that the people of Palau used – too heavy to carry, so the “owner” had to memorize the location, and transactions had to be carried out with witnesses so that everyone knew who owned which stones. Never figured out how to work that into a game though 🙂
You would use gold as a currency for the same reason that most real states historically used silver. Because it would no longer be *too* valuable for an everyday coin.
Our contemporary coins — with their sizes chosen entirely for ease of handling — are meaningfully larger than almost all silver or gold coins mentioned. The past would have been better off if silver were a few times more plentiful, allowing coins to be less absurdly finicky, and/or for a larger number of coins, allowing their use to spread more widely sooner.
If some of your adventurers are regulars at the inn, you can put a small transaction on their tab. (Or the innkeep may insist they settle their tab before they go and get themselves killed.)
Writing is a better witness than people. Particularly if the setting is early-modern (i.e. firearms are a thing) you’ll have some forms of written IOUs. Travelers were loath to carry stealable coins — it’s a high medieval invention for merchants to team up, allowing person A to give coins to merchant B in exchange for a written instruction for merchant C to pay a sum to person D. D≠A is the instruction is to be delivered as, basically, mail (which predates the regular postal system).
If you apply a lot of magic, you can recreate debit cards if you want, talking to a central book transferring numbers between accounts.
Elizabeth Moon makes use of what are basically “letters of credit” in both the Vatta’s War and Serrano settings (even though both settings have explicitly interstellar realtime “ansibles” with bandwidth sufficient to carry on video calls). Technically sci-fi, but large chunks of the settings are analogous to some fantasty RPG settings in flavor, IMO. (Early renaissance)
Bills of exchange were the usual way of transferring credit in mid-late medieval times, with accounts netted out at the great fairs. Your Roman who had made enough to purchase a plot of land and so qualify for the equestrian order did not lug a cart-load of silver out to the country. He strolled down to his banker in the Temple of Saturn in the forum and arranged a transfer to the seller’s account.
I really wish you hadn’t used D&D as an example here, because IME most D&D settings *aren’t* Pre-Modern. Indeed in settings where magic is common and widely available, there are D&D “kingdoms” that are in most respects considerably more advanced/developed/wealthy than your average mid-19th century European state.
(Especially in 3rd and 4th edition) D&D magic is just technology – consistent, reproducible, and subject to development and proliferation. 5th edition has drawn back on this on the theory that people prefer a more “Tolkein-esqe” setting, but even 5th edition settings often are closer to 18th century Europe than 11th century Europe.
And as for adventurers – High level adventures in D&Dare not analogous to Pre-Modern knights. They are analogous (personally) to a whole modern spec ops squad – each. A high level D&D wizard is an artillery battery, a radar-enabled CIC, a transport plane, and a fleet of recon drones – in a single person. A high level Rogue can handle most of the functions of an entire CIA station for a major city or small country – on her own.
If you want to play in a lower powered edition of D&D (even 5th tends to scale past this, you’re looking at some of the more limited OD&D variants), or only play at low levels, then you can be vaguely medieval knights. But if you play D&D as a lot of the rules and per-published adventures (for many of the editions) seem to suggest, then you quickly scale out of the sort of scope where a local baron matters.
This may differ with setting or edition, but in the ones I have tried, it would be absurd for a local baron to be sending anyone after an Aboleth. Aboleths are magical powerhouses – the Baron (if he somehow knows of the Aboleth without already having been made it’s thrall) would be screaming at his liege lord for help, and said liege would likely be carrying that screaming up another level at least. Maybe a Duke would be sending big name (as in, known through the land and all adjacent lands and all trading partners overseas) heroes after the Aboleth.
Fundamentally, past level 6 in 3e or level 10 in 4e or 5e, a Player Character is a legendary hero, not an aspiring would be knight. These are not people a local aristocrat tries to settle down on a landhold to increase their prestige and military power. These are people the local aristocrat gets the heck out of the way of because this is a concentration of force they cannot even dream of possessing.
The proper protocol for handling a high level adventurer is not “Landed Aristocrat to Knight Bechelor” it is “Roman Emperor to an entire victorious army and it’s general (in the shape of a small band of weirdos)”
I agree with all this, although I will say, in the Underdark campaign, it was a duke who sent my part underground to eventually deal with aboleths. Not that he could have known that. Also, we killed him before we went.
To be fair, in a fantasy world it would not be unreasonable to expect a Baron to have married into a magical bloodline three generations back and so be able to sling fireballs and for the local Bishop to be able to resurrect the dead and call forth an array of holy spirits. Even if they’re not on an Abeloth’s level they don’t have to be big standard baseline knights either.
Of course, if we go down that route, we have to accept that DnD worldbuilding is fundamentally flawed, because the society it gives you (whether you argue it’s Medieval or Early Modern or Wild West with swords or Modern with swords) is not one that would emerge in a world where there reliably is a demi-god like Hercules somewhere within 100 miles of any given city (but also reliably a world-ending threat *requiring* a Hercules somewhere within those 100 miles).
Not all worldbuilding is or wants to be realistic. Yes, DND society could not come to be in a world where DND’s magic system exists.
But it doesn’t matter, because the creators of the Sword Coast do not care about that aspect. They care about making a fun environment to play around in.
Oh, no. Adventurers are really incredibly rare. The books say so!
Yet you keep on stumbling over them. And they aren’t really that fundamentally different from non-leveled characters.
What’s worse for world-building, the rules from making magical objects are never good. (Because the players don’t want to do that that much.) But a world in which a cleric who could make a permanent Zone of Truth comes along once every several centuries but can make one a month for very reasonable requirements would have the advantage over one where there are several hundred such clerics at any given time, but making the Zone is so severe and difficult that you get one every several centuries.
As a non-DnD player (I didn’t even play much of the Golden Age of CRPGs based on it), my only knowledge of what Aboleth is comes from link provided in the blog. Based on that, though, I would say that it seems like a typical Baron would find out about an Aboleth quite easily – once the water in the 1-mile radius from its lair turns toxic to anyone besides the creature’s thralls. Since Aboleth appears to require eye contact to make thralls AND since it can only make and maintain control over them within the same 1-mile radius in which it fouls the water, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect a typical Baron to react by hopping on a horse and getting to the first non-tainted well, and then coming up with the best course of action. (Besides, the text appears to say that even thralls have a chance to break mind control once every day, after which it shouldn’t take that long to get to the safe place.)
On the other hand, a creature capable of rendering such a large area useless for habitation or agriculture actually DOES sound like a threat worth spending a good amount of gold coins to defeat ASAP. (Even if the adventurers themselves would still need to convert those to a more usable currency should they succeed.)
I’m not really sure the Price Edict is particularly useful for internal comparisons, at least across industry types. Maybe Diocletian wanted to push down prices in one particular sector relative to others, for his own reasons.
It’s not an RPG but the book/anime series Spice and Wolf averts the reliance on gold coins brilliantly since the main character is merchant. The first plot arc is quite literally him getting caught in the middle of a currency speculation scheme, involving a trading company and a king conspiring to debase the purity of his country’s silver coins and it’s pointed out there a dozens of different currencies in this world. He actually ends up taking his payment after that story in pepper.
I’ve heard various theories of big influxes of gold creating havoc in economies. For example, Mansa Musa’s pilgramage to Mecca, or the extraction of gold from the new world by the Spanish.
Yes, such events lead to certain countries suffering massive inflation. King Musa accidentally caused this in Egypt since his followers shopped a lot in Cairo. Similarly, Spain suffered this from importing large amounts of gold and silver from parts of South America.
It strikes me that, much like many things in “Medieval” fantasy, the “adventuring party” of, effectively, freelance military professionals, is a much better fit for the Early Modern period, particularly the 16th and (earlier) 17th centuries, where armies are raised less by customary obligation than by large-scale military entrepreneurialism.
In such a system, military professionals might quite freely pass between the companies of multiple military entrepreneurs (as d’Artagnan does in The Three Musketeers) or strike out on their own when their contract or arrangement with their current employer expires.
Three Musketeers is an acknowledged influence on D&D
Currency quest rewards are a videogame/CRPG innovation that’s leeched back into regular D&D. You can use a “Wanted: disposable nobodies” announcement as a hook for getting your players started (I always made my campaigns start with a band of sewer repair conscripts but an in media res start upsets some players), but spending money should always come from found treasure (as rolled on the loot table). An adventuring party doesn’t fit into local power structures and is not going to be welcomed into an elite gift economy even if your players want to try that, because you can’t trust your players to go along with it and so you have to run your NPCs as people who won’t trust your players to go along with it.
Anyway by level seven they should have staff expenses that they need to maintain that you can use to teach them about not doing everything in bullion, and by level ten they ought to be spending a lot on fixed fortifications for a lair if they don’t want all their stuff hauled off by various local authorities. Your players will usually not question the gift of an abandoned building with _no_ attached rents, and that’s the kind of unhelpful co-opting that hereditary elites should be willing to engage in with them.
Also magic. Even +1 armors resize to fit within size categories and never corrode while worn or stored; players should pull all the armor they can use out of lost graves etc before the real powers ever have a chance to even hear about them.
See, this is why when my adventurers raid the orc lair they wonder where the gold is; instead there are all these furs, chickens, and a couple head of cattle.
One very-nitpicky quibble: protein isn’t really stored for later use. So while feasting on rich, juicy protein feels great, nutrition-wise you’re chasing the fat and starchy calories for long-term storage.
It’s not really about *storing* proteins, but that some proteins are required for nutrition, especially those containing essential amino acids that the body can’t make on its own. If you don’t eat any of those for a prolonged time, you will develop some deficiencies and become ill, and among the best (and possibly only in a pre-modern society) sources are various meats.
So if you get to partake in the lord’s banquet from time to time, where you get to eat meat, you can survive your normal diet of mostly grain and a few vegetables for much longer.
I don’t think humans can store proteins. Instead we need a certain minimum amount of protein every day. However, it does not have to come from animal products (meat, fish, eggs, diary). One can get it by combining certain cereals, legumes and/or root vegetables. Yet pre-industrial farmers could not even make sure they got such combinations. This likely contributed to their poor health found out by examining skeletons. Also, European emigrated to North America in the 19th century worked much better due to better and more reliable food sources. I think most of them belonged to the part of the population of Europe not reached by the already rising standard of living.
Where good is *extremely* useful is in designing games, up to around 2000 CE, when gold speculation started messing with the price of gold.
Here’s the thing: in the late 1990s, a gram of gold (what one SF writer called gAu, which is a really cool coin name), was around $20. US. You could look up the price of, say, a sword in Museum Replicas, divide by $20, and that would be its price in gAu, which you could also convert to Troy ounces. The price of gold made a fantastic way to convert prices among eras. It worked great from 1920s Call of Cthulhu, if you were trying to figure out how much something cost by back translating modern prices, how much a sword cost in peasant wages, and so forth.
I’ve long thought that the fantasy gold piece is a design tool (like the gAu) not pocket change. It’s good for that, but for a game it really should be reskinned into something appropriate for the setting.
Science fiction sometimes gets this right (or goes very lazy and uses a “credit” that’s accepted everywhere)
In Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, there’s an episode where the ship needs new parts and supplies, so they have a “garage sale” of odds and ends to raise money. The hero, who with the ship was basically frozen for 300 years, during which time the previous galactic government fell, remarks “We have plenty of currency, it just isn’t very current anymore.”
And in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we get this gem: “In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altarian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. The exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Nigis are not negotiable currency, because Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.”
At this point I think of the Charles Stross novel Neptunes Brood:
https://reactormag.com/book-review-neptunes-brood-charles-stross/
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/econ-realism-in-neptunes-broodhtml
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/10/hard-social-science-fiction.html
Two thoughts. First, maybe this was obvious to everyone, but note that in its inception, a livre (aka pound) was indeed more or less equal to a pound of silver. Second, there is an interesting book, “The Roots of Rural Capitalism,” by Christopher Clark (not the same one who writes about Germany), about colonial Massachusetts, which notes that in that culture, too, specie was rarely exchanged, and pounds, shillings, and pence functioned as units of measure rather than methods of exchange.
So, who are some historical “peasant-adventurers” that my party can look to for inspiration (though yeah there’s always that one player who loves being the snobby noble’s son)? I believe El Cid was a minor noble. Spartacus was a slave, but famously crucified. The Carolingians were “mayors”. I don’t think Muhammed was a peasant, and he died anyway before things really got rolling. Chinggis Khan wasn’t born a peasant, but it’s told that his family became impoverished, so that might be something.
Does Joan of Arc count? Didn’t exactly end well for her…but then it doesn’t for many adventurers either…
J of A, heck yes. Definitely on the list.
Sir Francis Drake could work. Born to a common farmer, he became a cabin boy and later a captain, and by means that are either legitimate acts of war or piracy (depends on your point of view!) ended up honored and feted by the crown of England.
The Spanish nobility made up some 10 per cent of the population in some regions, so essentially, being a minor nobleman was equivalent of being a well-off farmer in England. Muhammed was a minor merchant who became somewhat rich by marrying a wealthy widow.
To be honest, many of the people here – and the social circle for whom they DM games – will be from Western upper middle classes who are so close to that top-10% stratus that they can probably identify with those backgrounds, if they understand that being a son of a minor noble in the 9th century Northern Spain is not really that different from being a son of a well-off professional today: you get a good start and a lot of privileges to start with, but need to work, if you want to actually make it.
Mercenaries. Varangian Guards, condottieri, even privateers in some places. Landed notables should be happy to address the player spokesperson as ‘Captain’ and hope it’s understood that that the pay isn’t for the deed, the pay is for going away after the deed is done.
Professor, any thoughts on how to value magic items in a premodern fantasy setting (especially magic items of the “+2 longsword” variety that are somewhat standardized, as opposed to unique artifacts)?
You could try to do something based on the labor and materials required (“well, a +2 sword takes 25 wizard-days to enchant, and a wizard is more or less a very skilled craftsman, and they made around 10x what the typical peasant did, and also you need ten pounds of basilisk organs, which would be comparable to an exotic foodstuff, which typically cost about…”). Or you could think about the use value (“a swordsman with a +2 sword is about twice as effective as one with a regular sword, so you’re saving £3/year on the extra guy’s salary, plus another 10s/year in depreciation on his gear…”).
But this is basically acting like a modern MBA. How might people in an authentic classical or medieval mentalité, thinking in terms of obligations and reciprocity and the natural order of things rather than in terms of numbers on a spreadsheet, think about the value of magical goods?
On the face of it, putting the value of all the X’s and Y’s on the same spreadsheet assumes that the X’s and Y’s are fungible – you can always convert X’s into Y’s and back at some exchange rate. The harder it is to exchanges X’s for Y’s, the more misleading that assumption becomes.
Of course, trade is only meaningful because the relative value of X and Y will change in different circumstances.
The price or “price” of things is going to be a function of supply and demand, whether or not the people trading in them think in those terms. If the wizard-time and materials are expensive, people are only going to make as many as they can profitably sell. If the gulf between the price of making them and their practical use is too high, they’ll become rare status symbols because the wizards have to sell at a unit profit. This effectively applies even if their salary is not paid in coinage; if they don’t feel they’re being properly compensated for their time they’ll look to switch liege-lords and probably have the capacity to do so. Or they’ll raise a tower and become a bossfight.
I expect demand is going to be pretty high, though, possibly higher than a bloodless per-guy profitability standard would indicate. The barons and knights aren’t just sending people off to war, they’re going themselves to stand in the front of the battle line. They’ll want the very best for their personal gear. That’s even before you get into the existence of incorporeal creatures and such that have a “you must have a +X weapon to play” sign. If you’re near a hellgate that spits out creatures with immunity to normal weapons on the regular demand is going to spike pretty damn high.
Unhelpful answer: because the economy is stagnant, long-run price trends are utterly flat (modulo coinage debasement), thus people simply observe prices. Even things on the level of “found a town” have known-from-observation risk profiles because e.g. the Seleucid project to monetize the peasantry involved doing it a hundred of times. (But then it’s not written down.)
More to the point, people think that an object has value the way it has weight. A merchant making a profit from moving stuff from A to B must have cheated at least one counterparty by buying/selling for less/more than the object’s value. (And selling foodstuffs at much higher prices during famine years than in good years is just blatant cruelty.) The reason for why it is worth that much is about as mysterious as the reason for why it weighs that much. (And it stays mysterious for longer, much longer! Economists finally nail the supply&demand thing to the wall with marginal utility theory only in the 1860-70s. (Jevons, Walras, Menger) By that point, Henri Giffard had flown a steam-powered airship (1852), steam trains and electric telegraphs are not rare, etc.)
Beyond a rough estimate, there’s a big “anything goes” here, depending on the social stuff that adheres to them. Speaking of: what’s the status of the wizards that make them? Are they household employees (servants)? Retainers? Burghers (like weaponsmiths)? Are they distributed evenly with a parallel social structure, like parish priests? Are they exercising secular lordship in a few places, like abbeys and bishoprics? Have they taken rulership at fireball-point? Perhaps there isn’t a price, as far as laymen are concerned, because wizards consider themselves to retain ownership of +2 swords and they merely issue/loan them to some of their agents. There can be substantial gray area here, as with religious relics that were used as prestige objects by secular powers (with occasional trade, theft, etc.) but with a high level of ecclesiastical involvement not too far from “actually it’s ours, we just let you have it”.
I think you’re underestimating people in the past; while they may have regarded selling at higher prices in famine years as cruelty, they clearly knew it happened well enough for it to feature in the bible as a symbol for famine. And it’s not like the economy was fixed; while agricultural yields didn’t improve a lot by agricultural revolution standards there were quite a few technological developments over the course of antiquity and the middle ages. There was a time when you couldn’t get iron weapons at any price because the technology to create them didn’t exist.
I would also suspect merchants had a rough sense of supply and demand in the same way that pre-Newton artillerists had a rough sense for trajectories. You have to know that city dwellers will pay more for food than farmers will sell it for to run a profitable grain wholesaling business. And you have to know that silk is more valuable where there aren’t silkworms to think shipping silk west is worth the hell that is crossing the Gobi Desert.
I think you’re overestimating people today. Look at how much griping there is about surge pricing, and how obvious it is that many of these people don’t understand that the alternative is “sorry, we sold the last of it hours ago”. It’s very possible that others would, on thinking about it, outright endorse lotteries and waitlists over auctions as allocation mechanisms. (Not just possible; this is policy in many cases.) To say nothing of the cases where the business can only exist at all due to surges; it being open the rest of the time is just a side effect.
The advances you talk about did happen — over centuries. For an individual human lifespan, perhaps 15-to-65 to be reasonable, it looks indistinguishable from zero.
Yes, merchants had a better understanding (though, again, unexplained but reliable empirical results, passed down through apprenticeship/family, are a thing). But Jake specifically asked about “classical or medieval mentalité, thinking in terms of obligations and reciprocity and the natural order of things” as directly opposed to modern supply-and-demand thinking.
This is not akin to natural law, because there is an intersection between the economic and the social structure. This is most obvious with labour: reward is very loosely coupled to productivity, has much to do with status and ‘supply’ has much to do with what activities are monetized (see eg ‘women’s work). Notions of fairness and justice are contested but underpin the social order, and not to be set aside because someone says ‘that’s just business’.
My notions of fairness and justice say that third parties who try to intrude their notions of fairness and justice to control the acts of people — whom they may never so much as meet, contrary to those people’s evaluations of their own best interest — are acting unfairly and unjustly.
@PeterT: +1000.
For *certain things* (many things) I’d absolutely prefer waitlists and lotteries rather than rationing by price. Waitlists, even multi-year waitlists, are ‘fair’ in a sense that auctions aren’t. And just speaking viscerally, I never get annoyed by sporadic shortages in the same way I do by prices going up, maybe because shortages seem (at some level) natural/normal to me, while high prices seem like the result of human actions.
Intellectually, yes, I know that in many situations high prices serve a purpose, and I don’t actually want everything to be dirt cheap. High prices serve as a signal for producers to produce more of a good (or for the state to invest more in production of that good). Just speaking at the visceral level though, I’m much more likely to look for a grocery item at Target (where I know it probably will be out of stock, but *if* I’m lucky i will get it for a listed price of $6) than to go to Meijer where I’m guaranteed availability but I will have to pay $10 for it.
The purpose of the economic system is not to appease notions of fairness — especially not selectively. Auctions provide incentive to increase supply, and waitlists don’t.
I would like to note that Martin Luther actually criticised this idea of things having a fixed price, in 1520’s. He lived in Germany, and noted that moving a load from a port town to the middle of the country caused expense and induced a risk of loss. Thus, these were costs that the merchant needed to bear, and had the right to be compensated for, just like any worker, because they performed a socially necessary function and had a right to livelihood.
Similarly, Luther accepted collection of interest on loans, because the merchant used many as his tool of trade. Loaning it implied foregoing the profit from investing it in mercantile business, and was the equivalent of a craftsman loaning his tools of trade to a colleague, for which it was just to ask rent for.
This is not a theory of demand and supply, but it is sophisticated enough a theory to understand that you can be a merchant without actually defrauding anyone, which is better than Aquinas and Aristotle could manage.
I don’t think Luther’s defence of merchants collecting interest is as airtight as he may have thought. He’s taking as a given the premise that there *should* exist a class of merchants who use money as their tool of trade, which could certainly be debated. An economy requires some kind of credit, lending, and interest, but it’s certainly possible to have those things handled by the state (through state-owned banks, etc.) rather than by private banks or moneylenders.
Likewise, I think that someone who farms or raises livestock on state owned land should usually need to pay some kind of rent- if the rent is too low, they’ll use land inefficiently- but that’s a very different thing than paying rent to a private landowner, and the moral/normative arguments concerning one might not apply to the other.
Gurps or Gurps Magic has a formula
Interesting to learn that the denarius is Roman but the talent is Greek, since the people of the New Testament seem to be using both. Is that because first-century Palestine had a healthy mix of both Roman & Greek influence? Or because the absence of a large unit in Roman currency caused even Roman-influenced areas to turn to the talent for those transactions? (of course, these aren’t mutually exclusive).
As a student, I often used the UK National Archives currency converter (https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/) which claims to be able to perform inflation calculations from 1270 to the present for British currency. Disappointed to hear that a credible organization would provide something like this without some serious caveats.
I think first-century Palestine was like current Switzerland: a local shopkeeper will take any of Swiss francs or euros or dollars. Of course, he will not give you the best exchange rate.
???????
Nutcase.
Second eruption, actually.
Objection, question assumes facts not in evidence, namely that ey81 hates Bret Devereaux.
Perhaps our host can clarify, but I’m inclined to think most Roman provinces had multiple currencies in circulation, mainly because of trade with both Rome and neighboring provinces. I also get the impression that the Romans preferred their own coin to be used for taxation and sought to get in circulation wherever they could. “Show me the tribute money…whose is this image and superscription?” “Caesar’s.”
Since the New Testament mentions talents and drachmas, it certainly seems that other coinages were circulating in first-century Palestine. Also, my understanding is that the reason the money-changers were in the temple in the first place is that offerings could not be made with Roman coins, many of which contained blasphemous inscriptions proclaiming the emperor to be a god, but were required to be exchanged (and not at the best rate). I’m not sure what coins were acceptable.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, I think, handles this relatively well. It takes the tri-metallic standard fairly seriously, to the point of using them as general socio-economic tiers based on which type of coin the character is likely to be using, and has a conversion rate similar to the medieval system (1 Gold is 20 Silver and 1 Silver is 12 Brass). It still probably undervalues the higher level currency, noting that a British reader can roughly think of a Brass as 1 Pound, a Silver as 12, and a Gold as 240, but the most expensive things a character is likely to buy are still single digit amounts of Gold and most basic goods are in Brass or low amounts of Silver.
If an RPG is going to try to realistically depict an actual historical setting or something, I’ll want them to get the currency right. But for most fantasy RPGs, ‘gold’ is an abstraction just as ‘credits’ are in sci-fi. (Although a friend of mine always called the latter “spacebucks”.) It just means how much money you have. You can ding the worldbuilding for it, I guess, and there are silly logistical things like how ‘gold’ is the only object in your inventory that apparently has no weight, but it’s way down the list of things that would bother me in the vast majority of RPGs.
I see a lot of talk here about looting treasure in the comments, but not much in the actual post. How much effect did wartime booty have on personal prosperity and broader economics? For example, I understand that Roman armies carefully portioned out loot from captured cities. How did they distribute the value from individual pieces of fancy jewelry, clothing, fancy vases, etc. evenly amongst the soldiers?
Also, could the wide gap between lower and upper classes be narrowed by getting lots of loot in battle? For example, could a Norse subsistance farmer go a-viking and come back with enough loot to invest in more land to farm, or even rent, becoming a jarl himself? Could medival/early modern peasant conscripts likewise make off with valuables from a sacked city to at least move up a class or two?
I’d also love to hear what we know about the procedures (or lack thereof) of looting, but concerning the question of the impact on wealth, I’d say while it had a strong effect for the individual, it didn’t have one on the societal stratification.
Reason One is that as Bret notes, the advancement in class is often not a matter of just wealth, but of the grant of the status marker *by a patron*. Get that status marker without that patron, and it doesn’t count. (A peasant with a sword from their Big Man is a man-at-arms. A peasant with a stolen sword is a bandit).
Reason Two is math: If you have an army of 10.000 looting a city of 2.000 households, each soldier gets the loot of 1/5th of a household. That is certainly not nothing, getting a bunch of nice pots and clothes and tools for free is certainly great savings, but it’s not going to turn a farmer into a Big Man. And “who gets to loot what house” will be class-stratified: The normal soldiers don’t get to loot the city palace (at least not in any way that will allow them to take that wealth home), the consul does, and shows off that wealth in his Triumph. In addition, the *real* value of a household at that time, the house itself and the land attached to it, can’t be rolled up and stored in a knapsack to be carried home.
Which is Reason Three: The wealth of house and land will always be distributed in a top-down process controlled by the elites, who can thus control the social mobility of the people they distribute it to. In the Roman army, this process *was* equalizing since the land seized was handed out to the soldiers as colonies to create more freeholding farmers, but for other places and times, it wasn’t.
So in total, I’d say that while looting was a windfall for everyone, it didn’t as such result in great social mobility. It resulted in some, but the greatest part of that would be the jump from “youth” (that is, unmarried brother to a landholder without household of their own) to “freeholder” (that is, landowner in a position to have a family) within their greater social class, be that peasant or elite.
The major part of the loot up to c1000 in Europe was slaves – your 2000 households might provide 4-5000 readily saleable persons. Slave merchants accompanied Roman armies.
A Norse peasant farmer could certainly come back with a lot of loot (Danegeld, Byzantine pay … ) but could not become a jarl. I am not sure if he could buy land (it never seems to be for sale in the stories) but could outfit himself well enough and gain enough prestige to take up land in England or Ireland. The small-holders of Gotland seems to have buried their loot.
“Also, could the wide gap between lower and upper classes be narrowed by getting lots of loot in battle? For example, could a Norse subsistance farmer go a-viking and come back with enough loot to invest in more land to farm, or even rent, becoming a jarl himself?”
I once read a book claiming that yep, this is what happened in Denmark during the Viking Age. (Note: I don’t know a thing about Viking Age Denmark, I’m just repeating one author’s claims as well as I remember them.) At the onset, Denmark was more-or-less unified. But when every other Eric the Average Viking could go off on a raid and come back rich, there suddenly were a lot more Big Men in Danish society. More cash in your coffer means you have more to hand out, which means more clients and personal strongmen. More Big Men – more local centers of political and economic gravity – fewer people gravitating towards the king as no longer as relatively Big as he used to be – political fragmentation.
I find the Japanese currency during the Tokugawa period to be a fantastic example of having coins that maybe only a handful people in the nation had enough wealth to possess. The oban, a giant oval gold coin, is just comically large and was likely only used in ceremonial transactions. The book The Japanese Family Storehouse puts a good perspective on the sheer amount of value contained in 5 ryo but the display at the Tokyo National Museum featuring replicas of each denomination from copper through oban that you can pick up is even better. The oban is hilarious to hold but it weighs the same as maybe 5 copper coins. Gotta save on encumberance in your feudal Japanese RPG!
I mean, the oban was nominally pegged to being worth a koku (斛) of rice, which was the amount of rice that fed one person for *one year*. Compared to the drachma, it better be big. But yes, the Edo era Japanese coinage followed the stratification that Bret lays out pretty closely: There were copper cash coins (often just actual looted Chienese cash coins) for the lower classes, silver for the middle classes and gold for the ruling class. It left a lot of daimyos in the position of having to issue credit notes, because they needed silver to pay their subordinates, but they only had ready access to rice (from taxes) and gold (from the shogun).
Great article! Way back in university, I remember reading Plautus’ Pot of Gold as part of an introductory class on Roman culture, and this definitely adds some context that I missed at the time. It certainly makes a lot more sense that our old miser Euclio is so jealously guarding his pot if it’s got enough money to buy up an entire village in it. And it also explains why the gold never actually gets spent in the play, because how on Earth are our middle-class Roman protagonists even going to begin actually spending it?