> So a linen weaver would need to work for (500 / 2×40 to 500 / 2×20) 6 to 12 days to earn the price of the simplest linen tunic<p>So translating to modern wages (in US/Western Europe) somewhere between $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and $21000 for the finest quality.<p>That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's clothes into perspective.
Something that continually just blows my mind is how <i>new</i> spinning wheels are. The most plausible range of time of arrival of the wheel in European contexts is between the mid-1200s to about 1340, which means that textiles produced previously to that were made with drop spindles: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_(textiles)#Hand_spindles" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_(textiles)#Hand_spindl...</a><p>That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ideas like hand-spinning all the fabric for sails for ships, which is a seriously nontrivial amount of time!
A marvelous book comparing income and wealth across centuries is <i>The Haves and the Have-Nots</i> - A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic.<p>One way to compare wealth is to see how many people's labor an individual could purchase. It differs across time and countries (labor is cheap in India currently for example). This book is a careful historic look by an economist - using evidence from literature, history, etc. Branko uses a variety of ways to compare individuals across history.<p><a href="https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/branko-milanovic/the-haves-and-the-have-nots/9780465031412/" rel="nofollow">https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/branko-milanovic/the-haves...</a>
There's a great book about the progression of clothing, textiles, and fabric being scarce and expensive to commonplace and cheap. It runs through the various technological innovations (think cotton gin, but plenty more), culture, and economics. The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel. Great quote about Viking sail ships:<p>"Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight hours a day with a heavy spindle whorl to produce relatively coarse yarn, a spinner would toil 385 days to make enough for the sail. Plucking the sheep and preparing the wool for spinning required another 600 days. From start to finish, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they powered."
> Robbers in Italy or debt collectors in Egypt often stripped the clothes off their victims’ backs,<p>With regard to debt collection, what is interesting is the Bible requires that cloaks that were taken as collateral had to be returned by sunset so the person could sleep in them.<p>Exodus 22:26 - If you take your neighbor’s cloak as collateral, return it to him by sunset, because his cloak is the only covering he has for his body. What else will he sleep in?
a lovely little factoid is that in elizabethan england, a set of clothes could easily cost more than a house (Shakespeare paid a 60 pounds for the rather large house New Place, while a very fancy set of clothes could cost hundreds of pounds). This makes sense when you consider that the clothes could take more labor than the house!
Up until very recently, durable goods were very expensive and labor was very cheap. In some parts of the world, that's still the case today.<p>Just the other day was an article about how Agatha Christie was considered middle class even though she had a live in maid and nanny, because she couldn't afford a car, because the cost of the car was the same as 5 years of salary for both workers.
This sentence stood out to me most: “executioners often claimed the clothes that their clients wore to the execution”. The word “client” is what shook me.
This is helpful context in understanding the saying: "If anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well." (Matthew 5:40) The ethic described in the modern vernacular is to "go the extra mile." (verse 41)
An interesting takeaway here is the wages with and without “maintenance”. From earlier reading, I take “maintained” workers to have been provided food, fuel, and housing.<p>Since “maintained” workers earned half of “unmaintained” workers, we can extrapolate that the pay was approximately equal to the cost of food, fuel, and housing, which would point to discretionary income at a much higher rate vs basic costs of living than contemporary laborers.<p>Many other factors are involved of course, including services and automation which greatly increase quality of life while reducing the need of discretionary spending, and also the comparative wage hierarchy of textile workers, but it is an interesting comparison nonetheless.
Also see:<p>• Prices and wages in Medieval England (2014) <<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882389" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882389</a>> 2022-01-10, 119 comments<p>• Medieval Price List <<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669787" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669787</a>> 2019-12-01, 147 comments<p>• List of price of medieval items <<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15680005" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15680005</a>> 2017-11-12, 48 comments<p>• List of prices of medieval items (2009) <<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11613093" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11613093</a>> 2016-05-03, 38 comments
There are a bunch of similar articles describing costs in the Middle Ages. Here's one example (there's another on the bookandsword.com site, too):<p><a href="https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-...</a>
Nice article. You can read also from Titus Livius, in his work *Ad Urbe Condita, that in many occassions, if not all of them, when an army won the battle they stripped all their defeated army clothing, leaving them only with a small underwear back to their own cities. That was the price of defeat.
Women used to spend all day either tending the stove or making thread, cloth, and sewing. It's no surprised that the Industrial Revolution started with the textile industry.
Not the author, don't know him, no connection – but I caught a glimpse somewhere on the blog that he is currently unemployed. As an open-source maintainer, I feel like it is my duty to plug him so he can perhaps get some patrons or donations, the blog is great. <a href="https://www.bookandsword.com/support/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bookandsword.com/support/</a><p>He is also not a software engineer or in tech in any meaningful way, so his 'tip to total income' ratio is probably off the chart compared to, say, me.<p>As an aside, now that everybody is asking for 'tips' of some sort, it is getting quite difficult to figure out for whom these tips are essential (i.e. him) and for whom they are just gratuities. I wish I had a good answer for this.