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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6495753" data-attributes="member: 4937">They, and Gygax, all had the same sources. Yes. What's less appreciated I think is how relatively useless price lists like that one actually are.  The problem is that such price lists collect prices from a wide variety of places and eras and put them side by side.  What they don't actually show you that they need to show you is the price of coin at that place and time.  By the high middle ages, you are already beginning to see the first inklings of inflation in the medieval economy.  By the renaissance, coin has fallen in price enough that common laborers are demanding more than a single coin for a days labor.  It's not necessarily that common laborer has gotten wealthier, it's just that there is more coin floating around and so it's price relative to labor has fallen.  One of the most useful notes in the whole document concerns the fact that horse prices doubled between 1210 and 1310.  Part of that may well be increased demand for horses,  resulting from greater overall wealth in the society, or else greater scarcity of horses (resulting from economic hardship) and consequently greater value in horses.  But most of that is in fact falling buying power of coin due to the number of coins per person increasing.  Horses probably didn't in fact become twice as valuable between 1210 and 1310.  More comparisons like that would allow us to make more profitable use of prices of goods from 1200 and 1500 on the same list, but as it is, the price list contains the same sort of gross distortions you'd expect of a price list that listed the cost of a bushel of apples in 2014 next to the cost of tuition at Harvard in 1910 with no commentary regarding the changed value of the dollar.</blockquote>

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