Cost of hirelings?

I believe your typical 100 ton square-rigged 2nd Century Roman merchant ship has a crew of around 5 hands

I'd love to see your sources, because in 5000 pages of reading on age of sail ships, I never could find numbers for the crew of Hellenistic sailing ships and had to ball park them based on typical great age of sail numbers.

I'll just say that there is a big difference between the crew you need to sail 4 hours across a bay or strait, and the crew you need to keep a boat operating 24 hours a day for days at a time. I'm not at all convinced that the simplicity of the rigging on a Cog or Hulk made them require less crew than a later sloop or schooner. For one thing, changing the sail often meant taking the yard arm down, setting the sail, and then hauling the arm back up again. This is not an undertaking for small number of crew.

Truthfully our modern notions of trade and economics are very foreign to pre-modern times. A REALISTIC medieval town of say 1100 AD wouldn't even have shops where you could spend coin at all. Virtually all production was handled by people bound up in various types of labor and trade obligations and there simply was no such thing as retail sales. The best you would do would be itinerant traders who distributed the few outside goods consumed by rural settlements. In a village the notion of purchasing some sort of good would have been ridiculous, everything made there or brought there was accounted for and needed by someone.

I pretty much disagree with all of that in detail. First, as I noted, the PC's are aboard a ship rigged Corvette, so even the assumption that the economics mimic high medieval economics is one that probably should be put on hold.

But in relation to your view of trade in the middle ages, I'll just put what my own medieval history professor wrote in red ink on one of papers, "Perhaps we should read more widely than just Charles Oman."

While medieval economics were largely local, and largely manorial, and largely based on simple barter, to claim that in 1100AD even a medieval town doesn't have shops is simply boggling. I'm not sure that I'd go so far as to suggests the towns of Northern Europe in the 8th century were so primitive, though the very lack of sources might make it impossible to answer the question definitively. At the very least, the defining aspect of a town by 1100AD was that they had a right to hold a Fair, where one could find a market, and goods were freely traded both by townsfolk and people from the surrounding area. In addition to shops, this would have meant any number of impromptu stalls and carts filled with local homemade goods. A typical town would also have at the least a cobbler (or two, probably the most common non-agrarian profession), a miller, a blacksmith, and probably a brewer (and with it a public house). Larger towns would probably have had at the least tailor, butcher, tanner, barber and baker as well with a whole host of other industries based on the locality - glass blowers, potters, brick makers, fullers, chandlers, felters, haberdashers, joiners, turners, whitesmiths, brownsmiths, jewelers, dyers, painters, furriers, stave cutters, thatchers, coopers, cartwrights, and the almost innumerable host of highly specialized medieval trades that made up the cogs in medieval industry. Many or most goods would have been made on commission - the cobbler probably wouldn't have had rows of shoes in your size waiting to be bought - because that required to much invested capital, but there would likely have been at least some finished goods available. Yes, these craftsman's shops would have doubled as their homes, but they were still places of business where you could buy things.

Even the smallest medieval village was supporting remote trade in some form. Granted, it might just be wheat that would end up in the town 16 miles away after passing through the apparatus of feudal government, to become the Lord's tax, then the Baron's tax, and then sold to merchant in town for coin so that the Baron could buy goods like mail and horses from other merchants. But a close observation of the medieval economy shows it was highly international. What it wasn't was centralized, but that doesn't mean that it was actually localized. Medieval villages were largely self-sufficient, but no one village could manufacture everything it needed. Even serfs needed and could buy cooper and iron tools forged in remote locations (and thus, local smiths to repair these valuable goods). People bought and sold and always have. Trade on an transcendental scale existed even in stone age America, with Michigan copper turning up in Colorado and Colorado obsidian turning up in Michigan. And Europe's trade networks were far more advanced than that during the same period. Remember, in 1100, population and trade in Northern Europe had reached the point that Northern Europe was able to organize and mount a successful invasion of the ancient heartland of human civilization - and it did so ostensibly because it was frustrated by the barriers to trade and traffic that recent regimes in the Middle East had raised.

Let's put it this way: trade in Europe in the middle ages was so highly developed, that in the course of a single year, pilgrims to one particularly famous Cathedral hoping to see its array of relics bought 200,000 souvenir lead pins made by local casters so that they could take them home and display their piety to their neighbors. Disneyland has nothing on that sort of commercialization. It would be wrong to see the medieval world as just being a different version of the modern world. But it would be equally wrong to see it as being utterly and radically different in every way. People are people.
 

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I'd love to see your sources, because in 5000 pages of reading on age of sail ships, I never could find numbers for the crew of Hellenistic sailing ships and had to ball park them based on typical great age of sail numbers.

I'll just say that there is a big difference between the crew you need to sail 4 hours across a bay or strait, and the crew you need to keep a boat operating 24 hours a day for days at a time. I'm not at all convinced that the simplicity of the rigging on a Cog or Hulk made them require less crew than a later sloop or schooner. For one thing, changing the sail often meant taking the yard arm down, setting the sail, and then hauling the arm back up again. This is not an undertaking for small number of crew.
Well, I talked to people that have crewed actual sailing vessels of the size category being discussed here. The answer I got is "25 men would be a fairly standard crew for a small 3-masted vessel of 1-2 hundred tons, but such a vessel could be handled by as few as 4 people. Such a small crew would be problematic and not usual on a long journey, but ancient ships had proportionately much less rigging and apparently smaller crews were common." There aren't really solid sources that I could find in half an hour of research, so I agree that numbers are hard to come by. However, I see no reason to believe that late Roman vessels, which were as large and sophisticated in most respects as those of the 16th Century, required much different crew numbers. You can sale a good sized vessel with under 10 crew, put it that way.

I pretty much disagree with all of that in detail. First, as I noted, the PC's are aboard a ship rigged Corvette, so even the assumption that the economics mimic high medieval economics is one that probably should be put on hold.

But in relation to your view of trade in the middle ages, I'll just put what my own medieval history professor wrote in red ink on one of papers, "Perhaps we should read more widely than just Charles Oman."

While medieval economics were largely local, and largely manorial, and largely based on simple barter, to claim that in 1100AD even a medieval town doesn't have shops is simply boggling. I'm not sure that I'd go so far as to suggests the towns of Northern Europe in the 8th century were so primitive, though the very lack of sources might make it impossible to answer the question definitively. At the very least, the defining aspect of a town by 1100AD was that they had a right to hold a Fair, where one could find a market, and goods were freely traded both by townsfolk and people from the surrounding area. In addition to shops, this would have meant any number of impromptu stalls and carts filled with local homemade goods. A typical town would also have at the least a cobbler (or two, probably the most common non-agrarian profession), a miller, a blacksmith, and probably a brewer (and with it a public house). Larger towns would probably have had at the least tailor, butcher, tanner, barber and baker as well with a whole host of other industries based on the locality - glass blowers, potters, brick makers, fullers, chandlers, felters, haberdashers, joiners, turners, whitesmiths, brownsmiths, jewelers, dyers, painters, furriers, stave cutters, thatchers, coopers, cartwrights, and the almost innumerable host of highly specialized medieval trades that made up the cogs in medieval industry. Many or most goods would have been made on commission - the cobbler probably wouldn't have had rows of shoes in your size waiting to be bought - because that required to much invested capital, but there would likely have been at least some finished goods available. Yes, these craftsman's shops would have doubled as their homes, but they were still places of business where you could buy things.

Even the smallest medieval village was supporting remote trade in some form. Granted, it might just be wheat that would end up in the town 16 miles away after passing through the apparatus of feudal government, to become the Lord's tax, then the Baron's tax, and then sold to merchant in town for coin so that the Baron could buy goods like mail and horses from other merchants. But a close observation of the medieval economy shows it was highly international. What it wasn't was centralized, but that doesn't mean that it was actually localized. Medieval villages were largely self-sufficient, but no one village could manufacture everything it needed. Even serfs needed and could buy cooper and iron tools forged in remote locations (and thus, local smiths to repair these valuable goods). People bought and sold and always have. Trade on an transcendental scale existed even in stone age America, with Michigan copper turning up in Colorado and Colorado obsidian turning up in Michigan. And Europe's trade networks were far more advanced than that during the same period. Remember, in 1100, population and trade in Northern Europe had reached the point that Northern Europe was able to organize and mount a successful invasion of the ancient heartland of human civilization - and it did so ostensibly because it was frustrated by the barriers to trade and traffic that recent regimes in the Middle East had raised.

Let's put it this way: trade in Europe in the middle ages was so highly developed, that in the course of a single year, pilgrims to one particularly famous Cathedral hoping to see its array of relics bought 200,000 souvenir lead pins made by local casters so that they could take them home and display their piety to their neighbors. Disneyland has nothing on that sort of commercialization. It would be wrong to see the medieval world as just being a different version of the modern world. But it would be equally wrong to see it as being utterly and radically different in every way. People are people.

Well, I'm not going to argue with you. I never said that there was no trade in Medieval Europe, you've greatly exaggerated what I did say. I will restate however the point. If you went to say a town of 1000 people in Northern France in 1100 and expected to walk around and shop as if it was a shopping mall you would be utterly disappointed because it wasn't anything like that. There were nothing like retail outlets where you would go to buy things, they simply didn't exist. Yes, there were fairs, and that's WHY there were fairs, because people needed a place to exchange goods and that was how it was done.

Certainly even small villages traded, yes, but almost no cash was involved and the trade was absolutely the few extra foodstuffs that were available. The local lord collected virtually 100% of surplus production (which was in any case rarely averaging more than 3% above sustenance) and it was traded for whatever couldn't be produced locally. Again, very little coin, nothing like retail trade as we would understand it today. If a peasant had some kind of surplus then he probably bartered it directly for whatever he needed to get for it.

In any case it would be wrong to think that Western Europe was anything like as wealthy as the Middle East in that time period. Just because some, mostly unsuccessful, military expeditions were launched by the upper class in an effort to muscle in on trade doesn't mean what you are implying it does. Not all of Europe was dirt poor by any means, but don't confuse the situation in the earlier periods with later when trade and commerce had grown and changed greatly, or with that of the classical era which was quite different as well.
 

There aren't really solid sources that I could find in half an hour of research, so I agree that numbers are hard to come by. However, I see no reason to believe that late Roman vessels, which were as large and sophisticated in most respects as those of the 16th Century, required much different crew numbers. You can sale a good sized vessel with under 10 crew, put it that way.

I have no doubt that a vessel could be sailed with less than its usual complement, particularly for a short while, particularly under ideal conditions, and particularly - in the case of later warships - if you were not to put it into battle. A Frigate generally carried a complement of about 280 men, but only 20-30 made up a prize crew and as little as 10 could sail it for a short period. The extra crew allowed for greater efficiency in battle, allowed guns to be manned, provided spares in the event of sickness, death, and injury (or the need to sail captured vessels).

I've little doubt that a 40-70 ton cog could be sailed by a crew of 2-3, but I doubt that they were regularly crewed by less than twice that. By the time we get up to 100 tons for a great cog or roman grain transport, we are probably talking about a regular crew of about twice that (8-10). By the time we get up to the 200+ tons for a large hulk or roman olive oil/wine transport, we are probably talking about a regular crew of at least twice that again (16-20). Hard numbers are hard to come up with, but equivalent 16th century ships generally had crews of 20-30. The The Mayflower was 180 tons and we know that ships of its class generally carried a crew of about 30. Frankly with block and tackle the romans lacked, stern rudders the Romans lacked, and better sailing characteristics generally, I'd be surprised if the Hellenistic era ships got by with fewer crew than the later ones. That would be rather counterintuitive, because if the later ships required much higher outlays of crew for the same cargo, then it implies that efficiency is actually going down as technology improves.

In any event, the OP identified his ship as a Bermuda Sloop. On the basis of that alone, I don't feel I have to tell him anything about ship characteristics. Anyone that pulls out as an answer 'Bermuda Sloop' already has sufficient knowledge to answer the question for himself.

I never said that there was no trade in Medieval Europe, you've greatly exaggerated what I did say.

You said, "Truthfully our modern notions of trade and economics are very foreign to pre-modern times." That's a very broad statement. It's hard to know exactly what you mean by it, but you seem to mean by it that trade is a relatively recent idea. You stated for example that there would be nothing for sale at all in an average medieval village, which I think vastly underestimates the productive capacity of a medieval village or the industry and sophistication of the average cottagers. And that's at the scale of a village. You extend that notion up to the level of the medieval town!

I will restate however the point. If you went to say a town of 1000 people in Northern France in 1100 and expected to walk around and shop as if it was a shopping mall you would be utterly disappointed because it wasn't anything like that. There were nothing like retail outlets where you would go to buy things, they simply didn't exist.

Again, it's hard to know what you mean by that. You keep stating what the town wasn't like - "It wasn't like a shopping mall."- but not what the town was actually like. Of course it wasn't like a modern shopping mall, but it's hard to know what you mean by that - obviously it didn't have electric power, indoor plumbing, The Gap, air conditioning, and large parking lots for cars. But if you mean by that that towns weren't actually hubs of economic activity were lots of buying and selling and trade was going on, then I have to ask what in the world you think a town was for?

Yes, there were fairs, and that's WHY there were fairs, because people needed a place to exchange goods and that was how it was done.

Well, yes, obviously, but doesn't that just utterly undermine your point? Because if you were walking around a medieval fair, you would see lots and lots of buying and selling. In fact, most of the economic activity you'd be seeing would be what we would call wholesale trade. A local brownsmith from a village 8 miles away would be trying to buy six months worth of copper and tin from a seller who bought the stuff at a port last month from a merchant who bought the copper in France from a trader that had brought the copper from a mine in Sweden and the tin from (modern) Turkey by way of Italy. That was normal as at least as early as 1000 AD, because that's when we first start getting written records of the transactions but it was probably going on all the way through the middle ages. Local what we'd now call retail trade didn't require a big fair and would have been done in weekly markets. The whole point of a big fair is you could essentially advertise to the international traders that on a given day buyers and sellers would be getting together and it would be worth your time to come around.

Certainly even small villages traded, yes, but almost no cash...

Cash lubricates trade but it doesn't create it. If I'm an Italian merchant and I'm in England in 1000 when England is chronically cash short, I'll be perfectly happy to trade bundles of silk for bundles of English wool and work out some exchange rate between the two that profits both the buyer and seller. Barter is still trade, and still works over long distances if you have merchants that are conversant in the markets at both end points. In fact, because coin was just another commodity, failure to realize that coin was just another sort of barter often resulted in really bad trades. Ask Japan about its exchange rate between gold and silver after it opened up for trade in the 19th century. It got raped by not realizing the value on both ends of the market.

The local lord collected virtually 100% of surplus production (which was in any case rarely averaging more than 3% above sustenance)

The Doomsday Book (1086) shows that, at least for England, this was not in fact true. There are serfs listed in the Doomsday book with holdings comparable to the Manorial Lord, and we know for a fact that in some cases serfs were able to negotiate more favorable contracts with their feudal Lord by way of giving the Lord loans of cash on favorable terms. I would not by any means suggest that the serfs of Europe weren't slaves and weren't therefore subject to all the potential abuses that station could see, but it would be a mistake to imagine the serfs of the middle ages as belong to a single caste of invariably impoverished farmers. The biggest economic challenge facing a serf is that his taxes weren't based on a percentage of income, but on a fixed annual rent. Most years a serf could pay the rent with a sizable profit, particularly during the 'medieval warm period' were crop failures were rare. The problem was that rent was still due when the crops were bad. Those were the years the serfs would starve. The problem was more acute the further east you went, with the climate getting worse and the rights of the serf decreasing. But no medieval peasant was as bad off as the serfs of say 19th century Russia, where in reverse of what you say in the West serfs lost rights over time rather than gained them.

Just because some, mostly unsuccessful, military expeditions were launched...

Wait, what? The Normans and their allies ruled the Middle East for between 120 and 200 years. I would by no means classify the first Crusade (1096-1099, just before your reference year of 1100) as 'mostly unsuccessful'. Nobody in 1100 would have called the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 'mostly unsuccessful'. It was spectacularly successful, and though later crusades were increasingly less successful over time, the fact is that Northern Europe of 1100 though relatively poor was sophisticated enough to launch a combined naval and land military expedition that was considerable even by Roman standards - the equivalent of transporting 6 Roman legions by sea and launching a 3 year campaign while at same time the Franks were simultaneously routing the Moors on the Iberian peninsula. It was the most spectacularly successful military campaign since the early Islamic armies had raced across the Byzantine Empire four centuries before it, and treated at the time as a very miracle of God. It was the shot heard round the world that announced the status of Western Europe as a superpower. Hindsight that the conquest was not permanent and would end in spectacular failures some century in 1100's future shouldn't obscure that. By the time that the crusades fell apart, one city in Europe (Venice) was by itself rich enough to oppose the entirety of the Islamic world by itself while the rest of Europe went about it's affairs.

By 1100 technology had been developed or adopted in Northern Europe that had solved the historical problem of feeding oneself in the harsh climate with a short growing season. Combined with a period of relatively mild weather, this allowed for the rapid and spectacular emergence of wealth in Northern Europe which had previously been one of the world's backwaters. That technology included widespread reliance on machine power the result of the population shortage that had made traditional slavery impossible, crop rotation, deeper till iron plows, stirrups, hay and silage, sophisticated cheese making, sophisticated brewing processes, and a sophisticated trading network that had comparatively low reliance on any centralized organization. The combination of an independent trading network with mechanized production (via waterwheels and windmills) would prove to be revolutionary.

Your fundamental idea is that medieval Europe had almost no modern notion trade. The opposite is true. The modern world has an idea of trade that mostly would only be recognizable in 1100 AD in medieval Europe. (To be fair, the Moslem traders were doing something very similar in the Indian ocean.) But trade itself is so human as to occur everywhere.
 

I have no doubt that a vessel could be sailed with less than its usual complement, particularly for a short while, particularly under ideal conditions, and particularly - in the case of later warships - if you were not to put it into battle. A Frigate generally carried a complement of about 280 men, but only 20-30 made up a prize crew and as little as 10 could sail it for a short period. The extra crew allowed for greater efficiency in battle, allowed guns to be manned, provided spares in the event of sickness, death, and injury (or the need to sail captured vessels).

I've little doubt that a 40-70 ton cog could be sailed by a crew of 2-3, but I doubt that they were regularly crewed by less than twice that. By the time we get up to 100 tons for a great cog or roman grain transport, we are probably talking about a regular crew of about twice that (8-10). By the time we get up to the 200+ tons for a large hulk or roman olive oil/wine transport, we are probably talking about a regular crew of at least twice that again (16-20). Hard numbers are hard to come up with, but equivalent 16th century ships generally had crews of 20-30. The The Mayflower was 180 tons and we know that ships of its class generally carried a crew of about 30. Frankly with block and tackle the romans lacked, stern rudders the Romans lacked, and better sailing characteristics generally, I'd be surprised if the Hellenistic era ships got by with fewer crew than the later ones. That would be rather counterintuitive, because if the later ships required much higher outlays of crew for the same cargo, then it implies that efficiency is actually going down as technology improves.

In any event, the OP identified his ship as a Bermuda Sloop. On the basis of that alone, I don't feel I have to tell him anything about ship characteristics. Anyone that pulls out as an answer 'Bermuda Sloop' already has sufficient knowledge to answer the question for himself.
Yeah, I think your answer is as good as mine frankly. It is surprisingly difficult to come up with any sort of solid information on this kind of thing for the classical period, that's for sure.

You said, "Truthfully our modern notions of trade and economics are very foreign to pre-modern times." That's a very broad statement. It's hard to know exactly what you mean by it, but you seem to mean by it that trade is a relatively recent idea. You stated for example that there would be nothing for sale at all in an average medieval village, which I think vastly underestimates the productive capacity of a medieval village or the industry and sophistication of the average cottagers. And that's at the scale of a village. You extend that notion up to the level of the medieval town!
I don't think it would be literally impossible to purchase any sort of goods. As you pointed out there is almost surely some sort of ale house, probably some level of provision for paying coin for a place to sleep, perhaps an Inn depending on the exact place and time, certainly a modest town will presumably sport some sort of inn unless its in a terribly remote area.

Again, it's hard to know what you mean by that. You keep stating what the town wasn't like - "It wasn't like a shopping mall."- but not what the town was actually like. Of course it wasn't like a modern shopping mall, but it's hard to know what you mean by that - obviously it didn't have electric power, indoor plumbing, The Gap, air conditioning, and large parking lots for cars. But if you mean by that that towns weren't actually hubs of economic activity were lots of buying and selling and trade was going on, then I have to ask what in the world you think a town was for?
Towns had a number of functions, of course including commerce. They served as administrative centers for one thing. You are being a bit obtuse though with this "are you talking about electricity" sort of silliness. What medieval commerce generally lacked was the notion of retail merchandising such as what we have today, or anything close to it. First of all people acquired a lot of things in the form of materials, which they used themselves, or only purchased a very little of specific things (you might buy buttons, but you probably wove and sewed your own clothing, and if you bought cloth it was cloth, not clothing unless you were quite wealthy). Remember how materially poor people were in these times. The King of France had his bed transported in his baggage train from place to place in this time period because there was only one such bed that he could afford to own! If you wanted things in a town you went to the fair (which was in 1100 probably twice a year and maybe not even in your town) or market (for ordinary goods you didn't make yourself) or you went to the guy that produced something and ordered it. If you were lucky he had some on hand. Otherwise if you were out in the boonies then some peddler came buy now and then.

Well, yes, obviously, but doesn't that just utterly undermine your point? Because if you were walking around a medieval fair, you would see lots and lots of buying and selling. In fact, most of the economic activity you'd be seeing would be what we would call wholesale trade. A local brownsmith from a village 8 miles away would be trying to buy six months worth of copper and tin from a seller who bought the stuff at a port last month from a merchant who bought the copper in France from a trader that had brought the copper from a mine in Sweden and the tin from (modern) Turkey by way of Italy. That was normal as at least as early as 1000 AD, because that's when we first start getting written records of the transactions but it was probably going on all the way through the middle ages. Local what we'd now call retail trade didn't require a big fair and would have been done in weekly markets. The whole point of a big fair is you could essentially advertise to the international traders that on a given day buyers and sellers would be getting together and it would be worth your time to come around.
I think I'm failing to convey my point well because that's not what I'm talking about. Commonly in D&D you will see GM's inventing towns full of shops where people sell things for coin. That concept is as much out of place in a medieval town, certainly in 1100 AD, as a Roman bath house would be out of place in 21st Century New York City. That doesn't mean there was no commerce or trade.

Cash lubricates trade but it doesn't create it. If I'm an Italian merchant and I'm in England in 1000 when England is chronically cash short, I'll be perfectly happy to trade bundles of silk for bundles of English wool and work out some exchange rate between the two that profits both the buyer and seller. Barter is still trade, and still works over long distances if you have merchants that are conversant in the markets at both end points. In fact, because coin was just another commodity, failure to realize that coin was just another sort of barter often resulted in really bad trades. Ask Japan about its exchange rate between gold and silver after it opened up for trade in the 19th century. It got raped by not realizing the value on both ends of the market.
Of course barter works, though truthfully there were fairly sophisticated credit arrangements available even in the year 1000. That's what the Hanse was all about really.

The Doomsday Book (1086) shows that, at least for England, this was not in fact true. There are serfs listed in the Doomsday book with holdings comparable to the Manorial Lord, and we know for a fact that in some cases serfs were able to negotiate more favorable contracts with their feudal Lord by way of giving the Lord loans of cash on favorable terms.
Well, I said 'peasant'. Presumably the term 'serf' as it is normally understood describes people in bondage to the land. They might have had some meager wealth, but yes there were Cottars and Villeins and etc. They certainly were not dealing with much cash though, in general. Of course there are always people who are exceptional. Again, its just a common misconception amongst modern people that there would be any kind of cash economy. There was a very elaborate system of tenancy, work obligations, etc which took care of the vast majority of obligations between people in communities. The point being that certainly in smaller communities, it would be hard to come in with cash and buy things. Most things were accounted for, and while you might sell a bit of something and hand some cash over to who you owed the thing to it wasn't the normal way things were handled.

I would not by any means suggest that the serfs of Europe weren't slaves and weren't therefore subject to all the potential abuses that station could see, but it would be a mistake to imagine the serfs of the middle ages as belong to a single caste of invariably impoverished farmers. The biggest economic challenge facing a serf is that his taxes weren't based on a percentage of income, but on a fixed annual rent. Most years a serf could pay the rent with a sizable profit, particularly during the 'medieval warm period' were crop failures were rare. The problem was that rent was still due when the crops were bad. Those were the years the serfs would starve. The problem was more acute the further east you went, with the climate getting worse and the rights of the serf decreasing. But no medieval peasant was as bad off as the serfs of say 19th century Russia, where in reverse of what you say in the West serfs lost rights over time rather than gained them.
I'm not disagreeing with you here. The point I made was that the average return on your work in agriculture in 1100 was about 103% of sustenance. For every 100 serfs you could feed about 3 people beyond them. In good times it could easily be 150%, and in bad times it could easily be 20%, which is when people starved.

Wait, what? The Normans and their allies ruled the Middle East for between 120 and 200 years. I would by no means classify the first Crusade (1096-1099, just before your reference year of 1100) as 'mostly unsuccessful'. Nobody in 1100 would have called the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 'mostly unsuccessful'. It was spectacularly successful, and though later crusades were increasingly less successful over time, the fact is that Northern Europe of 1100 though relatively poor was sophisticated enough to launch a combined naval and land military expedition that was considerable even by Roman standards - the equivalent of transporting 6 Roman legions by sea and launching a 3 year campaign while at same time the Franks were simultaneously routing the Moors on the Iberian peninsula. It was the most spectacularly successful military campaign since the early Islamic armies had raced across the Byzantine Empire four centuries before it, and treated at the time as a very miracle of God. It was the shot heard round the world that announced the status of Western Europe as a superpower. Hindsight that the conquest was not permanent and would end in spectacular failures some century in 1100's future shouldn't obscure that. By the time that the crusades fell apart, one city in Europe (Venice) was by itself rich enough to oppose the entirety of the Islamic world by itself while the rest of Europe went about it's affairs.
What did they capture? A couple of very small territories on the coast of Palestine and inland 40 miles to Jerusalem, plus some other small coastal enclaves, all of which were reduced by Saladin etc within a generation. The entire military might of Europe made only that much dent, and then only on a very disunited Islamic world that barely bothered to resist. Yes, significant manpower was raised at first and some gains were made. Nobody is disputing the historical significance either, though it was far more significant in Europe as a wake-up call to how backwards they were than anything else.

By 1100 technology had been developed or adopted in Northern Europe that had solved the historical problem of feeding oneself in the harsh climate with a short growing season. Combined with a period of relatively mild weather, this allowed for the rapid and spectacular emergence of wealth in Northern Europe which had previously been one of the world's backwaters. That technology included widespread reliance on machine power the result of the population shortage that had made traditional slavery impossible, crop rotation, deeper till iron plows, stirrups, hay and silage, sophisticated cheese making, sophisticated brewing processes, and a sophisticated trading network that had comparatively low reliance on any centralized organization. The combination of an independent trading network with mechanized production (via waterwheels and windmills) would prove to be revolutionary.
I think you may be projecting 200 years ahead, which is why I haven't talked about 1300, a rather different time period overall, though some of the same observations might apply to a much lesser extent.

Your fundamental idea is that medieval Europe had almost no modern notion trade. The opposite is true. The modern world has an idea of trade that mostly would only be recognizable in 1100 AD in medieval Europe. (To be fair, the Moslem traders were doing something very similar in the Indian ocean.) But trade itself is so human as to occur everywhere.

Of course trade occurs everywhere. Again, I seem to have conveyed my point poorly. What you don't see in 1100 AD in Europe is the kind of retail merchantile activity that we take for granted today. It was pretty much ENTIRELY absent. The idea of a 'shop' as a retailer of goods simply did not exist in that time and place. Its a very common misconception that is certainly built into the assumptions of D&D generally. If you were to go to hire people or buy the types of goods that PCs regularly try to buy in a medieval European setting you'd find out very quickly that you can't buy labor for coin without all sorts of hoops and obstacles, that you can't just go in and buy ropes and food and other similar goods with coin, etc. You could get those things, but it would take time and require requisitioning them ahead. Arms and armor, good luck. Owning a sword anywhere in those days was highly unusual and trying to buy such things would get you in trouble as fast as trying to buy a machine gun and some hand grenades would here in the US today.
 

What medieval commerce generally lacked was the notion of retail merchandising such as what we have today, or anything close to it.

Whether I'm being obtuse or not, you still aren't telling me what you mean by that. The modern retail industry has all sorts of features that wouldn't be found in the 12th century of course, but that doesn't mean that the people living in the 12th century had no notion of retail goods, trade, and purchases. Perhaps you could tell me what they did have, and it would save trouble of me guessing what you mean. So far you've only tried to explain yourself by telling me that they weren't as wealthy as we are, but being as wealthy as we are now is not a precondition for understanding retail sales. And you've tried to explain yourself by saying that since they were cash poor, most things were bought with labor or other things - which while certainly true, still doesn't preclude the idea of retail sales.

I think you may be projecting 200 years ahead, which is why I haven't talked about 1300, a rather different time period overall, though some of the same observations might apply to a much lesser extent.

The Cistercians were founded in 1098. By 1130, Europe was in an industrial revolution. But the agricultural revolution that set the stage for that had already happened. Somewhere in those Dark Ages, Europe invented a bunch of things that are so basic that we don't even imagine that they had to be invented. Rome for example had no hay. In Mediterranean climes, you simply changed your pastures in winter and grazed your animals year round. The agricultural revolution that occurred in the dark was a precursor to the industrial revolution that was to come, and without it, the later wouldn't have been possible. Your 3% surplus figure is something I can't quibble with, because I haven't the data, but doesn't strike me as a number I'd associate with 1100. I think it's far easier to under estimate how sophisticated medieval Europe is than over estimate it, given the stereotyping tends to be all in one direction.

Commonly in D&D you will see GM's inventing towns full of shops where people sell things for coin...That doesn't mean there was no commerce or trade.

Let me take a wild stab at where I think you are coming from. In B2 Keep on the Borderlands, there are a number of shops of various sorts catering to the mercenaries which are passing through the area. One of them is a 'General Store' which has every sort of good lying around 'in stock' and in large quantities. This sort of store is I think much more in place in the 19th century American frontier, where goods can be requisitioned in mass quantities from industrial centers elsewhere and transported to less urban centers than it is I think period for the equivalent 12th century frontier, and I think it is this sort of store (and arguably this very store) that becomes the type for what stores are like in a fantasy setting when in fact, a real medieval shop was basically some ones combined home and workspace and they tended to be more like the ludicrously narrow joke stores of humor: "Ye Old Spatula Shoppe: We Sell Spatula's; And that's all", or maybe more to the point, "We'll make a spatula while you wait." Pretty much every shop was in a sense also a factory outlet. Heck, every home was in a certain sense a small factory. England was churning out enormous quantities of wool thread and filling up boats and barges with it without having anything like a factory where people went to work anywhere.

But even the claim that there were no 'general stores' is a simplification, because only the very largest towns would have the capacity under such a system to produce goods of various types or to employ craftsman of every type full time. To address this, towns had markets of various sizes at various intervals where goods of many different types could be aggregated and wandering craftsman could find work. A marketplace - especially one that becomes so frequent that its shops become permanent features - is in a sense very much like a mall.

And even that is a bit of a simplification, because by the 11th century you have in most towns a 'Mercer' who aside from his main trade in bolts of cloth from as far away as China, you find inventories of various non-locally produced durable goods of all sorts of types, and likewise Haberdashers selling in addition to their main trade in buttons, clasps, pins and sewing accouterments all sorts of small items. The importance of these retail merchants who weren't actually selling anything they made themselves is easily seen from the fact that London's "Worshipful Company of Mercers" is first in rank among all the trade guilds of London.

When you go so far as to suggest that there aren't shops engaged in retail trade in towns in 1100, I have no real clear idea what you mean.
 
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Sorry, I think if you want to continue this discussion its probably better to create a thread. I think we derailed this one enough! Its an interesting discussion, but this isn't the place for it.
 

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