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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6512672" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.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.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.</blockquote>

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