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 feast
18 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 societies
21 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.
acoup.blog
