tavern prices

[TerraDave]

This isn't what you are looking for?

Choice venison, mutton, poached salmon, trout stuffed with
specially prepared mixtures, goose roasted to a golden brown,
pork, steaming sausages, steak and kidney pie with mushrooms
or truffles, squab stuffed pheasant, and boiled crayfish in drawn
butter are just a few of the epicurian delights which are expected
and sewed here. The locally brewed ale and beer is supple
mented by brews from other places, and wine, mead and brandy
from all over the Flanaess make their way to the boards of the
Welcome Wench.

Prices are:

Breakfast, plain 5 c.p.
Breakfast, elaborate 2 s.p.
Dinner, plain 5 s.p.
Dinner, elaborate 1 e.p.
Dinner, 7 course 2 g.p.
Supper, plain 3 s.p.
Supper, elaborate 7 s.p.
Beer, small, pint 5 c.p.
Beer, heavy, pint 1 s.p.
Ale, pint 2 s.p.
Ale, special, pint 1 e.p.
Mead, pint 1 e.p.
Mead, special brew, pint 15 s.p.
Wine, table, pint 1 e.p.
Wine, Keoish golden, pint 15 s.p.
Wine, Urnst white, pint 1 9.P.
Wine, Celene ruby, pint 2 S.P.
Wine, Sundish lilac, pint 5 e.p.
Wine, Furyondian emerald pale, pint 4 g.p.
Wine, Velunan fireamber, pint 1 P.P.
Brandy, local, gill 1 e.p.
Brandy, Keoish, gill 1 S.P.
Brandy, Urnst, aged special, gill 3 g.p.
Ulek Elixir liqueur, half gill 5 S.P.

Meals are sewed on pottery or pewter or copper services
according to the order. Various leather jacks, pottery mugs,
wooden tankards, pewter steins, glass flagons, crystal goblets, or
silver chalices are used for potables.

 

[Umbran]

im DMing gor people how actualy cares about how much a pie would cost

A la carte dining is, as I understand it, a relatively modern invention. Your typical tavern wouldn't be charging for individual items, but would more probably go "room an grub, X siver pieces" and leave it at that.

I'm a fan of the upkeep system. When compared to having more time to slay dragons, orcs, and tax collectors, bookkeeping down to the copper piece seems to me a boring way to spend game time.

 

[Celebrim]

Ah, no. Six days, no working on the sabbath. (Unless it was absolutely neccessary.) And working on the Lord's land was usually between two and four days.

The plight of the medieval peasant, while certainly not great, was - at least in the Western countries - not that bad. They worked six days a week, but they could not be worked on the Sabbath and by tradition and right could take off all feasts days of the church - not merely just Easter, All-Saints, and Christmas but something like 80-120 days a year depending on the customs of the region. In a sense, they probably had more rights to a vacation than you or I have. In harvest, they'd work 16 hour days its true, but so do farmers everywhere even today. In the winter work would come to basically a stop, and other than 3-4 hours of chores a day the big problem was staying warm and seeing in the dark.

The manorial system was a form of slavery, but it was both less brutal than many of the slave systems it had replaced, less brutal than the plight faced elsewhere in the world (though the land was harder), and less brutal than the explicitly racial slavery that would come after it. Serfs had rights, and while they lacked much power they had a force of tradition and religion protecting them. If you read the doomsday book, one thing you will be struck by is how well to do some of the 'slaves' were. They had businesses, they had assets, they for all practical purposes had land, they had livestock, and had obtained various 'rights' which ammounted to basically business transactions with thier Lord. In some cases you have really unexpected things like the land and property being held in the woman's name because she was a higher caste serf than the husband.

My point is not that it was some sort of idealic system, but rather that the truth of it was far more complicated in practice than any blanket statement you could make.

 

[rossik]

When compared to having more time to slay dragons, orcs, and tax collectors, bookkeeping down to the copper piece seems to me a boring way to spend game time.

well...they like

since they are low level pcs, and new gamers, every single dead body have to be searched (even animals )

 

[Thunderfoot]

Ah, no. Six days, no working on the sabbath. (Unless it was absolutely neccessary.) And working on the Lord's land was usually between two and four days.
<SNIP>

Peasants were not freemen, they worked on the Sabbath as well otherwise, they didn';t have time to raise crops for themselves, as did slaves before they were outawed by Feudal law (only to be reinstated later). Feudal practice and Feudal law parted company in this instance. While a peasant could not be forced to work on the Sabbath they were required to work the land of the lease holder on which they lived, this land was the best land (usually) and even the firstfruits of the land parceled to the peasant was usually required as payment (and usually all the tools and equipment was leased from the land owner as well). So a peasant had a plot of land to grow food for his family and make a little extra for market day; the land was usually poor and the time able to be spent working it 2 of the 6 work days, any farmer will tell you, that isn't enough, so day 7 was spent working as well. By law, they weren't required to do it, true, but in practice, it was either that or starve.

 

[Thunderfoot]

Celebrim, your sources and information are quite good; I am impressed. *bows*
As to the 'nine days old', I was unclear and do beg forgivness, usually the whole pot did not last nine days, but new was usually added to the remnants of the old (at least according to a few surviving texts). Kind of a Medieval equivalant of cassaroles. /BTW for you Hungarians out there, that was how gulosh (I know I spelled that wrong) came about, giving rise to the western favorite...stew (which had nothing to do with actual stewing of the time)./

History is fun and wonderful, I love it with a passion, and the contradictions just make it all that more interesting. As for the nuserey rhymes, a lot of them have been found to have historical basis and quite a bit of truth if you dig far enough (but that's a different thread).

 

[Celebrim]

Thunderfoot: No need to apologize. We all get told something at some point or the other that we take for truth, and then find things are more complicated than that (or sometimes even more simple) later. I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about the middle ages for about 30 years.

There are two things I would caution you on. First, alot of the Reinnasance through Early Modern sources on the Medieval period are not to be trusted. The Reinnasance writers were 'counter culturists', and they wanted to portray themselves in as fine of light as possible, and do that they wanted to portray the proceeding culture as being as backwards, ignorant, and brutal as possible. Alot of our notion of the middle ages as 'dark ages' comes in part from what is essentially the propaganda of that day. The real dark ages as such were over by the time you get to what we think of as the middle ages. There was nothing particularly dark about 12th or 13th century Europe - plenty of writing and learning were going on.

Secondly, don't confuse Serfdom in the middle ages for the 'second serfdom' of the modern period, which really was just the return of slavery. For example, in Poland - were serfdom reached a degree of harshness that probably equalled just about anywhere - in the middle ages serfs started out needing to work thier lords land less than one day a week. By the 18th century, pretty much all the land was the lord's land, the serfs were required to work it six days a week, and they were in no better economic conditions (and maybe even worse) than black slaves in America. Basically what I'm saying is that if a serf doesn't have any significant land of his own usury to farm, then he's not really a serf.

Now, if you like contridictions and ever want a really funny (or really tragic) story about economics in the middle ages, you need to research how Karl Marx misenterpreted economic data from the Middle Ages to create his theory of communism. True story, the economic theory of communism was based on the trade monopolies of the late medieval and early reinnasance trade guilds, which looking back we might consider to be the exact opposite of communism - namely virtually unrestricted merchantile power in the hands of a corporation. But if I go any farther, people are going to accuse me of discussing politics.