AD&D 1E What is the cost of one night at an Inn?

[John R Davis]

I meant peek, as in have a look!

 

[AlexofBarbaria]

I build the economy up from wages.

So like @haakon1 I build my assumptions about prices from wages.
[snip]
1 sp to a day's wages allows for all sorts of extrapolation regarding prices, including doing something like 1 sp = $75 worth of largely handmade goods or services in 2025.

I'll note that you can't derive prices directly from wages unless you make assumptions about purchasing power. The purchasing power of an unskilled laborer varied in the Middle Ages, most dramatically before and after the Black Death, which boosted wages 2-3x due to a massive labor shortage. But even in that period, they had less purchasing power than today.

With $75 today one could buy 30 or 40 loaves of bread. As best I can tell, in the late 1300s (post-Black Death) a laborer earned around 3 pence/day, and the price of a loaf of bread was ~1/4 pence (a "farthing loaf"), giving them a purchasing power of 12/day.

If we go with 1 sp/day as a laborer's wage (which I like, as it matches the silver piece to the common groat/grosso/groschen silver coin worth 3-4 pence),1 sp = $25 seems a better figure to match their purchasing power to the Late Middle Ages.

 

[Celebrim]

I'll note that you can't derive prices directly from wages unless you make assumptions about purchasing power. The purchasing power of an unskilled laborer varied in the Middle Ages, most dramatically before and after the Black Death, which boosted wages 2-3x due to a massive labor shortage. But even in that period, they had less purchasing power than today.

With $75 today one could buy 30 or 40 loaves of bread. As best I can tell, in the late 1300s (post-Black Death) a laborer earned around 3 pence/day, and the price of a loaf of bread was ~1/4 pence (a "farthing loaf"), giving them a purchasing power of 12/day.

If we go with 1 sp/day as a laborer's wage (which I like, as it matches the silver piece to the common groat/grosso/groschen silver coin worth 3-4 pence),1 sp = $25 seems a better figure to match their purchasing power to the Late Middle Ages.

You make a good point, and one I was aware of but only addressed indirectly.

So the problem with trying to use purchasing power is it is skewed by industrialization. If you want to get price equivalents, you generally need to use the closest to non-industrial goods you can manage. So, one of the biggest shocks will be the price of clothing. You have to price clothing close to the price of hand tailored clothes, not machine-made clothes. Likewise, for bread, you have to use something close to handmade bakery loaves, not mass-produced grocery store bread. You will note that "artisanal" bread loves come in closer to the $7 to $8 a loaf range, and that will match right up with your calculations. Heck, depending on the grocery store loaf and brand, a better quality loaf can run you $6.75. Handmade furniture works out pretty well. So does for example handmade fight quality armor pieces or weapons, handmade leather saddles, and so forth.

Of course, none of this is perfect, and there are a lot of things that don't translate well, and all of it even the stuff that does work out tends to work out because there are a variety of competing factors that more or less average out.

But as long as you avoid using any sort of cheap manufactured good as a basis of pricing, you'll be surprisingly close and probably much closer than the prices in a typical price list.