# The price of a horse.



## Antonlowe (Apr 3, 2017)

How much do you think a horse should cost? I am talking about a regular riding/work horse. Not one trained for battle or a race horse.

I am assuming that a commoner makes about 12.5cp per day of economic output. 7cp gets taxed in most locations. It requires 5cp to live at a subsistence level.

I was thinking that a horse would be worth about a month’s worth of untaxed income which would make it worth 375cp.

Does this sound reasonable.


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## pdzoch (Apr 3, 2017)

Ultimately, you can set the prices as you see fit in your campaign.  Prices are going to be dependent on availability and demand.  The price of a riding horse is provided in the player's manual, but you are not beholding to those prices.  Given a 75gp price of a riding horse in the player's manual, a 375cp horse does not sound unreasonable if it is not intended to for anything other than light work (a pet horse, older horse, etc).  However, in a medieval setting, or in a high fantasy setting, owning a horse set the upper class apart from the common folk.  Any horse a common person own was probably low quality and not desirable by a noble or hero.  I would guess prices for a horse in the player's handbook would be for a hero worthy horse and not the common nag.


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## Eltab (Apr 4, 2017)

If you think a horse is too pricey for your peasants, remember that they would often combine their efforts: Jack buys a horse, Fred buys a plow, John buys a thresher, Widow Sal plants nothing but oats, &c., and everybody gets together (with their equipment) to work all their fields.  In the end, somebody or other has every piece needed to make the whole thing work.


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## Man in the Funny Hat (Apr 4, 2017)

Antonlowe said:


> How much do you think a horse should cost?



One Kingdom, according to "Wild" BIll S.


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## Random Bystander (Apr 5, 2017)

Rather than a horse, it would be more likely they would own an *ox. Or, rather, as has been pointed out, that they would own some share or portion of said animal.

A peasant's life has been unduly portrayed as endlessly depressing in fiction. The average peasant, presuming they **survived to adulthood, would be far more likely to die of old age than anything else; at a ripe old age of 70 to 75. Furthermore, there were a number of ^feasts, ^festivities, and ^games each year. Nor would a typical peasant wear muddy greys and browns. Certain dyes were reserved for royalty and the rich; but plenty of dyes weren't, and ^^embroidery was a well-known and widely-practised art. People didn't always bath often, but that was because, while you could argue that dirt made you more likely to get sick, everyone knew that freezing in the wintertime made it more likely for you to get dead. And you needed that firewood to keep your house warm. In the summertime, there were streams and rivers if you wanted to get the sweat and dirt off, which people would regularly take advantage of.

* A domestic bull, raised and bred for work rather than food, and possibly gelded. The plural is "oxen", not "oxes"; a statement which also occurs in a famous silly poem about English spelling. And at this point, there may be approximately two and a half items of TMI, and here we have one proverbial lampshade.

** The major problem here being surviving childhood illnesses long enough to develop a robust immune system; so, if one made it to about twelve, one was most likely "in the clear".

^ A typical use for a feast would be to get rid of all the food that was closing in on its due date. That being said, smoked and salted meat can keep for a long time, and it is most likely proper to regard with dubiousness any claim that medieval people regularly ate rotten meat. The average peasant used about 45 kg of salt per year, far more than would be needed for table salt. Festivities would generally occur on holy days and various other events people felt like commemorating, such as marriages and historical events. Games included various forms of ball-and-goal played against nearby villages, and were typically quite brutal. To the point that the Catholic Church made particular appeals to keep the violence down and enacted limited bans; the most notorious other such appeals being _jousting_ and the _use of crossbows_.

^^ If, at any point, you enter a fantasy or medieval world and desire to sell your clothes off, do not expect the locals to be that impressed with your factory-made clothes. Yes, the threads are quite densely packed...On some clothes. However, the dye job is most likely one that will quickly flake away; the clothes themselves are relatively thin; and the embroidery is non-existent. You would be much better off selling the idea of a zipper...Carefully. Accidents can happen. A factory means you can pay for a new shirt with the equivalent of two good meals at an "inn"... It also means you still get what you pay for. My apologies for any upset.

ps: ...And my apologies for the info-dump; it seemed useful to address some info around the general idea of peasant livelyhood and welfare.


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## Capn Charlie (Apr 5, 2017)

How rich is the common man?  Depending on the era a horse could cost a month or twos wages, or a year or more.  

When I was doing research for my gritty game I repriced them to be closer to historic prices where a stonemasons apprentice earns two silver pence a day and might spend one of them on a poor lifestyle and a horse costs 320 of these silver pence.

Sent from my MT2L03 using EN World mobile app


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## aramis erak (Apr 5, 2017)

Antonlowe said:


> How much do you think a horse should cost? I am talking about a regular riding/work horse. Not one trained for battle or a race horse.
> 
> I am assuming that a commoner makes about 12.5cp per day of economic output. 7cp gets taxed in most locations. It requires 5cp to live at a subsistence level.
> 
> ...




Historically, the horses on a manor-fief were generally worth more each than the manor itself was.

A good horse is a 15+ year investment, and are priced as such. Also, in most places, a commoner couldn't own nor ride a horse legally; they used oxen for carts and blow pulling, and walked or rode carts. A cheap horse was 2-3 £ in the Domesday survey; a well bred warhorse in desirable colors about 100£ ... and the D&D GP is about 1 shilling of value of the Domesday survey era... so call it a range of 30 gp to 2000 gp.


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## Random Bystander (Apr 5, 2017)

aramis erak said:


> Historically, the horses on a manor-fief were generally worth more each than the manor itself was.
> 
> A good horse is a 15+ year investment, and are priced as such. Also, in most places, a commoner couldn't own nor ride a horse legally; they used oxen for carts and blow pulling, and walked or rode carts. A cheap horse was 2-3 £ in the Domesday survey; a well bred warhorse in desirable colors about 100£ ... and the D&D GP is about 1 shilling of value of the Domesday survey era... so call it a range of 30 gp to 2000 gp.



In the d20 System era, *at least, the cost of "adventuring gear" is **inflated by about 20 times. Given that probably-viable divisor, a galley (large medieval warship) has a price of 1,500 "gold pieces".

This is reasonably in line with a peacetime crown revenue of 30,000 gold pieces.

As a side note, and not meant to be snide,  Dungeons and Dragons in general should not be used as an accurate source of: Coinage, earnings, weapon and armour weights, prices for any item, sizes and shapes of weapons or armour; types of armour, and for certain editions, types of weapons. Certain exceptions include the d20 System version by dividing "adventuring gear" prices by 20; that same system for weapon and armour weights with the assumption that one-quarter to one-half of the weight of the weapon is an appropriate sheath or storage; and a fairly robust ability of even peasants to make a living, including using the rules in the DMG 2, provided one first divides those monetary numbers by 20, as they are intended for higher-level adventurers who want a stable base. Of course, Dungeons and Dragons has other things it is unrealistic about, but I intend to inform, not insult. 

* Other eras also have this effect, but possibly or probably to different ratios.

** As posted by someone (apologies; I do not remember who) in a news thread on this forum, where someone posted a medieval price list. I then did some math to check this assertation, and found it reasonably sound. Checking my bookmarks...

The site linked to in the ENWorld news post: http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medprice.htm

Checking my history reveals that I probably could easily find the item, if Firefox' history search had more utility - I can find the linked site, and the ENWorld post is most likely close to it; but that does not actually help find the ENWorld post.


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## Lwaxy (Apr 5, 2017)

Also remember, no prices are ever set. People haggle, especially about horses


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## Random Bystander (Apr 5, 2017)

Lwaxy said:


> Also remember, no prices are ever set. People haggle, especially about horses



For some things, I think there may have been fixed prices; although I have no actual data to back this up.

It simply passes the "common sense" check; for example, given an inn, the proprietor would most likely not want to barter over every bowl of potato and onion soup. 

Of course, having no actual data is an easy way to be wrong.


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## aramis erak (Apr 5, 2017)

Gygax grabbed his prices from domesday survey and a few other period sources. Most people put things in D&D coinage modes.

Note that a typical 1 shilling coin was the gold penny... gp. Tho' sometimes it hit as high as 20 d worth.

(The English gold penny was about 10-12 kt... )

D&D coinage was decimalized, but roughly:
1 cp = halffathing (1/8 d. - but the coinweight would be worth 1/10 that...)
1 sp = silver penny - baseline coin. also called the _denarius_, abbreviated d.
1 gp = gold penny at lowest values... roughly a shilling (12 d.)

Using 10th to 12th century sources, the conversion from libra (240 d.) to shillings (12 d) should be x20 

Medieval specie values typically are about 1:15:1000 for gold:silver:copper.


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## Random Bystander (Apr 5, 2017)

aramis erak said:


> Gygax grabbed his prices from domesday survey and a few other period sources. Most people put things in D&D coinage modes.
> 
> Note that a typical 1 shilling coin was the gold penny... gp. Tho' sometimes it hit as high as 20 d worth.
> 
> ...





			
				https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shilling_(British_coin) said:
			
		

> The shilling (1/-) was a coin worth one twentieth of a pound sterling, or twelve pence. It was first minted in the reign of Henry VII as the testoon, and became known as the shilling from the Old English scilling,[1] sometime in the mid-sixteenth century, circulating until 1990. The word bob was sometimes used for a monetary value of several shillings, e.g. "ten bob note". Following decimalisation in 1970 the coin had a value of five new pence. It was made from silver from its introduction in or around 1503 until 1947, and thereafter in cupronickel.



Most sources of information on the medieval age are wrong, I am sorry to say. Sometimes grossly so.

It is possible that it is Wikipedia that is wrong in this case, but as far as I know, external testing has validated Wikipedia's factual accuracy in the sciences.


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## Brandegoris (Apr 6, 2017)

Setting is important too. if it is an Asian setting Horses are very rare and expensive( even riding horses). Also if you are simply doing standard European setting a WARHORSE is ridiculously expensive. losing a warhorse could ruin a knight because they were so expensive to replace. 
Sometimes I also think of it in terms of modern day: A Riding Horse should cost relatively whatever it costs someone today to buy an Automobile? 
So a year of wages wouldn't be outlandish ( maybe more for a really nice horse)?


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## raleel (Apr 6, 2017)

Mythras has a Freeman's yearly income as somewhere between 750-3750 silver pieces, and a riding horse is 2500 for a reasonable quality one. Poor quality is half that, and draft horses are a bit more than riding.  

Potentially. Quite pricey


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## Celebrim (Apr 6, 2017)

There are several things to consider.

1) Not all horses were created equal.  Are we talking a nag suitable only for pulling carts and destined in not too long for the knacker's block, a draft horse for the plow, a lady's riding palfrey, a good quality rounser, a courser for use in battle, or a knight's well breed drestier for use in tournaments?  Prices could be very different depending on what we were talking about.  Talking about the price of a horse even today is problematic, and it was even more so in the medieval era.  It would be like assuming that a Honda Civic and a Ferrari have the same customer base and prices.  
2) It's also worth noting that recorded prices of goods are fairly rare, and so most compiled lists you see have prices covering a span of centuries.  Well, inflation and deflation aren't strictly modern phenomena, and in particular were effected by the local availability of 'coin' - silver and gold.  The general trend though was perhaps 50% inflation per century, so prices always have to be compared to the local prevailing wages to determine prices in terms of constant units.   Even this can be misleading, because industrialization throughout the period changed which jobs were considered 'high skill' or 'high demand', meaning that it's hard to look at any one profession and determine overall trend lines in wages.  
3) To make matters worse, you are seeing all of this filtered through the lens of D&D, which has infamously maintained two separate price lists basically since the Gygax era - a 'realistic' price list for NPCs and a 'gamist' price list for PC's designed to drain off wealth and keep acquisitions in balance.  The realistic price list - taxation, wages for non-expert hirlings, costs of non-adventuring gear - tends to be prices in silver pieces based off historical data.   The gamist price list - adventuring gear, cost of lairs, costs of expert hirlings - tends to be based off of gold pieces and set by game considerations.   So when you try to answer, "What should a horse cost?", you are trying to translate for one economy (the NPC economy) to the other (the PC economy).  

We could go really deep into medieval economics to try to answer that question, but I personally have found that in the long run that's impractical.  It also ignores that most D&D world's aren't remotely medieval and have access to highly advanced technology that would totally change medieval economics.   This is true regardless of how medieval your trappings get - consider the available 'health care' technology of a D&D world, or the available technology implied by all those mechanical traps found in dungeons, or what a druid implies about agricultural technology, and so on and so forth.   Essentially the D&D world is a world where all the medieval understanding of 'physics', medicine, chemistry and so forth is basically true.  

Instead, what I find is a more useful method is to note that the price of produce, livestock, hand made goods, and really anything that isn't directly manufactured by machines is reasonably constant over time to within an acceptable degree (certainly within the margin created by the assumption magic is real and effective).   So what you can do is take the price of a cow or a horse or a hand tooled leather saddle or jewelry on etsy or Amish made furniture whatever it that you are looking at, and divide that price by some assumption about wealth (ordinary people make the equivalent of $50 a day give or take depending on how wealthy you want your society to be), and produce a price in 'day wages' for the item.  You can then make a simple assumption about what a day's wages are - 1 silver piece for example - to produce a price.   

This works really well across the board IME any time you need a price quickly (and have Google to hand), and the only thing you have to do is introduce a multiplier of some sort (x3 works pretty well) if you suspect the price is suppressed by some industrial factor.   For example, you can assume fight grade plate mail is worth perhaps 1/3rd of what it once costed because while most is still handmade, the cost of steel itself is greatly reduced because it can be made in an industrial fashion very cheaply.   So, you might notice a handmade steel helmet runs $200-$1000 dollars on ebay, and translate this quickly to 12 s.p. - 60 s.p.   And you might quickly compute that this means that it probably took a medieval craftsman 4-15 days to make it by assuming he's earning about 3 s.p. a day.   Will you be wrong?   Almost certainly!  But you won't be that wrong, and you certainly won't be as wrong as I've seen some people be either relying on D&D prices or trying to reconstruct the whole of a medieval economy based on scant and often erroneous evidence.

Doing this for horses, I'm seeing horses in D&D's 'riding horse' to 'light warhorse' category running between $1000 and $6000.  That translate to 40-120 days wages under my simple conversion, and which is 40-120 s.p. under my other simple conversion (or 40-120 g.p. for most tables, since most tables use "treasure is in gold" standards).   Am I spot on correct?  Probably not.  Do I care?  Not really.  I'm close enough.   By the same standards, I figure a PC will spend about 10-20 s.p. a month in upkeep for the horse, unless he owns his own good pasture land and doesn't do a lot of travelling.


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## Celebrim (Apr 6, 2017)

Antonlowe said:


> How much do you think a horse should cost? I am talking about a regular riding/work horse. Not one trained for battle or a race horse.
> 
> I am assuming that a commoner makes about 12.5cp per day of economic output. 7cp gets taxed in most locations. It requires 5cp to live at a subsistence level.
> 
> ...




In most cases, a medieval peasant only paid about 1/3rd of their income in taxes.   Taxes only reached 50% of their income in Eastern Europe, where peasants tended to be more oppressed and had fewer rights.   Your 12 c.p. per day might be about right, but they were probably paying only about 4 c.p. per day in taxes.   You might be about right regarding 5 c.p. per day for subsistence, leaving a profit of 3 c.p. per day (or 1 c.p. per day in high tax regions).   

If that profit seems high to you.  What you are neglecting is that the economy is agricultural, and so this assumes 'the weather is good' and 'the crops don't fail'.   The medieval peasant wasn't in bad shape as long as that remained true, and had enough profit on his farm to weather a bad year every few years.   The problems got critical in a hurry though when that wasn't true.  The problem was exacerbated by the fact that taxes were negotiated fixed sums, and not percentages of income or expenditures, and so whether a good year or a bad year, taxes were supposed to be paid first and you lived off of what was left over.


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## Brandegoris (Apr 6, 2017)

Celebrim said:


> In most cases, a medieval peasant only paid about 1/3rd of their income in taxes.   Taxes only reached 50% of their income in Eastern Europe, where peasants tended to be more oppressed and had fewer rights.   Your 12 c.p. per day might be about right, but they were probably paying only about 4 c.p. per day in taxes.   You might be about right regarding 5 c.p. per day for subsistence, leaving a profit of 3 c.p. per day (or 1 c.p. per day in high tax regions).
> 
> If that profit seems high to you.  What you are neglecting is that the economy is agricultural, and so this assumes 'the weather is good' and 'the crops don't fail'.   The medieval peasant wasn't in bad shape as long as that remained true, and had enough profit on his farm to weather a bad year every few years.   The problems got critical in a hurry though when that wasn't true.  The problem was exacerbated by the fact that taxes were negotiated fixed sums, and not percentages of income or expenditures, and so whether a good year or a bad year, taxes were supposed to be paid first and you lived off of what was left over.




In actuality Depending on time period most peasents never really saw coinage. They were "Paid" ( Nit a correct term really) in goods


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## Celebrim (Apr 6, 2017)

Brandegoris said:


> In actuality Depending on time period most peasents never really saw coinage. They were "Paid" ( Nit a correct term really) in goods




You are of course correct.  I didn't want to make the post longer than it had to be.  One of the essential features of a true medieval economy is that it is a barter economy because there is insufficient coin to reflect all the economic activity that the society is engaged in.  Not only are they paid in goods, but they make payment in goods.  So for example, they don't have to pay taxes of some amount of coins.  They pay taxes in some amount of bushels of wheat, some amount of wooden staves, some amount of cut firewood, some amount of time spent working the Lord's land, and some amount of spun wool.  Each householder would individually negotiate taxes with the land lord based on the perceived productivity of the property and the skills of the householder.   

The Doomsday Book is extremely enlightening in this regard, because it often lists out the individual contracts and so gives us far more insight into the lives of the people than a simple census would.  So we find example of serfs who are independently wealthy and possibly wealthier in some cases than the landlord, women who have higher legal status than their husbands and are so treated as heads of household, and so on and so forth.  The real world is incredibly more complex than any simple model of it.

Europe exits the medieval economy when it acquires enough coin that lords can start dispensing with those private contractual obligations, and simply ask each householder to pay a lump sum of coin.  Likewise, lords no longer had to collect taxes from lesser lords by forcing them to serve in the army, but could instead just ask them to send money to pay for an army.  This lead to centralization of power in the hands of the monarchies, and the end of the feudal system (although, it wouldn't completely die for centuries).  Of course, this is also a vast simplification, as we've said nothing of the role of cities and monasteries in revolutionizing the economy.


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## Antonlowe (Apr 6, 2017)

There have been some really interesting responses to this thread. Thank you all. 

Currently I am doing a major rebuild of 5e for my own personal use. I wanted to give some thought about how the economy works. 

Its “simulationist” in the sense that I try to come up with some basic rules and then see what that would actually mean, if the world worked based on those rules. Not in the sense that I am trying to recreate an accurate simulation of England Circa 1067. 

The first rule I came up with to be the basis of the economy is that
 “A person can spend the day Earning a Living. They roll a d20 add proficiency bonus if appropriate, and earn the result in copper pieces”. 

That’s where I came up with the 12.5cp per day. 
Next I decided upon some basics for costs of living. A person with no other concerns ought to be well off, with a little of extra pocket money they could spend on luxuries or capital investment. You could survive on half that much, but it would suck. You could spend more to maintain a particular lifestyle, if you wanted to….. 

>5cp per day = Wretched (disadvantage on all downtime checks)
5cp per day = Subsistence (disadvantage on all downtime checks except Earning a Living)
10cp per day = Well off (no modifiers)
50cp per day = Arriostocratic

I used those two rules to come up with a basic tax system. Most nobles want to get as much as they can out of their peasants. So they set the taxation rate at a level where the peasants can live at a subsistence level. This is common, but not monolithic. 
A ‘happy’ kingdom will probably set the tax rate at 2cp per day. 
I assume that most people will spend all of their money on living expenses until they reach well off (10cp per day). At which point they will start to diverge.


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## Random Bystander (Apr 6, 2017)

The problem with "Hollywood inaccuracy" is not that we don't know that movies are fake, but that when faced with the question of, then, what the facts are, the majority of the population is left with little idea of what the facts might be.

Fortunately, the internet can be used as a vital source of information; unfortunately, it can also be used as a source of disinformation. As I was *told by a friend without a background in science, how do they sort the fraud from the fact, when the facts can sound as **fantastical, or more fantastical, than the fraud? It is easy to say "learn science, and thereby learn what is plausible", but when one does not know which sources might be correct or incorrect in the first place, it becomes much more difficult. Sadly, also, "schooling", such as it is, often teaches only rote memorization and regurgitation.

* The words are mine, the meaning is theirs.

** Current research efforts include monkeys controlling robotic limbs through electrodes implanted in their brains, which sounds like the plot of a science fiction B-movie, but is real research in progress right now. And when I inform you that reall humans without arms have been able to strap on prosthetic, cybernetic arms due to this research...


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## Celebrim (Apr 6, 2017)

Antonlowe said:


> I used those two rules to come up with a basic tax system. Most nobles want to get as much as they can out of their peasants. So they set the taxation rate at a level where the peasants can live at a subsistence level. This is common, but not monolithic.




Common, true, but typically not monolithic.

England was restive and independent, and tended to have low taxes.

The western end of the continent tended to be slightly higher taxes, while the eastern end had slightly higher than that.

The worst cases were Eastern Europe in the 19th century, were taxes rose to 80% of peasant income leaving the peasants in essentially perpetual starvation.  

While nobles wanted to maximize taxes, if you set them too high you ended up with poor peasants or dead peasants.  Some time before that, you had angry peasants who can and did go into revolt, become bandits, complain to the bishop or the king, and otherwise become a hassle.   If you set them lower, your regime in the long run tended to be more successful - the peasants would make investments (build apiaries, dove coots, clear and farm more land, etc.) and become wealthier (letting you charge more taxes), and the peasants would tend to not die off as quickly following a bad harvest (because they had savings) meaning you had more people to tax over time.  However, if you set them too low, then you couldn't field an army and your neighbor would come and take your stuff (since Knights were often little more than bandits with a license).   

Cost of living depends on both your expectations regarding your lifestyle (you eat meat 7 times a week, you have more than two changes of clothing), and the maintenance on your property (you have a horse to feed, taxes to pay, a roof to thatch, and armor that has to be cleaned with vinegar and tumbled in a barrel of fine sand and then coated in rapeseed oil on a regular basis if it isn't to become rusty).  In general, for PC's, I tend to make cost of living a function of character level, and then add sundry costs if they decide to purchase a steed, etc.   For most campaigns this is mostly ignored, but if you run a dynastic campaign where the focus of play is building up institutions it becomes a huge concern and time sink.


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## Antonlowe (Apr 6, 2017)

Celebrim said:


> Common, true, but typically not monolithic.
> 
> England was restive and independent, and tended to have low taxes.
> 
> ...




Celebrim, I don't understand what you are trying to say. I pointed out that the 7cp tax was not monolithic. The guidelines I posted take into account diminishing returns for taxation and the possibility of capital investment on the part of peasants. 

Is there something I am missing??? Or are you just agreeing with me???


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## aramis erak (Apr 7, 2017)

Random Bystander said:


> Most sources of information on the medieval age are wrong, I am sorry to say. Sometimes grossly so.
> 
> It is possible that it is Wikipedia that is wrong in this case, but as far as I know, external testing has validated Wikipedia's factual accuracy in the sciences.




Do you even know what Domesday was?

It was a tax record and census of England. It's documentary history. I've checked the prices in the 1976 printing of D&D against sources I know were available to Gygax, and the correlation is sufficiently high that we can use those same 11th century PRIMARY SOURCES as viable inputs for source information. And the value of horses in Domesday is 1-2 £ on the low end to 100 £ on the high.

The currency in use in that era is  VERY WELL DOCUMENTED.  Multiple primary sources, including legal specifications issued by the crown. (and enough surviving copies of coins to establish that the mints were ripping people off...)

It's quite easy to reverse engineer Gygaxian prices.


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## Random Bystander (Apr 7, 2017)

aramis erak said:


> Do you even know what Domesday was?
> 
> It was a tax record and census of England. It's documentary history. I've checked the prices in the 1976 printing of D&D against sources I know were available to Gygax, and the correlation is sufficiently high that we can use those same 11th century PRIMARY SOURCES as viable inputs for source information. And the value of horses in Domesday is 1-2 £ on the low end to 100 £ on the high.
> 
> ...



I am aware of what the Doomsday Census was. However, you incorrectly stated that the Shilling was a gold coin. My quote from Wikipedia stated that the shilling was a silver coin. To narrow it down to only the most relevant pieces of information:


aramis erak said:


> Note that a typical 1 shilling coin was the gold penny... gp. ...





			
				https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shilling_(English_coin) said:
			
		

> The English shilling was a silver coin of the Kingdom of England, ...




Edit: My apologies for the tone of this post, and I mean no offence by contradiction.  I am posting this edit here rather than in a new post to avoid cluttering up the thread.


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## Celebrim (Apr 7, 2017)

Antonlowe said:


> Celebrim, I don't understand what you are trying to say. I pointed out that the 7cp tax was not monolithic.




The 'tl;dr version' is that a greater than 50% taxation rate is far from common, and in fact would only be associated with actual slave states.  The majority of European serfs endured lower taxation rates, and societies where economic output was garnished by 50% or more were extreme cases.  The effective increase in taxation from about 30% to about 42% by Prince John to raise King Richard's ransom very nearly brought about general revolt, and is remembered in story to this day.  Similar periods of increased taxation in different periods - such as the 1377 tax reform - brought about actual peasant revolts, or revolts by nobility, or both.

Gygax's 9 s.p. in tax per 30 s.p. in income outlined in the 1e AD&D is probably closer to the historical mode.  It was extremely unusual for the government to actually control more than about 10th of the economy.  (For example, in medieval England, the king's share was 1/13th part of income and a great many competing institutions - churches, cities, major lords - and the lands they held were exempt.)  Your idea of 7 portions out of every 12.5 being taken as tax is simply unbelievable except for an ancient society practicing near universal and unregulated slavery, and the usual method then is to keep everything and give back the 5 s.p. worth of economic output needed for subsistence rather than trying to extort that much from people with some sort of rights.

Put it this way, while Gygax was not above imposing taxes on the PC's to drain excess wealth out of their coffers, he also understood that the flow of cash could go both ways, with PC lords taxing their subjects.   And he would have - quite rightly - invoked an instant insurrection on any PC lord that tried to raise taxes to the sort of rates you are calling common.


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## aramis erak (Apr 8, 2017)

Random Bystander said:


> I am aware of what the Doomsday Census was. However, you incorrectly stated that the Shilling was a gold coin. My quote from Wikipedia stated that the shilling was a silver coin. To narrow it down to only the most relevant pieces of information:
> 
> 
> 
> Edit: My apologies for the tone of this post, and I mean no offence by contradiction.  I am posting this edit here rather than in a new post to avoid cluttering up the thread.




The Gold penny was commonly used with a value of a schilling, tho technically it was specie, and depending upon debasement, varied between 10 and 20 d in value. 

There are a dozen better refs online, including the UK Mints' websites. .

It's clear from the sources available at the time Gygax was researching that the use of the gold penny as a shilling was mentioned - one of the library books I ILL'd in the 90's was a copy of a book on Domesday's prices from the U of Wisconsin... which had duedate stamps from the early 70's... and mentions the nominal value for the gold penny as about a shilling. 

Right or wrong, Gygax noted the silver penny, and the gold penny, as the correct denominations and got the relative value, then decimalized for convenience. (that the farthing was copper was later, but the relative valuation of a 5 dwt copper coin as 1/4th the value of a 1 dwt silver one is still in the realm of fiat coin rather than specie - the lowest conversion I've found for relative value by mass is about 50:Copper:Silver, 10:silver:8kt gold. (peak values in the medieval era seem to be about 70:copper:silver and 24:Silver:14 Kt gold The D&D gold piece is clearly based upon the early gold penny in a  low purity. And the conversion of early sources to D&D style gp/sp/cp is best fit at D&D 1gp=12 d silver aka 1gp = 1 s. Which is, by the way, consistent with roman coin... tho' roman coingold was around 12-16 kt, and valued at 20x the silver denarius nominally.

But I've mentioned, repeatedly, that it was valued at a shilling, not that it was the primary shilling coin. (That would be the 12 dwt silver coin... which weighs 12x the silver penny's 1 dwt of silver... Then again, historically, most people used hacked bits of silver, and few ever saw shilling-value coins in either metal. And trade was by weight and fineness, not face value, until into the 17th C, and even into the 19th C in many places.)


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## Antonlowe (Apr 8, 2017)

Celebrim said:


> The 'tl;dr version' is that a greater than 50% taxation rate is far from common, and in fact would only be associated with actual slave states.  The majority of European serfs endured lower taxation rates, and societies where economic output was garnished by 50% or more were extreme cases.  The effective increase in taxation from about 30% to about 42% by Prince John to raise King Richard's ransom very nearly brought about general revolt, and is remembered in story to this day.  Similar periods of increased taxation in different periods - such as the 1377 tax reform - brought about actual peasant revolts, or revolts by nobility, or both.
> 
> Gygax's 9 s.p. in tax per 30 s.p. in income outlined in the 1e AD&D is probably closer to the historical mode.  It was extremely unusual for the government to actually control more than about 10th of the economy.  (For example, in medieval England, the king's share was 1/13th part of income and a great many competing institutions - churches, cities, major lords - and the lands they held were exempt.)  Your idea of 7 portions out of every 12.5 being taken as tax is simply unbelievable except for an ancient society practicing near universal and unregulated slavery, and the usual method then is to keep everything and give back the 5 s.p. worth of economic output needed for subsistence rather than trying to extort that much from people with some sort of rights.
> 
> Put it this way, while Gygax was not above imposing taxes on the PC's to drain excess wealth out of their coffers, he also understood that the flow of cash could go both ways, with PC lords taxing their subjects.   And he would have - quite rightly - invoked an instant insurrection on any PC lord that tried to raise taxes to the sort of rates you are calling common.




Ok. Now I understand where you are coming from. Thanks for the reply. 

I still disagree. You seem to be arguing that peasents will rebel and the economy will collapse at a given tax rate. 35%, 50%, 70%, the actual rate doesn't matter. 

I take the position that peasants will rebel and the economy will collapse only if people cannot afford a certain lifestyle. the 7cp tax rate is the MAXIMUM a noble could tax his peasants before the economy would reach that level. No one is happy about it, but they are not starving either. 

You could argue that one of my base assumptions are wrong. Peasants are too productive, Lifestyle thresholds are set wrong, or something else. 

But simply doing a historical comparison of what tax rates actually were is not enough to make me change anything.


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## Brandegoris (Apr 10, 2017)

Celebrim said:


> You are of course correct.  I didn't want to make the post longer than it had to be.  One of the essential features of a true medieval economy is that it is a barter economy because there is insufficient coin to reflect all the economic activity that the society is engaged in.  Not only are they paid in goods, but they make payment in goods.  So for example, they don't have to pay taxes of some amount of coins.  They pay taxes in some amount of bushels of wheat, some amount of wooden staves, some amount of cut firewood, some amount of time spent working the Lord's land, and some amount of spun wool.  Each householder would individually negotiate taxes with the land lord based on the perceived productivity of the property and the skills of the householder.
> 
> The Doomsday Book is extremely enlightening in this regard, because it often lists out the individual contracts and so gives us far more insight into the lives of the people than a simple census would.  So we find example of serfs who are independently wealthy and possibly wealthier in some cases than the landlord, women who have higher legal status than their husbands and are so treated as heads of household, and so on and so forth.  The real world is incredibly more complex than any simple model of it.
> 
> Europe exits the medieval economy when it acquires enough coin that lords can start dispensing with those private contractual obligations, and simply ask each householder to pay a lump sum of coin.  Likewise, lords no longer had to collect taxes from lesser lords by forcing them to serve in the army, but could instead just ask them to send money to pay for an army.  This lead to centralization of power in the hands of the monarchies, and the end of the feudal system (although, it wouldn't completely die for centuries).  Of course, this is also a vast simplification, as we've said nothing of the role of cities and monasteries in revolutionizing the economy.



 Absolutely. It would be a hellavu RPG game if I had to figure out how many cabbages I need to buy a Horse


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## Celebrim (Apr 10, 2017)

Brandegoris said:


> Absolutely. It would be a hellavu RPG game if I had to figure out how many cabbages I need to buy a Horse




When I was younger, like so many GMs of my era, I had fetishized 'realism' as the ultimate goal of a game that would (in my mind) solve table conflicts, create game balance, serve all player aesthetics, create literary narrative, wash the dishes and make me a sandwich.  

I decided that I would implement realistic coinage in my game world, with each nation minting its own denominations and there be rates of exchange between currencies and so forth.  That lasted two or three sessions before I de facto began ignoring my own setting details and was using simplified coinage. 

There are a lot of things that sound cool, but unless your bookkeeping is being handled by a computer, they definitely aren't worth it (and might not be worth it even then).


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## Lwaxy (Apr 17, 2017)

Tehee.. but in some worlds it is fun to see what gold you have from which country. Assome enemy country would not want you to pay with any given currency.


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## aramis erak (Apr 17, 2017)

Lwaxy said:


> Tehee.. but in some worlds it is fun to see what gold you have from which country. Assome enemy country would not want you to pay with any given currency.




If history is any guide, they'll accept it based upon public trust in its relative purity. Coinage as other than mark of who certified its purity really only begins to take hold in the 1600's, and doesn't become the standard until the 1800's...

French Livre 1 coins were about the same weight as English £1 coins... but at various points, trust in the french king's coin was higher than the English, and vice versa. Whichever one was debasing less was worth more in both... per unit weight.

(Note that the debasing with copper is why the roughly 14kt coingeld 1dwt coin was worth about 1 shilling... the "pure" 20 kt (which isn't 100% - that would be 24 kt - but was about as pure as it got in the day) was worth about 12 pence instead of the 20 that a dwt of pure/pure-ish gold would be. Debase it to 10 kt, and it's worth about 10 d.

In other words, the coin simply "assures" weight and purity, based upon the public trust in the minter. But that's an inconvenient thing in most fntasy campaigns.


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## Lwaxy (Apr 18, 2017)

Yeah, some worlds have detailed measurement systems for such, but there are some countries on some worlds where you just can't pay with enemy currency. Of course, gold could always be melted down.


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## aramis erak (Apr 19, 2017)

Lwaxy said:


> Yeah, some worlds have detailed measurement systems for such, but there are some countries on some worlds where you just can't pay with enemy currency. Of course, gold could always be melted down.




Keep in mind also - the real world's gold supply wouldn't fill a football stadium (neither soccer nor gridiron) to 5' deep. The ENTIRE mining total to date won't fill four olympic pools. (Source 1: [a=http://www.numbersleuth.org/worlds-gold/]Numbersleuth[/a] says 165,000 tons in 2011; more than half was mined since 1960. Source 2: [a=http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21969100]BBC[/a] says 171,300 tonnes in 2013...) For Silver, about 1.4 million tonnes has been extracted. (Source 3: [a=http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-01/visualizing-all-silver-world]Zerohedge[/a]) Compare that to copper... about 5 million tons per year...

Medieval nations couldn't really afford to be picky about whose gold it was, except at tax time. Even then, it almost always would still spend. Why? Because it was precious in its own right. Even silver was rare enough to merit such. Copper coins, however, even ones alloyed with silver...

More than a few PC's have more gold each than many medieval nations did. 

Medieval coins were SMALL...  1dwt is 1.55517 grams or so. A 1 cm diameter coin of gold weighing 1 dwt woould be less than 1 mm thick (about 0.9 mm), assuming 24 kt. At 10 kt, cut with copper, it's about 1.7mm thick. 

Sterling of .99 fine silver would be 1cm diameter and 1.9 cm thick for a 1dwt penny. 

A copper penny worth the same as the silver one, at 5mm thick, would be 5.9cm in diameter... and mass 70x the silver one. (which is why the copper penny farthings initiall had about 1/5 dwt silver, the rest copper... and rould be roughly 2.2 mm thick, and 2cm across. (more likely, 2.5cm - 1 inch - and just under 2mm.) Tiny tiny...

The massive treasure pile - several hundred pounds of gold - my players got two weeks ago in a published module is a medieval king's treasury worth... before looking at the silver.


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## Random Bystander (Apr 19, 2017)

I think the most cogent conclusion that could be correctly calculated here, would be that reaching a consensus with your players on the world their characters will be played in is important.

There are, self-evidently, players who enjoy no-magic, harsh-realism worlds where knowing your coinage and its kingdom to the copper piece is just complex enough. There are also players who want the dragon they slew to have made, as its bedding, a literal pile of gold.


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## Brandegoris (Apr 19, 2017)

I like the Idea sometimes of a harshly realistic world. The Struggle is real! 
But at the end of the day it usually isn't as much fun as I imagine it to be


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## Random Bystander (Apr 20, 2017)

Brandegoris said:


> I like the Idea sometimes of a harshly realistic world. The Struggle is real!
> But at the end of the day it usually isn't as much fun as I imagine it to be



In my experience, mostly, I want to relax during my relaxation time. However, some times, I want more of a mental challenge.

Checkers versus Chess versus Go, I suppose.


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## Random Bystander (Apr 21, 2017)

And I would also like to say that this is, by far, the most civil discussion on realism in gaming I have had for...Far too long.

This is, by far, the most civil discussion on realism in gaming I have had for...Far too long.


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## raleel (Apr 21, 2017)

Brandegoris said:


> I like the Idea sometimes of a harshly realistic world. The Struggle is real!
> But at the end of the day it usually isn't as much fun as I imagine it to be






Random Bystander said:


> In my experience, mostly, I want to relax during my relaxation time. However, some times, I want more of a mental challenge.
> 
> Checkers versus Chess versus Go, I suppose.




This is always a tough balance to maintain. I am seeing this now with my 5e game where I play. It feels very simplistic to me, which is good in some ways and on some nights. On others, it's sort of boring because I have nothing to sink my teeth into. I've experienced the opposite, though more frequently as a GM.


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## guachi (Apr 22, 2017)

In my current campaign when I researched historical prices I valued a farthing at 1 cp. This made one pound equal to 9.6 gp and does a reasonable job of inflating historical prices to something approaching what you see in the D&D books.

Also, I found a great book from a Welsh library for about $5 + $5 shipping entitled _Medieval England: Towns, Commerce and Crafts 1086-1348_ that has more information than you could possibly ever want about, well, commerce and crafts in medieval England.

The book certainly helped me come up with a ship full of contraband that consisted of ale, cloth, and raw wool.


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