[Pedro Paulo Gaião]

Just recently I discovered that English monetary system of pounds (£), schillings (s) and pences (d) was mostly mathematical rather than real: going back to Charlemagne's idea that a pound of pure silver minted 240 silver coins called denarius/pences/dinheiros, and thus the reference of something costing "£7 14s 4d" was purely mathematical, as the denarius was the only real coin.

As far as I researched, England issued few silver coins, so my question is: when Laws and documents do reference to, let's say, "Gentry is defined by £5 of landed annual revenue", is this based on real, 99% pure silver pound ingots? Or was rather based on 5 groups of 240 silver pence issued at that time?

I'm suspecting it's the second one because I have read that, in 13th century, the 3.5g gold florin (99% pure) was worth 1 pound of pure silver, but by 1500 it was worth 7 pounds of silver; which only makes sense if this was rather based on pound meaning a collection of debased 240 Florentine pennies, given that we know Florence debased their silver at will (inducing social unrest and reducing buying power).

Portugal issued the "real branco" in late middle ages which was supposed to have 41% of silver content, while the "real preto" had smaller silver content; but the Historians have found out that most of Real Branco pieces we have are rather 25% silver, the rest being copper. Regardless, the 15th century Assize of Arms gives your military classes on silver marks (which wasn't a local coin), which also relates to "is this pure silver?".

If someone appeared with ingots amounting 5 pound in weight, would that be appraised as actual 5 pounds worth of impure silver pennies, or more? When we read about Scottish ramsons and payments made in "silver marks", was this pure silver?

[Blaz Berlec]

I'm not an expert, but I think it very much depends on the region and date.

For instance England was in a very unique position when they standardized both the content of silver in their pennies and in the silverware and other decorative objects or ingots, so they could all be simply weighted as currency - "sterling silver", 92.5% silver, since 13th century. Although England did relatively little silver mining, they had a strong and constant lucrative wool export, and more or less centralized monetary system.

So English coins were valued even outside England for their silver purity, when others solved many temporary problems by diluting silver content in their coinage - sometimes extremely so, and their value usually eventually settled around their silver content. The crysis in Austria and Bavaria in mid-1450 resulted in Schinderlings, Böse Halser ("Evil Halser"), pfennigs virtually without silver - a contemporary source described them:

"Anyone with lots of old copper kettles could mint better."

On the other hand weight and content of gold in Ducats, Florins etc. was really strictly followed - so their value was often used to denote the worth of more expensive items, even if the majority of purchases was mainly made in silver coins. Some very large purchases could be made in ingots of silver or gold, but these are eventually replaced by coins, even if that meant an unpractically large ammounts.

Money changers and accountants were usually quite versed in identifying coins, determining silver or gold contents, and they were indispensable, because money often traveled far outside their area of origin, and was of mixed date.

[Ryan S.]

I think the income would have been mostly paid in pennies or shillings, and for legal purposes may have been theoretical. A gentleman would probably have received a portion of income from rent, which would have numerically stable. A lot of rents were calculated based on the price of grain, but could be paid in cash. Whoever needed to could probably calculate the probable income from land a gentleman farmed himself.

English silver was also debased. According to Adam Smith it was only 1/3 silver in 1775 and hadn't been since the reign of Philip and Mary. That was a lot better than Scottish and French currency. I wouldn't expect too much precision, it was after all the Middle Ages. Also, as coins wore out they lost value based on metal content (gold and silver are soft metal so the coins wore out faster than modern coins) but still had the same face value. It still was better to have higher quality coins.

People also used silverware as currency and would also use scales to determine value if the coins were too debased or foreign. The movie the Knights Tale isn't too unrealistic when they break off a piece of a trophy to pay for things. So there might be large pieces of silver, but most transactions are small. Also, most medieval coins I have seen are quite small.

Inflation played a big roll in expanding the right to vote in England, as a 40 shilling freehold was a requirement to vote, and it became easier to achieve as time went on.

[Glen A Cleeton]

There is this.

This old link for now, I know the old root pages are good. The Fordham University Medieval Source Book
https://web.archive.org/web/20110522064216/http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/medievalprices.html#WAGES


Cheers
GC

[Pedro Paulo Gaião]