A NOTE ON MEDIEVAL ENGLISH MONEY

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Throughout most of the period covered in this book, the standard units of English money were the pounds (£), shillings (s.), and pence (d. for the Latin denarius) that appear over and over in the documents reproduced here. Twelve pence made a shilling, and twenty shillings (or 240 pence) made a pound. Another unit frequently used in accounting was the mark, which consisted of thirteen shillings and four pence. In some of the Anglo-Saxon documents below, the ora, equal to sixteen pence, is the standard unit of account. A mancus, another Anglo-Saxon coin, was equal to thirty pence.

A penny was not an insubstantial amount of money. While it is impossible to convert medieval amounts into modern monetary equivalents, some idea of the value of money may be had from examining wages and prices. In the twelfth century, for example, an ordinary laborer who worked for money (though most people did not) might earn a few pence daily; a knight could earn eight pence a day. Many ordinary purchases cost less than a penny, hence the common practice of physically cutting the silver coins into half-pennies and quarter-pennies, or “farthings.” A single sheep cost between four and nine pence to buy, and as part of a wool-producing flock it produced for its owner a profit of two or three pence annually. A riding horse cost £1, but a warhorse cost £20—as much as the annual income from a good-sized manor. These are just a few examples. A number of the documents in this book list various wages and prices, and the reader can easily draw further comparisons from them.