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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;EWC3, post: 4189920, member: 93416&quot;]Great. My knowledge concerns the British scene and - as always with history - it seems to me when we delve we learn as much about the present as we do about the past. First a bit on the history of the idea that c. 1400 was a great time to be a peasant in England.</p><p><br /></p><p>Back around 1800 popular writers like Tom Paine and William Cobbett had big criticisms of the contemporary political economy. Actually, I think they were only repeating what Adam Smith had said (more tactfully!), and they were right. Around 1820 Cobbett however propagandised for his position by saying farm workers were much better off back in the old Catholic days before Henry VIII. That became a very popular idea during the later 19th century, and Thorold Rogers rolled out a lot of historical statistics to back it up around 1884. To the best of my recollection that thesis was what I was taught as a schoolboy in the 1960’s – that plague killed so many workers the remainder could bargain for high wages (appealing because simple and logical).</p><p><br /></p><p>As I got into coins I started to get worries about this. My main question was – if the peasant were getting great wages – what were they being paid with? Silver pennies seem to be common but much earlier – for Henry III and especially Ed I. By the later 14th and 15th centuries the circulating silver was getting sparse and junky - gold was replacing it, and I could not believe the peasants got to handle much gold. This seemed to tie in with contemporary comment - say Langland’s “Piers Ploughman” – which directly contradicts the Thorold Rogers idea, being one long moan about the ill treatment of poor Piers by that dratted Lady Fee (who perhaps was the gold noble personified).</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyhow that was where I had got to when an extraordinary series of event happened at a big Leeds medievalist conference I attended a few years back. Am no expert on this stuff – but went along mostly just to ask my one question which was</p><p><br /></p><p>“OK – but if the wages were so high - what were the labourers paid with?”</p><p><br /></p><p>There were maybe 60 people in the room, and three speakers on the stage, two of them eminent Oxbridge numismatists, the other a youngster from a Business College. There was an old fellow sitting next to me, so I struck up conversation, and put my question – and got rebuffed. When I came to the Q&amp;A at the end I put my question to the numismatists on the stage. They batted it around between the pair of them and ducked it – (did not say I was wrong though). Just as I though that was it, the young guy on the stage piped up that I should read a guy called Hatcher. I tracked the young guy down in the bar afterwards and discovered that the grumpy old guy I happened to sit next to was a very very eminent expert on historical demography, and so I surmise the numismatists ducked my question so as to avoid a row with him (just my guess). Also got this citation for Hatcher</p><p><br /></p><p>You can download the Hatcher paper here:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/ehswpaper/11012.htm" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/ehswpaper/11012.htm" rel="nofollow">https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/ehswpaper/11012.htm</a></p><p><br /></p><p>As best I recall he takes on the Thorold Rodgers argument that later medieval labour got 4d a day in two ways (my simplification)</p><p><br /></p><p>1) the account books that Thorold Rogers worked from for building workers were for Cathedrals and Palaces etc. They were not typical and in particular, would not represent wages for labourers but rather payments to gang-masters for labour provision, a big slice of which would not trickle down.</p><p><br /></p><p>2) Yes – as shown by the Labour Statute, farm workers did ask and get 4d a day. But Thorold Rogers worked that up to 4d a day for 300 days a year. In fact free labour was only needed at harvest time – so yes they could now get 4d a day – but only for a maximum 40 days a year.</p><p><br /></p><p>Actually I have doubts these sort of folk handled coin at all, much of the time. More likely I think they ran up debts at the local store, which were cleared in gold by direct payments from employer to shop keeper. But that is just my guess.</p><p><br /></p><p>Rob T</p><p><br /></p><p>PS - Italy and England probably differed - at least in fine details.&nbsp; Interesting to compare the Peasant&#039;s Revolt with the Ciompi affair on that I feel............[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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