Yipes, I did this

Great coins! I’ve always loved the Medieval coinage with the cross and the writing around the edge.

The cross used to sometimes be used when people needed small change. They would cut the silver coins into 1/2 or 1/4 using the cross as a guide line.

Apparently back then a single silver penny was worth a significant sum of money.

 

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Milano/ Duchy
AV Ducato ND(1425)
Milano Mint
Filippo Maria Visconti 1414-53
Wearing a crowned helmet/ fully decked out on his steed.

 

@Gam3rBlake, I wish I had good info ready to hand on what a penny could buy --bet other people here do-- but yeah, it was a fair hunk of change, even into the 13th and early 14th centuries. At least under the Normans and Angevins, some of the fractions were actually pre-made at the mint. The very first round halfpence don't show up until Henry I (1100-1135), and they're really scarce. It was sort of like Elizabeth I's experiment with milled coins; a little too far ahead of its time.
That's too great, @panzerman ...replete with the Visconti arms (snake eating a small boy --bet the origin of that is a story).

 

That coin I was amazed remained "unsold" in MDC/ Monaco Auction. I must have added over 100 coins that where avaliable after auction. Always a good idea to check "unsolds"
John

 

@panzerman, I think you made your point!!!

 

Awesome @+VGO.DVCKS !

 

Doesn't Constantine the great have a whole series of elaborate helmet coins?

 

Shucks, Many THanks, @Alegandron.
...It would be great if someone would go into @Ryan McVay's point about helmets on Constantines. I'm only familiar with the commonest ones.

 

I found a medieval price list for comparison


£1 = 20 shillings/240 pence
1 shilling = 12 pence

For 1 penny you could buy a whole gallon of medium quality beer or 2 chickens ^_^

 

Many thanks, @Gam3rBlake!
...I thought I dimly remembered that, as of the earlier 14th c. (circa Edward II), three pennies could get you a pig (...some serious capital, if you wanted your family to eat for a minute or two). But I couldn't begin to reconstruct where that even came from. Your link is Terrific; I want to find and bookmark it.

 

Oh yeah for sure!
The link also has ALOT more prices such as wages and dowries and the cost to build a castle.

Link: http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html

Check it out!

The source is the University of California Davis which I consider a reliable source. Usually I consider any reputable university as a reliable source.

As to the 3 Pence for a pig:
Apparently eating meat in general back then was considered a luxury and only nobles at it regularly because it required slaughtering an animal.

Not only that but due to Church rules eating meat was prohibited for a full 4 months a year to everyone from schoolboys to Kings. The only exemptions were people who were sick, small children etc,.

 

Massive thanks, @Gam3rBlake!
Summarily bookmarked. And, dee-Yup, I'm on your page, paragraph and line about academic sources, versus the other kinds. Peer review, adult supervision, and so forth. Yes, even when history, never mind only more immediately fraught contexts are concerned.

 

Glad it's something someone else is interested in!

There's a lot of interesting stuff in there.

Notice that the price of Sugar is 1-3 shillings per pound!
That's 36 pence! The average wage back then was about 2 pence per day so it would take someone over 2 weeks just to buy a pound of sugar. Back then it was an exhausting, back breaking, process to crush and extract sugar from sugarcane. Today it's all done by machine power and the spot price of sugar is about $0.40/pound. Although in the US the sugar industry is subsidized so it sells for an artificially high price.

That explains why honey and fruits (like apples) were the most popular sweeteners of the time. They were much cheaper.

I love that it has interesting little insights into medieval life.

 

Great coins!

However, I think a more exact prototype to the Aethelred penny is this Probus below. It would be even closer, if I had a variety with baltheus (sword belt). The pattern of his armour (lorica hamata) is repeated on the shield. So the Anglo-Saxon die engravers didn't really have to interpret a continuation, but copied what they saw on Roman coins.





I think the question why the Anglo-Saxons copied 700 year old coin designs is really fascinating. Were these Roman coins still so prevalent that people recognized them as money? Or (more likely in my view) was the idea of Rome and Roman civilization still so prestigious that rulers wanted to associate themselves with everything Roman, even after so many centuries?

 

That is a fantastic coin. Great heroic bust with decorated shield. Congratulations.

 

So how much ale would you buy with all your deniers @+VGO.DVCKS

 

Oh yeah! Here is another chart I find extremely interesting and useful.

It shows how much £1 was worth in precious metals through different periods of time.


It’s very useful for imagining larger purchases.

For example if a War Horse is £50 in 1420 and in 1420 £1 was 215.8 grams of silver.

50 x 215.8 = 10,790 grams of silver.

So a War Horse would’ve cost almost 11 kilograms of silver. Or you could do the same with gold.

You can even try to compare it to modern times and determine today’s value for that much silver. In my example it would be roughly $10,000 today which sounds reasonable for a trained war horse with all the riding gear.

Anyway I always use this chart when reading about medieval European coinage so I was hoping you’d find it useful .

 

$10K in todays money for a "war horse" sounds cheap. I have a clients who is into "dressage". They imported a Hannoverian from Germany/ cost $120K Canadian (90K US)
Here is another helmet themed coin.
AV Stater ND (312BC)
Salamis Mint
Nikokreon 330-10BC
Ptolemaic Satrap (Cyprus)

 

@Tejas, many thanks for your enlightening and, Yes, very cogent observations!
...I'm still thinking my example is good enough ...provisionally.... :<} And, Yes, thank you for your kind congratulations!

 

Hmm, @seth77, that's a good question. However much it was, it would have to be the Real stuff; either Scottish, or Belgian barley wine. ...Right, on the other side of the day, I also like dark roast coffee.