The following is a link to a PDF file of a spreadsheet with the historical prices of hundreds Medieval items as well as wage rates and fine/fee amounts. I found these over years of reading books on the Medieval period and I’ve finally decided to make them public. Most of the items are footnoted and sourced. I’ve also included the great list that Prof. Kenneth Hodges of U.C. Davis put together over a decade ago. His prices are highlighted in blue.
Note that in cases where a price was given in non-English currency, I used the precious metal content of the coins to translate into English coinage. In some cases, this required translating from gold coins to silver. In this case I used an assumed gold/silver ratio, usually 10 which is close to the average of the high and late Middle Ages.
To incorporate these prices into your fantasy RPG world I suggest using the peasant wage as the link between Medieval and fantasy prices. In the Middle Ages, the typical English peasant earned an average of 2 denier (pence) a day for paid labor. The actual amount tended to be 1 ½ denier prior to the plague and about 3 denier afterwards but many historians use 2 denier as the average. To convert Medieval prices to your fantasy prices, figure out how much a peasant would earn annually in gold pieces and then convert each Medieval price to your fantasy price using the item’s percentage of the peasant wage.
For example, if a Medieval sword costs 360 denier, then the sword cost 72% of the annual Medieval peasant wage of 500 denier (on a 250 work day year). If peasants in your fantasy world earn 25 gold pieces annually, then the converted sword value is 72% x 25 gp = 18 gp.
PDF link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/136D710RYyMXh4aoXmnWAgZP0egPl4hT9/view?usp=drive_link
tags: RPG, DnD, Dungeons and Dragons, fantasy, Medieval, Middle Ages, prices, wages
