(no subject)

[erastes]

HALP!

I've just found this amazing resource

http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/Datafilelist.htm

and one of the files is the price of EVERYThing (near enough) from the 13th century onwards)

However - I don't understand the figures in this excel spreadsheet below. Because I am a bear of no brain.

http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/files/England_1209-1914_(Clark).xls

How does it WORK? Where it says (for example) that Barley is 12 pence a bushel, at the top - where the figure for year 1209 is 0.206: does that mean that the actual price is about a fifth of 12 pence??

Sorry to be dim, but spreadsheets baffle me, and I KNOW I have mathematicians who will make perfect sense of this in a jiffy. (It's the Paper and Parchment columns I'm particularly interested in btw - for 1814)

But wow - what a treasure trove.

Comments

[mylodon.livejournal.com]

Treasure trove indeed.

I've tried coming at this another way - before me I have my first edition of Novel Notes, which is 1893. It advertises other books (and things) at the end. The prices vary from one shilling to several guineas so the book prices for mid 1800's could well equate into 13 x 12, ie 13 shillings.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

that's useful, thank you!

[clarelondon.livejournal.com]

OK, so we have the combined weight here in the household of a chartered accountant, an aerospace engineer and a 13 year old, and we LIVE and BREATHE spreadsheets *lmao*.
It is a tricky thing to read though, and there's a lack of current entries to give us any sort of modern benchmark to check we're on the right track, but here's how we read it...

The header tells you:
Row 6 – the item
Row 7 – the currency measure where 1=pence, and 12=shillings. (old pence–“d”–obviously, where there were 240 to the pound, not new metric pence)
Row 8 – the metric value of row 9!
Row 9 – the unit of measurement of the item.

So…(feeling your eyes roll…)

The barley example is :
In 1209, a bushel of barley cost 0.2 (one fifth) of a shilling (the base being the 12=shilling on row 7).

And your paper example:
In 1814, a quire of paper cost just over 22 pence (the base being the 1=pence on row 7).

There’s no entry for parchment, though.

Maybe that's just confused it further *lol*, see if anyone else agrees with my interpretation. I have *no idea* how much a quire of paper would cost at any time is the problem, to know if that's plausible.
But what a fabulous chart of data!!!
Good luck with it.
^__^

[erastes.livejournal.com]

OH BRILLIANT!

That's what I thought it must be. Jeez! It would have been easier to put a formula under the cells and just TELL you what the price was rather than make me work in fractions!

Thanks you!

22 pence for a quire! that's... just under a shilling.. hey - coincidentally, that actually works with what I've already written... woot!

Thanks again!

[clarelondon.livejournal.com]

You're welcome!
And yes, it wasn't so much a spreadsheet issue as a data dump issue! It could have been made a lot more user-friendly.

Umm.. and 22 old pence is actually nearer 2 shillings than one, mind.
(It's frightening here to find we'd almost all lost our memories re old money).
Don't know if that casts aspersions on the data conversion now!
^_^

[erastes.livejournal.com]

god how embarrassing. yes. 12 pence to a shilling, what a moron.

One

embarrassed

Brit.

[aunty_marion]

I can still get slightly confused over old money too. We used to have a sort of Happy Families-type game called Sum-It - you got a master card with an amount on it, which you kept secret, and tried to build your hand of cards of different values up to equal that by swapping them. We bought a decimalised version back in 1971 to learn the New Money with. And about 10/15 years later we tried playing the old version again, and were all horrified to find we couldn't remember (without working things out carefully) how many ha'pennies there are in 17/6. Quick, now!

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I am ashamed. No excuse as I've been thinking in old money for the past two weeks as I work out what my character does with a shiny guinea he's just got for nothing!