(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.