How Much Did a Shirt Really Cost in the Middle Ages?

Some people on the Internet are curious about how much a shirt cost in the middle ages. Now you could try to answer that question by trying to calculate how long it would take to spin and weave the linen and sew the shirt, combining your guesses in an elaborate chain of assumptions using your modern education. A certain Eve Fisher imagined and calculated and came up with the figures $3500 or $4200 for a shirt like those depicted by painters like Peter Brueghel the Elder. This has been re-posted by a number of popular websites, and several weavers and spinners have dropped by her website to comment that they are not so sure about some of her assumptions. But did you know that we can skip all of these guesses and calculations, and the questions which they pose about whether we spin and weave as fast as people in the past, and just ask medieval people how much they paid for a shirt?

People in the 15th and 16th century have left us whole rooms full of accounts where they listed how much they had spent on particular items. Eve Fisher used a 16th century Dutch painting as her example of a typical medieval shirt, so lets look at some accounts from Tudor England. At the court of Henry VIII, a shirt consumed 2 or 3 ells (225 or 338 cm) of linen, probably somewhere between 60 and 100 cm wide, and usually worth something between 6d (six pence) and 12d the ell. Making up a shirt cost 2d unless it was embroidered. Shirts for low-ranking servants cost amounts like 14d, 19d, and 20d (pence). (Caroline Johnson, The King’s Servants, pp. 12, 20, 21-23).

What is that like in modern money? Well, most families in late medieval England had incomes between 2 and 5 pounds English a year (much lower than that, and the man was unlikely to be able to afford a spouse and feed children well enough that they lived; much higher, and they had to be living off the work of others). Christopher Dyer reckons that people in late medieval England usually worked about 240 days a year after allowing for holidays, festivals, illness, and times when they showed up at the shop and the master was not hiring journeymen that day, so an income in pounds a year is more or less pence (1/240 of a pound £) a day (240 workdays in a year). So the shirts of humble servants at Henry VIII’s court cost between 3 and 10 days’ income. That would be similar to someone who earns 10 dollars or Euros an hour spending 240 to 800 dollars or Euros on an item today. (Of course, in the 15th and 16th century, people spent much more of their incomes on food, fuel, and clothing than they do in Europe or European settler societies today, and much less on rent, transportation, and medical care … but it seems that most people could make or obtain one or two new shirts every year or so).

I think it is great that Eve Fisher tried to help people imagine what life was like before the 20th century when almost anything made by human hands was expensive. Before the 20th century, many people could only afford one new outfit a year, and the poor sometimes had to go without underwear or pawn their winter clothing in summer. It was very easy to spend a month’s income on a single garment. And Fermi problems are good geeky fun. But I think it would be better to skip the fanciful calculations and move straight to how much things actually cost and asking why that was so. Finding sources for the prices of everyday things is not easy, but I hope that this post helps people move straight to the sources rather than having to guess how long it would have taken to make a shirt.

Keep this site from going naked into the world with a monthly donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay

Further Reading:

• Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1989) {on pp. 175, 215, Anicia atte Hegge transferred her farm to her daughter-in-law in exchange for lifetime maintenance including a shirt worth 8d. every year in a decade when a thatcher’s mate earned 1 1/4d. per day, so the shirt was worth 6.4 days’ work for a beginning worker}
• Tracy P. Hudson, “Variables and Assumptions in Modern Interpretation of Ancient Spinning Technique and Technology Through Archaeological Experimentation,” ExArc https://exarc.net/ark:/88735/10147
• Caroline Johnson, The King’s Servants: Men’s Dress at the Accession of Henry VIII (Fat Goose Press, 2009) {available on Etsy}
• Sean Manning, “Historical Prices for Gamers and Writers” {many examples of garments costing a month’s income or more}

A good example of the clothing of poor people any time from the Bronze Age to the 19th century is Cato the Elder, de Agri Cultura, chapter 59: farm slaves should be given a tunic and a cloak (sagum) in alternate years, and the old tunics or cloaks should be cut up and made into patchwork. According to Geoffrey Kron, many farmhands in 19th century Naples were poorer than the slaves of thrifty Cato. The authors of the English sumptuary law of 1363, which was so strict that no court in England tried to enforce it, allowed men earning £3 to 5 a year to spend a third of that (2 marks, 4/3 pounds) on the cloth for one outfit.

Edit 2020-07-22: Changed one phrase in the first paragraph which sounded a bit harsh.

Edit 2020-09-14: Trackback from Ecofrugals. Their beautiful watercolour avatar is causing problems with my CMS so I will link this way instead.

Edit 2021-04-16: Added data and page reference in Christopher Dyer’s book

Edit 2025-04-02: block editor

#economicHistory #HenryVIII #historicalClothing #medieval #modern #tunicCosts

"When we picture the history of money, many imagine barter leading naturally to coins, then paper bills, then cards and digital balances. But new research led by University at Albany Anthropology Professor Robert M. Rosenswig shows that this familiar narrative doesn't hold up—and that lessons from ancient wooden and bone tally sticks matter for how we understand money today.

His conclusion: Orthodox economics, which treats money primarily as a medium of exchange, does not fit the evidence. Tally sticks, he argues, suggest that money originates with governments as a system of accounting and taxation.

Rosenswig's study, "Ancient Tally Sticks Explain the Nature of Modern Government Money," published in the Journal of Economic Issues, shows that tally sticks—independently invented in England, China and the Maya world—were consistently used by state officials to record and cancel tax or tribute obligations.

"The historical record shows that barter doesn't precede the creation of financial money," Rosenswig said. "Tally sticks remind us that money is not a scarce commodity but an accounting system rooted in political authority.""

https://phys.org/news/2025-09-ancient-tally-civilizations-myths-money.html

#Money #Anthropology #Economy #EconomicHistory

Upcoming book! My new book explores how immigration, entrepreneurship, and institutions intersect to shape a nation’s economic story. "Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Sweden" (Palgrave Macmillan) is a deep dive into centuries of entrepreneurial energy, tracking how immigrants contributed to Sweden’s growth from medieval markets to modern metropolitan hubs. #rauhut_research #immigration #entrepreneurship #PolicyInsights #EconomicHistory #Sweden #PagraveMacmillan

https://link.springer.com/book/9783032024657

Regime Risk in Investing

(The following is outside my usual topics but its an area of my expertise that I have not found anyone else talking about).

Wise investors use diversification to reduce risk. Any one investment might fail for many different reasons, but many different investments are unlikely to fail together. Additionally, what causes one investment to do poorly often causes others to do well. Rising energy prices hurt manufacturing (which buys energy) but not energy companies (which sell it). Rising wages hurt employers with many low-wage employers, but benefit businesses who sell to consumers. Classically, bonds and stocks tend to move in opposite directions under a given type of pressure, so almost all long-term investors will benefit from holding some of both. For most of history opportunities for diversification were limited, and a prudent investor might buy several plots of land, invest in a ship’s cargo, and make some loans to neighbours. In the 20th century, mutual funds allowed small investors to own dozens of different assets for low but significant costs. Today anyone with a bank account in Canada can buy an index fund that holds thousands of different assets around the world for around 0.25% of their investments per year. However, most of these funds lack one important type of diversification.

Most balanced index investment funds in Canada invest 34-43% of their money in a single foreign country, the United States of America. Lets look at three examples that just buy everything in the index, and three that consider sustainability and business ethics but still have a low cost.

• XBAL, the iShares Core Balanced ETF Portfolio invests 35% of its money in the USA
• VBAL, the Vanguard Balanced ETF Portfolio, invests 36%
• ZBAL, the BMO Balanced ETF, invests 43%
• CSBA, the CIBC Sustainable Balanced Solution, invests 34% of its money in the USA
• GBAL, the iShares Environmental, Social, and Governmental (ESG) Balanced ETF Portfolio, invests 34%
• ZESG, a Balanced ESG ETF from the Bank of Montreal, invests 39%

Although prospectuses and fund facts don’t fully explain their thinking, by reading the personal finance literature we can make an argument for such heavy investing in the United States. The United States made up about 60% of the global stock market in 2024,1 and the US stock market is very diverse and contains many companies with global markets. So most of these funds invest about 60% of their non-Canadian stocks in the United States. Financiers traditionally consider US government bonds as completely safe investments, so its common for index bond funds to contain some US government bonds in addition to Canadian. Many of these funds invest about 20% of their bonds in the USA. This argument overlooks one major factor.

Investments in the United States are at the mercy of a single political regime. Bad decisions by that regime can affect every industry and every type of investment in the country. The united Kingdom of Spain conquered a new world and discovered a whole mountain of silver. Philip II was the second greatest monarch in Europe and the third or fourth in the world. But the Spanish people and the Spanish economy did not prosper under this regime, because it was aristocratic and because its theory of how to use silver to create prosperity was inadequate to the problem. Argentina was as rich as Canada or Australia in 1913 and seemed ready to progress from agricultural exports to industry. Ever since it has fallen behind first the developed world, then Latin America. A series of governments, many of them juntas, made a series of bad decisions. The country has defaulted on its debts nine times since 1816. Czar Nicholas’ Russia was the emerging market of its day until it made the terrible choice of accepting a war with Austro-Hungary and Germany. Three years and two revolutions later Russia was taken over by Bolsheviks who nationalized the economy. Foreign investors lost everything.

Most of these stories involve monarchies, dictatorships, juntas, and one-party states. Japan, whose stock market crashed in 1991 and did not recover for thirty years, is ruled by the Iron Triangle of the Liberal Democratic Party, large corporations, and the civil service. Japan also takes very few immigrants and has been slow to bring in equality of the sexes. These things were even more true in the 1980s and 1990s. Its not surprising that a country ruled by a few hundred men from a few dozen families, educated at the same universities and employed by the same organizations, had trouble dealing with their stock-market crash. Thomas Watson Sr. was not the only American who thought that Nazi Germany’s high government spending and low unemployment made it a wonderful place to invest. That turned out to be mistaken after the Nazis stole everything that a stronger Nazi had not stolen already then went to war against the world.2 The United States is no longer a lawful country where a wide variety of people have a voice and those who make poor decisions are removed from power by peaceful means.

Indexing can deal with the gradual decline of any one company, sector, or country by slowly moving money elsewhere. It cannot give you your money back if you invest it in something which collapses in value. This is why investors in small and medium-sized countries often use capped indexes of their local stock market which limit the investment in any one company. They do not trust the market that if one company is 10% of the national stock market, then they should trust it with 10% of their money (although they do trust that if it is 1% of the national stock market, they can trust it with 1%).

Canadian personal finance literature is full of warnings that you should not just invest domestically, because sometimes the Canadian stock market does well and sometimes it does poorly.3 It is not as full of warnings against heavy investment in any one foreign country. However, investing too much of your money in one country is like investing too much in one company or one economic sector.

Many companies listed on the US stock market are global and have branches which would not be hurt by poor sales or high costs in the USA. However, the global reach of American companies like Mastercard and Microsoft is tied to American hegemony. The US government finds it very useful to be able to read everyone’s emails by wiretapping just one company, and to be able to block payments around the world by sending a memo to Visa and Stripe. Foreigners watch Disney+ and Marvel movies because they think American culture is cool. Bad decisions by a single regime could undermine all of these things. Trips from BC to the United States have fallen about 40% since last year and I do not expect that trend to change for years. In addition, as long as the executives and critical assets of those companies are based in the United States they are subject to extortion.

In my view, it is very risky to invest 34-43% of your money in one foreign country with a faltering authoritarian regime. So in August 2025, I have made the second major change in my investment strategy since 2013, moved away from one-fund solutions, and bought a collection of investments that limits regime risk.

I do not think that any strategy could make investing in the 21st century safe. Even the insurance industry is issuing warnings that they may not be able to insure projects in some regions as climate change accelerates. But not investing too much in any one security, any one sector, or any one country reduces your risk.

(scheduled 14 August 2025)

PS. it was Nortel which grew to 1/3 of the entire Canadian stock market before collapsing in 2001. As of this writing, just ten stocks in the IT and surveillance sector make up 37% of the US stock market. Buying the biggest 500 stocks in the US market does not buy as much diversification as you might hope.

PPS. One euphemism for this is geographical diversification, but the reason a fifteenth-century Italian might invest in both Ravenna and Venice was not that one bit of the Adriatic coast was more vulnerable to floods, plagues, or Turks than the other. It was that one was part of the Romagna under Papal supervision, and the other was definitely not, so one foolish doge or pope could not ruin both cities.

PPPS. If I had enough money, I would talk to a brokerage or financial planner until I got a clear answer on which assets could be frozen or confiscated by a US government order. I am not a lawyer or financial advisor so I will not post my suspicions here.

#economicHistory #finance #investing #modern #notAnExpert

The invention of the ox-drawn plough was a turning point in the #prehistory of #agriculture because it was the first time food production was decoupled from human labour (https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.105).

This is why, from Medieval Europe to the ancient Near East, farms were measured by the number of oxen (later horses etc.) working it, not people (https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118970959.ch8)

Yet it's surprisingly difficult to pinpoint when this actually happened.

#Archaeology #History #Economics #EconomicHistory

The middle class wasn’t a gift.
It was won. ⚖️

From burghers demanding rights in medieval towns to bureaucrats shaping policy today, the story of this class is the story of power redistribution.

🔗 https://brewminate.com/from-medieval-burghers-to-modern-bureaucrats-a-historical-anatomy-of-the-middle-class/

#Brewminate #MiddleClass #HistoryUnfolded #BurghersToBureaucrats #EconomicHistory #ClassConsciousness