When I began to write medievalist fantasy fiction but wanted some aspects of gritty realism in my work, I decided to start by finding out how much money a person would need to afford adequate food and drink daily in such a society. I wanted to know the daily wage for common laborers and soldiers in real history. I wanted to know how much money the typical knight had access to each day or year.

I expected to find simple answers quickly and easily. (Any trained medieval historians reading the previous sentence are chuckling. I hear them like a choir of intellectual angels.)

Decades later (I’m not joking), I know that no simple answers to such questions exist. You need to form or limit the question based on dozens of variables, and our incomplete documentary evidence often still will contain contradictions.

But if I limit my time boundaries to the fifty or hundred years before 1347 A.D., I can find numerous records establishing that 1.5 to 2 silver pennies was a normal wage for an unskilled laborer in the U.K. and parts of Western Europe. Men could receive extra wages for working longer hours (called “pressing the pace”), and wages sometimes doubled or tripled in areas with labor shortages but necessary work (i.e., bringing in the harvest).

Daily hours approximated a modern eight-hour workday to allow men and women to work their land holdings or to run some sort of small business. A household’s wife, or ale wife, might routinely brew small batches of ale for sale from her house. A farmer could work extra hours on a wealthier farmer’s land or maybe work as a general laborer on a nearby construction project.

But consuming bread and ale costs money, too. Depending on quality of grain or ale quality, a man might spend several copper coins or up to a silver penny for a two-pound loaf of bread and 1 silver penny for a gallon of decent ale. Or if he was lucky enough to have meal privileges as a member of a household, he might spend nothing out of pocket because eating at meals in the lord’s hall was a part of his wages.

Many people could eat from their lord’s kitchen on the feast days. People would receive special bonuses for good service, and affluent lords built their reputations by conspicuous wealth-sharing. Soldiers sometimes secured a share of battlefield loot that could change their fortunes permanently.

Once the bubonic plague hit Europe in the first wave of the Black Death (late 1347 into 1352 A.D., with later outbreaks, too), workers often could extract higher wages, inflationary prices became more visible, and pushback from landowners or business owners increased wage volatility.

Over time, I’m going to document some of the specifics I found in the medieval research. But if you want to explore the subject yourself, I strongly encourage you to start with Christopher Dyer’s excellent books on such issues in England. Try Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in English c. 1200–1520 and Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520.