How much money did a person earn for wage labor in medieval Europe?

Okay, this question will require a series of posts to answer because of the many complications. In which country? When? For skilled or unskilled labor? Working as day laborers, or soldiers, or household members? Before or after the Black Death? Including or not including allowances for food, clothing, or weapons and armor? For a high- or low-status employer?

But assume a period of relatively low inflation and a place with a sensible money system—say, England from around 1250 to 1350 A.D.

The standard English money system centered around the pound, shilling, and pence (French and Latin equivalents exist). One pound was twenty shillings, one shilling was twelve pence, and so one pound was 240 pence. The pound was often money of account, rather than coined currency, but during some periods, gold coins did exist.

Silver coins, though, were the common circulating currency, and coin shortages were surprisingly common. Trade often happened in equivalent exchanges of goods. [Practically every good historical museum has a coin display–see my featured image from a Shanghai museum–and the history of coinage is fascinating in itself. Do not underestimate how much trouble societies had with keeping an adequate supply of coin in circulation.

Now, even though medieval records are almost always maddeningly incomplete, enough household accounts and other documents survive to provide a lot of specific information regarding England, France, and many other parts of Europe. The problem is, you frequently need to painstakingly piece together the information you are interested in from many different sources.

The multi-volume works produced by academic researchers are not always easy to access, and many readers find academic monographs to be a difficult slog. But the single-volume textbooks released by university presses are often extremely useful and easy to read. Probably your best starting readings, if you are trying to create a believable or coherent medievalist economy, are two books by Christopher Dyer: Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge University Press, 1994 (1989)) and Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520 (Yale University Press, 2005 (2002)).

Dyer shares that a building worker could make two pence (2d.) per day in 1250 (SoL, xv), so the worker could buy a gallon of weak ale for one pence or less and a two-pound loaf of bread for about one pence.* Skilled masons or carpenters made more, but strong ale or wheat bread also would cost more (wheat or white bread was the prestige food), and bread prices varied based on the type of grain used in the baking.

Securing a place in a noble’s household, with a daily meal allowance from the hall’s kitchen, would be an attractive option by comparison.

*The price of ale and bread varies widely across sources and over time, and most sources report wide variance between official attempts to set prices and actual market prices. Dyer also included the calculation that one quarter of grain (290 litres), or eight bushels, could yield about 250 two-pound loafs (xv, 57). If I did the conversion correctly, one quarter of grain weighs about 460 pounds. See the problem with keeping an army in the field well supplied with bread?