Thread by @BretDevereaux

Let's have a fun topic and talk about GOLD(!) or more specifically why medieval and fantasy settings which use 'gold' as the main currency are pretty much bonkers.

And also what a more grounded currency system might look like! 1/

I'm going to lean on the currency system of the Roman Republic and early empire but I'm make reference to other systems too.

I am not going to convert to modern values though; that's a hopeless task. Too many incomparables. 2/

The big problem is that a gold coin of almost any size was such an absurdly large unit of currency as to be basically useless.

The basic Roman gold coin was the aureus; at 20mm diameter and 7(ish) grams, it's about the size of a quarter, roughly. 3/

But as a small coin, it packs a big punch; valued at 25 denarii an aureus represented probably a bit more than a month's pay for a skilled worker. It was 1/9th of the ANNUAL pay of a Roman soldier in the time of Augustus. 4/

Put another way, the average price of grain - the main food staple - was probably around 3HS (= sestertius) per modius. An aureus was 100HS so worth 33 modii of grain (= c. 220kg; or 485 lbs of grain).

It's enough to feed a family of seven for two months. 5/

So this is a unit of currency way too big to do any kind of normal transactions with. I suspect many Romans would go years never seeing one of these damn things; most Romans probably never had cause to use one. 6/

So what might the aureus be for?
1) Storing value, when you need a LOT of value in a small place (only really applicable to the very wealthy who might have so much money)
2) big transactions, especially wholesale trade.
3) unit of account (for the rich) 7/

And you see this pattern repeat later in the broader Mediterranean. The aureus is phased out by the solidus, a 4.5g gold coin.

Later on we see the florin (3.4g) and the ducat (3.5g) serve similar purposes. 8/

Gold was so valuable that nearly all gold coins were like this: even a small gold coin was going to be such a large unit of account that it was going to mostly be for large-scale trade or elites. 9/

The one odd duck here is the pound sterling, a silver currency unit so big as to be equal to one of these gold coins, the gold solidus (indeed, aimed by the Carolingians to replace the solidus, the supply of which was mostly controlled by Constantinople). 10/

So if your RPG character or fantasy hero walks into a tavern with '30 gold' in his pocket, there's a good chance he could *buy the inn* with that - check out the prices on some of the buildings in the 14th century here: medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html

11/

So if gold currency is out, what did people use?

Silver! Which is why 'silver' - not gold! - is slang for 'money' in Latin (argentum) and ancient Greek (ἄργυρος) and Spanish (plata), etc.

A silver coin was still a big unit, but small enough to have regular use. 12/

The ancient coins here were the Roman denarius and the Greek drachma, both 4.5g (or so) of silver. A drachma a day seems to have been a fairly frequent wage for skilled or dangerous work (like soldiering, for instance). The Roman soldier's 225 denarii per year was similar. 13/

(Note that when thinking about labor pay rates in the ancient world work was very irregular. So a laborer who gets a drachma a day and a soldier who gets a regular paycheck of 225 denarii a year are probably close in terms of earnings; w/ soldier better off) 14/

To give a sense of size, silver was still valuable enough that a broadly useful silver coin needed to be pretty small. The denarius was a bit heavier but about the same size as a modern dime (c. 17mm diameter). The difference is that it was 90+% silver, initially. 15/

A denarius could buy about a modius of bread (6.78kg-ish; modius is a unit of dry measure so weight varies), which would feed a grown man for about a week or our family of seven for a day with a bit left over (though it would still require a bit of preparation work). 16/

The shilling - part of that Carolingian currency system, 1/20th of a pound, like the denarius is 1/25th of an aureus - seems to have a comparable value (not exact mind you!) in the late Middle Ages. Between 1s and 0.5s (=6d) seems to have been typical for non-noble soldiers. 17/

So this is a unit of currency that's still chunky - you aren't going to casually toss one of these as a tip unless you are loaded - but it's the sort of chunky unit of currency a regular person might use on a regular basis.

But what about if you need to make change? 18/

There are two options here: super-small silver coins - like the Carolingian denier (just c. 1g) or the Greek obol - but you also see physically larger bronze or copper coins, like the Roman sesterius, 1/4th of a denarius but 25g in brass. They're big and very pretty. 19/

Often these units were further subdivided; half-pennies (the penny or pence being another word for the Carolingian denier) were common. The sestertius could be halved into the dupondius or quartered into the as (which could in turn be halved into the semis). 20/

All of that said, some things - luxury goods but also basically anything made out of metal - were really expensive.

Prices varied a LOT over the centuries, but things like good metal tools could often run single-digit (or more) in the denarii/shillings range. 21/

Good military equipment was REALLY expensive. A decent war horse might run £10+ - that's *pounds* (keep in mind, not modern pounds, but that HUGE unit of account)*

In 1304 a good mail shirt cost £10-15, an eye-popping sum decisively out of reach for all but the well-to-do. 22/

For comparison that mail price is more than a quarter of the total annual wages of a skilled artisan in an urban guild in the same place (1304 Bruges). An enormous investment even for such a relatively well-off person. 23/

All of which I think works to drive home another important point about the stratification in these societies: the difference in spending power between the peasant and the modestly well-off burgher was basically unbridgeably massive. 24/

So don't think in gold, think in silver - and in very small units. For most people basic food and lodging would eat basically all of their money; the idea of saving a few 'big coins' for weapons or armor would have either been a huge generational investment or absurd. 25/

Finally to pick up on that * above...war horse prices - a warning here: the prices of war horses specifically were notably unstable (more so than everything else, which was already also unstable) in the Middle Ages. We see order-of-magnitude fluctuations. 26/

Also just a shout out for the now quite retro Exile/Avernum series by @spiderwebsoft which I played when I was young which specified that 'gold' didn't really mean 'gold' but just general barterables of various kinds.

Always thought that was a neat thing to note. end/