A few months ago I did an episode on credit in Tudor England, and the big shift that was happening out of Renaissance thought – credit is a deep manifestation in the belief that tomorrow will be better than today (ie, lend me money so I can start a bakery, which will succeed, and I can pay you back in a year or two). If you want more on that, you can listen to the episode here, or read the transcript.
But what about other money? When someone received an award of £100, what was that actually worth? What would that buy you?
Let’s talk about Tudor money for a minute.
To start with, there’s a brilliant currency converter at the National Archives. You can enter in an amount, choose the year, and it will tell you what it would have bought you, and what it’s worth today.
It’s important, when converting currency, to remember that it’s not an apples to apples comparison. Food today is much cheaper than it was even just a few generations ago, for example. Cloth was also much more expensive. But healthcare for the average person, who was dealing with a healing woman or midwife, wasn’t as expensive (even if you’re on a national health plan, medicines, machines, operations, x-rays, tests, all have to be paid for by someone). So it’s not so much about what it’s worth in 2019 money, but about what it could get you. Could you afford to survive? Live well?
So that £100 in 1510, a year after Henry VIII came to the throne, would be worth about £66,000 in today’s money. You could buy 3,333 days of skilled labor with that, for example. Or 263 cows, or 70 horses.
Tudor money was all in coins – paper money wasn’t inserted into the currency until the 18th century (those who watch Poldark will remember the suspicion with which the miners viewed paper money a few episodes back).
All coins had either gold or silver in them, but the amount differed making the coins more or less valuable depending on how much they were mixed with other metals.
England still uses pounds and pence, but the shilling ended in 1971. During the Tudor period a pound had 240 pennies. A half penny was half a penny – you would cut the penny in half. And a farthing was a quarter of a penny. Do you ever see the abbreviation d in household account lists? It stands for the Roman name denarius, which was the silver coin of Rome, and it represented a penny. So something that was 13d was 13 pennies.
Shillings were expressed with an s which came from sestertius, another Roman coin. There were twenty shillings to each pound (and remember, 240 pennies to a pound, so 12 pennies in a shilling).
An unskilled laborer would earn somewhere between £5 and £10 a year. Skilled workmen could earn 6d a day. 1lb of cheese cost 1 1/2d. It cost 12d to hire a horse for the day and 4d for a dozen eggs. So for that 6d a skilled workman earned he could buy a dozen eggs and a pound of cheese with half a penny left over.
Here’s a list of the coins the Tudors used:
one fine sovereign = one pound and ten shillings
one pound = twenty shillings
one angel = ten shillings
one crown = five shillings
one half-crown = two shillings and six pence
one shilling = twelve pennies
one sixpence = six pennies
one groat = four pennies
halfgroat = two pennies
threefarthing = 3/4 of a penny
one farthing = 1/4 penny
Makes perfect sense, right?
People used to cheat the system by chopping off tiny amounts around the edges – notice how today coins have a texture at the edge? That’s so that we can’t do the same thing. Then they’d melt them down, and make new coins.
Do you think you could keep it all straight? I don’t!
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, one of the longest running indie history podcasts, going since 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. She writes books, created the original Tudor Planner (a yearly diary filled with Tudor history) and in 2019 created the world's first Tudorcon (you can "attend" online this year!). She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.