I have posted about the cost of a shirt in fifteenth-century England, and the price of a tunic in the time of emperor Constantine. That is not the earliest date which we can explore! Writing on scraps of stone from Egypt and clay tablets from Ugarit tell us how much a garment cost in the Late Bronze Age around 1500 to 1100 BCE.
Many short everyday documents survive from the village of Deir el Medina. The village was built to house workers for the Valley of the Kings, then abandoned in the Late Period when it became clear that burying all the kings along the same wadi would not keep them safe. The villagers had access to scribes who managed the King’s work, but they also lived in the Red Land of the desert where texts painted or scratched on potsherds and limestone fragments did not wash clean or sink into the mud when the Nile flooded. And so we know all kinds of things about these ordinary Egyptians which we don’t know about farmers and carpenters who lived in the Black Land along the Nile and in its Delta.
At Deir el Medina, a simple garment of rough linen cost about 5 deben (a weight, usually of copper). Janssen suggested that the families which built tombs in the Valley of the Kings were paid 12 to 15 deben per month in goods and services, including grain worth 9 deben. It is pretty typical of the world before the 20th century that 60-75% of most people’s incomes was spent on food and drink. The workers were probably a bit wealthier than the average person in an agrarian society (and certainly in New Kingdom Egypt). Their houses were built on plots about 5 × 15 metres which would be very familiar to medieval townsfolk or villagers. If we assume that a month has 20 working days, then paying 5 deben out of a month’s income of 12 to 15 deben was 6.66 to 8.33 days’ income for that garment of rough linen.
We have more prices from the Bronze Age city of Ugarit in Syria. The people of Ugarit wrote a unique alphabetic cuneiform script. Their city was destroyed in the disorders at the end of the Bronze Age, so many everyday documents were baked in burning houses and buried in mud-brick rubble. In these documents, a garment which is probably a tunic (ktn, probably the same root as Greek chiton and possibly English cotton) cost 1.5 to 2.5 shekels. Interpreting these prices is hard because we don’t have evidence for wages and incomes. In 1975 it was not even clear whether a shekel at Ugarit was 1/50 or 1/60 of a pound! The traditional standard in Babylonia was 1 shekel of silver to feed, fuel, and clothe a family for a month but that may have been optimistic. These garments were probably woollen, whereas the medieval shirt, Late Roman linen tunic, and New Kingdom Egyptian garment were all linen. But the prices from Ugarit are the first which I have seen where the price of a basic garment might be one or two months’ income for a family.
I am not sure where to find prices for garments from Old Babylonia or Old Assyria, but it might be possible to work out prices for garments in those cultures. That period around 1800-1500 BCE is probably as early as we could estimate prices from contemporary documents.
I wrote this post from the fragments of old notes so I can’t give exact page numbers. Projects like Jansen’s are unfashionable because there are so many unknowns and so many factors that can affect quality. Readers of Terry Pratchett novels or shoppers at retailers in Canada know that not all boots or cotton slacks last equally long and work equally well. In the 20th century, it was more fashionable to construct price series for basic commodities such as a bushel of wheat or the wage of a country thatcher. But I still think that prices for clothing in historical documents give a feel for the past, and are more reliable than guessing how long hobbyists today would need to make the same garment. When you have a spindle put in your hand before you can walk, or spinning and weaving is the only way you can feed your children, you get good! Today the old tailors of Naples tell anyone who listens that by the time someone has graduated from university they are too old to learn the art of tailoring.
Further Reading
Jac J. Janssen, Commodity Prices From the Ramesside Period. E.J. Brill: Leiden, Netherlands, 1975.
Robert R. Stieglitz, “Commodity Prices at Ugarit, ” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 99, No. 1 (1979), pp. 15-23 especially page 19
Colin Clark and Margaret Haswell, The Economics of Subsistence Agriculture (1970)
(scheduled ?)
https://www.bookandsword.com/2024/02/10/how-much-did-a-garment-cost-in-the-bronze-age/
#ancient #ancientEgypt #economicHistory #historicalClothing #LateBronzeAge #tunicCosts
The New Faces of Tailoring — Die, Workwear!
About ten years ago, I traveled to Naples, Italy to interview bespoke tailors for some stories I was writing for various outlets. When you interview enough tailors, particularly those of an older generation, you will hear the same stories repeated.Derek Guy (Die, Workwear!)
Peter Brueghel the Elder, The Harvesters (1565: now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, accession number 19.164). Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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.
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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}
- 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 in the 3 to 5 pounds a year range 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
https://www.bookandsword.com/2017/12/09/how-much-did-a-shirt-really-cost-in-the-middle-ages/
#economicHistory #HenryVIII #historicalClothing #medieval #modern #tunicCosts
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