Currency in the past

[Miseo]

Let's say, Ancient Rome or late medieval/early renaissance. I'm asuming money was not nearly as common as it is now. It was made from metals (sometimes precious metals) and probably wasn't circulated too much. How common was it for people living in a village or a city to have money? I would imagine in a village, money was rather scarce because the village had less trade and more bartering. In a city, how much of trade was exchange of money and how much was bartering?

What about farms... under feudalism land was owned by a lord, and serfs worked it. What happened to the produce? Did the lord keep all of it? Did he give it to the people or sell it on the market? Did the serfs keep some portion of the food they grew, and none of it made it to a market? And then for farming in Ancient Rome, I would imagine it was quite different...

Got lots of questions like this, but I think this is enough... been doing some research but it's pretty hard to find anything. Hopefully someone here knows more than I do.

 

[skip.knox]

>How common was it for people living in a village or a city to have money?
Common. More so in a city than in a village. More so among farmers and guildsmen than among the urban poor or cottagers.

>how much of trade was exchange of money and how much was bartering?
Impossible to say. Barter by its nature does not leave much of a record. But probably less barter than most people would picture for the Middle Ages. Especially the late MA.

Under manorialism (not feudalism), the lord got a percentage, the peasants got the rest. The balance varied by century and region, so it's hard to generalize. FTR, there is a significant difference between a serf and a peasant.

Farms in ancient Rome were family farms for the most part. The family might or might not also have slaves. Rather notoriously, there were times (late Republic, for example) when wealthy landowners bought out most of the family farms in Italy, working vast estates (called latifundia, which pretty much translates as vast estate) with hundreds and even thousands of slaves. Ancient agribusiness, if you will.

The history of agriculture is way more complex than one might expect.

 

[Miseo]

Thank you very much! That was a great answer.

 

[Alyssa]

I would agree with slip.knox that bartering was a lot less common than you might imagine. Currency itself is a form of barter system and allows you to have one thing that everyone agrees has a single universal value. You can see how a farmer might want to trade his turnips for coins, the coins won't rot and can still buy turnips if he runs out of food. The system would more likely revolve around currency and debts instead of bartering. If the debts got out of hand, then things would be repossessed.

In feudal cultures, farming produce was split into 3, tithing to the church, payment to the landowner, for personal use/sale. Alternatively, and I think more likely, the church and landowner might leave the farmer to sell their crops, often to an agent of the landowner (monopoly on price - so can set it low, so that 1: they know how much the farmer produced and 2: they can control the farmer's profit and therefore dependence on the landowner - feudal societies are a bit like a mafia). Finally, to finish of the medieval equivalent of wage slavery, the landowner owns the bars, smiths and other services in the local area. Meaning that the landowner controls the prices, forcing the farmers to break their backs farming from dawn till dusk in order to pay for tools, clothes, taxes, tithes and the landowner's cut, while also producing enough food for themselves. As a point of disclosure, I should say that I've never read this anywhere (apart from the fact that peasants/serfs were often regarded as slaves and that taverns were often run by the landlords) but it seems like a particularly devious and effective method of control.

 

[Miseo]

That makes sense actually. Thanks!

 

[skip.knox]

I hate to disagree so blatantly, but landowners did not for the most part own taverns. These were privately owned, though we cannot document the existence of taverns much before the 13thc. But, then, most of what people picture when you say "Middle Ages" really dates from the 14thc or later. Lords did, otoh, often own mills. They required all peasants to have their grain ground there. Smithies were all over the map; tough to generalize on that one.

But, really, there was so much variation in local economic arrangements, feel free to design whatever makes sense. Unless you're aiming for historical accuracy, of course, in which case be prepared for much research.

 

[Alyssa]

Hey slip, I was under the impression that in feudal societies the villages were often isolated, with the feudal lords demanding rent for the land and taxes for protection with the church taking its own slice. These little fiefdoms would be pretty much self sufficient, perhaps linking a small cluster of villages together with little external contact. It was only with the rise of capitalist systems on a large scale in the 15-17 centuries where land ownership became more distributed due to readily available wealth. Correct me if I'm wrong in this, but surely this suggests a concentration of wealth among the feudal landlords which is only broken by the advent of large scale capitalist systems. These areas are closed economic systems due to difficulty in transport at the times. If the landlord raises his rent or protection money demands, surely that will have downstream effects on everyone. Ultimately resulting in the peasants losing out as always. Also, smithies might be scattered all over the map but they still require ready access to customers and that will inevitably be the aristocracy first and the peasantry second, would it not?


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[skip.knox]

WRT smiths, their condition varied widely. There were villages with a thousand or more people in them that could definitely support a (poor) smith. OTOH, another village might be completely dependent on a smith who was the lord's serf. And everything in between.

I would not say villages were isolated, but much depends on how we define isolation. Weekly or monthly markets were pretty common west of the Rhine, save for what we might call "wastes" -- regions were the soil was too poor to support more than scattered farms. Same goes for the scenario of a small cluster of villages linked together with little external contact.

The places that tended to be isolated were fishing villages (I'm thinking particularly of those in the Hebrides in the north, or along the Cinque Terre or Riviera in the Mediterranean. Over in Galicia, too). Certain trades were isolated, such as shepherds or woodcutters, but we're talking about farming villages here.

I think in terms of layers of contact. So, villages might attend a weekly market, often held at some central place, which might be little more than a crossroad. But they would also be visited by travelers, everything from peddlers to mendicants or itinerant preachers to a circuit court or other representative of the nobility (or crown). All of these visits were occasions for trade. In addition, certain events brought villagers together, such as a marriage (exogamy was more common than endogamy). All very much petty commerce, but all things that broke isolation. Also there were what we today would call migrant workers, who might come in to help for a day or a season. The landless poor got around quite a bit.

Wealth was definitely concentrated among the nobility (and Church), but I don't think that speaks to isolation.

I don't want to overdraw this. I'm really speaking to the stereotype of "self-sufficient" villages living mainly through barter, which we can demonstrate pretty much did not exist. At the same time, a person could go weeks without speaking to anyone outside the circle of five hundred people in his village. He probably did not go years.

Where was the lord? Somewhere. Over in the next valley. Up on that hill there. Or maybe even a few days walk distant. Or one might live in the shadow of his walls. That, too, varied quite a bit.

 

[Miseo]

I should probably, like, screenshot all of this or something. Lots of info. Thanks

 

[Alyssa]

Of course "isolation" is only a relative thing, but if anything describes it well, it is the linguistic map of 1550s Europe above. The landless poor would indeed travel, but the fact that so many different languages, dialects and accents exist, shows that it would be just within their home spheres (accents and local patois aren't included in the map as there are just too many and mostly unknown in many a case). each color represents a unique language, while each section of fine lines represents a dialect, each dialect would have a handful of accents.
The reason languages across western countries (with the exceptions of belgium and switzerland) are so homogenous is because the ease of transport nowadays. It is undeniably true that the landless poor would get around a lot more than their landed counterparts, however, they would tend to stay within their linguistic areas. And any trade would be between villages nearby, but fading away with distance. It would be entirely possible, even likely, for someone born in a small village to travel no further than their closest town for the occasional trading visit/marriage arrangement. That's not very far, and its reflected in the linguistic map above.

 

[skip.knox]

The maps at that web site are tres nifty. I wish he'd used a clearer font! But the linguistic info does indeed show how fragmented Europe was (same is true elsewhere, of course). In particular it shows now rather nonsensical are the many historical maps that show only political boundaries.

It is worth mentioning that, despite the language differences, merchants managed to travel all across Europe and do business. The fairs of Champagne brought people from hundreds of miles away, and they sure weren't speaking Latin to each other. I don't really know how they managed this. I mean, as a Venetian, I might in the course of a day do business with someone from Cremona, then Frisia, then Nantes, then Narbonne. I certainly did not know all those languages and didn't bring my Universal Translator with me! I've never read a historian who even addressed the issue.

I dunno. Maybe they all spoke Common. ;-)

 

[Alyssa]

I've heard stories about some of the street markets in China. The vendors speak a hell of a lot of languages and if you don't respond to one, they try again with a different language. Also, it should be noted that languages unique to the area are prioritized, over The Common Tongue, in that map.
The website is extremely useful (and I'm glad that my world has industrialized sufficiently to allow me to explain away any similarities in language) for understanding how to build a realistic world (thank god for secondary world fantasy). It's also slightly broken with a few links that are more difficult to find.
http://www.muturzikin.com/carteseurope/imageseurope/carteeurope.png