#middleages — Public Fediverse posts

I’m reading #ProjectHailMary by #AndyWeir. I just finished The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the #MiddleAges by #NormanCohn.
 #books #BookSky

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5zca2ola2zxpkw37w4f3wxtu/post/3my3arsdtks2z

Since everyone is talking about #recession indicators, how would we define #poverty in the (high) #middleages?

First, we need to consider what a person in, say, 1290 #England actually needed to live.
1) #Bread. How much? Enough for roughly ~4 people (assuming a smallholding here).
2) some clothes (basic, rough things for all 4 people)
3) some wood to fuel the hearth (assuming our smallholders use bought wood, not dung or peat).

Now we put all of this in a #basket. If the #salary of the smallholding buys at least 1 basket, we are on the very line of true poverty. More than 1 basket? Not extremely poor!

Cottagers (those that had too little land to grow grain) occasionally fell under the basket-value.

Of course, if one lived through 1346-1353, a whole lot of baskets were suddenly purchasable! (For the small price of all your friends & family being dead.)

#economics #history #medieval #plague