How many peasant lives are worth 1 royal life?

How many peasant lives are worth 1 royal life?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weregild
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidus_(coin)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churl
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_Renaissance#Carolingian_currency
regia.org/research/misc/costs.htm
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

In Anglo-Saxon Britain there was an official value IIRC.

A peasant was worth 200 and a nobleman 12000 cows or something like that.

lol how'd they figure that?

>200 cows for one shitty peasant
No deal

200 pissants for a king? Lol

Sorry, I got that wrong. It's 200 and 1200 shillings, not cows, for a freeman and a nobleman, respectively.

>Weregild (also spelled wergild, wergeld (in archaic/historical usage of English), weregeld, etc.), also known as man price, was a value placed on every being and piece of property, for example in the Frankish Salic Code. If property was stolen, or someone was injured or killed, the guilty person would have to pay weregild as restitution to the victim's family or to the owner of the property.[1][2]

>In 9th century Mercian law a regular freeman (churl) was worth 200 shillings[5] (twyhyndeman), and a nobleman was worth 1,200 (twelfhyndeman),

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weregild

all of them

So how much income would that be?
Like is 200 shillings a lot?

This. Will it be like a month's salary to muder my douchebag neighbour? Or more like three years worth?

Were peasants free to kill? Or cheaper by the dozen?

>King Offa of Mercia began minting silver pennies on the Carolingian system c.785. As on the continent, English coinage was restricted for centuries to the penny, while the scilling, understood to be the value of a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere,[6]
Lol so it might have been the value of a cow (in Kent) after all. 200 cows for killing your neighbor.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidus_(coin)

In Anglo-Saxon society a peasant was a freeman.

> churl (etymologically the same name as Charles / Carl and Old High German karal), in its earliest Old English (Anglo-Saxon) meaning, was simply "a man", and more particularly a "husband",[1] but the word soon came to mean "a non-servile peasant", still spelled ċeorl(e), and denoting the lowest rank of freemen
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churl

More on the shilling
>The solidus (Latin for "solid"; pl. solidi), nomisma (Greek: νόμισμα, nómisma, lit. "coin"), or bezant was originally a relatively pure gold coin issued in the Late Roman Empire. Under Constantine, who introduced it on a wide scale, it had a weight of about 4.5 grams. It was largely replaced in Western Europe by Pepin the Short's currency reform, which introduced the silver-based pound/shilling/penny system, under which the shilling (Latin: solidus) functioned as a unit of account equivalent to 12 pence
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidus_(coin)
>As the debased solidus was then roughly equivalent to 11 of these pennies, the shilling (solidus; sol) was established at that value, making it 1/22 of the silver pound.[22]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_Renaissance#Carolingian_currency

Shillings did not have a definitive value in Anglo-saxon England. Different places had different notions of what a shilling was worth. The only thing that remained constant throughout the country was that 1 pound was worth 1 pound of silver and that there were 240 pennies in a pound. That's why shillings weren't minted.
Some values
>Kent
>1s=20p
>Wessex
>1s=5p
>Mercia
>1s=4p
The purchasing power of the era is essentially impossible to estimate accurately. Hodgkin goes just a little into this in "The history of England ... to the Norman conquest", and he suggests directly converting 1 Wessex shilling to 1 pound Stirling at the time of his writing - 1808.
After all conversions from Mercian shillings to 1808 pounds and then to today's money, you'd arrive at a value of 13,500 pounds for a peasant and 20,250 for a nobleman.
Some other places suggest instead a simpler 1s=100£ conversion which works out pretty well and I only found that out after writing all this and feel real dumb.
Here's the super simple conversion, including a list of Weregilds
regia.org/research/misc/costs.htm
The book is free on Google Books.

Also, the book was actually written in 1906 rather than 1808.
So the prices would have been 26,880 for a nobleman or 17,920 for a peasant.

There is not enough peasant lives

The crown, all of them.
The direct male heir to the crown, most of them.
Anyone else, two or three.

However many it takes to keep the monarch alive

Like 5 or 6 right now my dude...

>Changing a single pure and honest peasant girl for this.

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