Armor and weapon costs for nobiltity

[egamma]

Longmane, or anyone else,
Can you find some cost ranges for armor and weapons? There's a feature request/suggestion for plate armor--what did that cost 1000 years ago?

[Longmane]

ha I've not for the life of me been able find the answer in one of my books yet, so I hope this will help for now.


http://web.mit.edu/21h.416/www/militarytechnology/armor.html


I'm quite certain someone on here will be able tell us what the value of a pound (£) then would be worth today 



 

[Zakilevo]

Read number 3

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aams/hd_aams.htm#expense_b

isn't much on it but does have some good facts like a helmet was pretty expensive.

[Shizzle]

to the cost of an entire armory of an English knight, the contents of which were valued in 1374 at over £16. This was equivalent to about five to eight years of rent for a London merchant's house, or over three years' worth of wages for a skilled laborer, a single helmet (a bascinet, probably with aventail) being worth the purchase price of a cow.

I suppose that would set the knight's armory around €50.000 (based on the skilled labourer earning €1500 a month?). Yahoo tells me a cow is about $500.

^Hm, this doesn't really help, does it?

also, I consier this badass: "The Mongols wore thick silk inner clothing which would not prevent arrows going into the body, but would not let the arrowhead go through the cloth, so it could easily be pulled out later(1)."

[Zakilevo]

yeah. Mongols took all the silk in china to make cover themselves with silk. And silk was bloody expensive...

As for the cost of knight equipment, helmet = cow... crazy. Having a warhorse was equivalent to having a small private airplane...

[De-Legro]

"At the upper end of the scale, we find examples such as a large garniture (a basic suit of armor that, through the addition of further pieces and plates, could be adapted for various purposes both on the battlefield and in different types of tournament) commissioned in 1546 by a German king (later emperor) for his son. For this commission, the court armorer Jörg Seusenhofer of Innsbruck received on completion a year later the enormous sum of more than 1,200 gold coins, equivalent to twelve times the annual salary of a senior court official. "

Nuff said

[Shizzle]

"At the upper end of the scale, we find examples such as a large garniture (a basic suit of armor that, through the addition of further pieces and plates, could be adapted for various purposes both on the battlefield and in different types of tournament) commissioned in 1546 by a German king (later emperor) for his son. For this commission, the court armorer Jörg Seusenhofer of Innsbruck received on completion a year later the enormous sum of more than 1,200 gold coins, equivalent to twelve times the annual salary of a senior court official. "

Nuff said

So a senior court official earns about one third of a gold coin or less a day. In our system, that would be 4 silverlings. Advies live on one piece of silver a day. Nice

[Indirik]

Isn't it one per turn? i.e two a day?

[vonGenf]

yeah. Mongols took all the silk in china to make cover themselves with silk. And silk was bloody expensive...

As for the cost of knight equipment, helmet = cow... crazy. Having a warhorse was equivalent to having a small private airplane...

That's why <1% of the population was noble.

Remember, income inequality was orders of magnitude higher then than it is now. There was no concept of middle class.

[egamma]

So...we could start armor out at 10 gold, and knights could add to it little by little, and have it be mentioned in battles when the total cost of the armor reaches 300 gold?

[Haerthorne]

Don't forget that, due to the extreme costs involved, it was not beneath a knight to steal from his opponents. There are cases of young knights being reprimanded for not having done so when they realise how poor they are. In tourneys it was even considered perfectly ok to take bits and pieces of (easily carried) equipment from other knights you felled, so in a battle with squires and the like you could carry off a knight and gain more money from his gear than from the ransom. This is all largely in France and Germany however.

Armour did get more and more complicated as the centuries went on though.

[Shizzle]

Didn't realise this thread was old so started googling. With results

=CPI&year_early=1649&pound71=5&shilling71=&pence71=&amount=5&year_source=1649&year_result=2008]http://www.measuringworth.com/ppoweruk/result.php?use[]=CPI&year_early=1649&pound71=5&shilling71=&pence71=&amount=5&year_source=1649&year_result=2008

Here you can read that £5 from 1649 would be worth £499 today.

On http://web.mit.edu/21h.416/www/militarytechnology/armor.html we read: "while in 1641 a custom-made one with lots of decorations for a prince went up to 340 pounds."

That would mean (340/5)*499 = £33932

[Tom]

That would mean (340/5)*499 = £33932

Which sounds reasonable, even cheap. Try getting a custom-fitted armour with decorations made today.

[vonGenf]

Which sounds reasonable, even cheap. Try getting a custom-fitted armour with decorations made today.

While the handwork that goes into can be probably be translated to modern times in such a way (how long does it take to do it, how much is a typical artisan hourly pay), I would have thought the price of steel back then to be way, way higher. Does anyone have any source for medieval ressource prices?

[Chenier]

That's why <1% of the population was noble.

Remember, income inequality was orders of magnitude higher then than it is now. There was no concept of middle class.

I have a hard time believing this.

Also, how much does a B-2 bomber cost?
I think you'll come to the conclusion that the price of a helmet (a cow) does not compare to the astronomical prices we pay for miltiary equipment today. A cow, while quite expensive because of intensive breed-perfection programs, just doesn't compare to the price of modern military equipment.