OLD-TIME LIVING EXPENSES.
Figures Which Must Convince the $10-a-Week Clerk That He Came Too Late—Had He Flourished in England Several Centuries Ago He Might Have Cut as Wide a Swath as a Present-Day Millionaire.
It makes the ordinary, hard-working householder envious to see the luxurious display of fortune’s favorites. He finds it hard enough struggle to get the necessaries of life without any of its delicacies, and to keep the cost within his income. Nor can he look back into the days of long ago for consolation. It only increases his discomfiture to compare his expense account with those of his ancestors.
If a man had a quarter in his pocket in the days of the Plantagenets, for instance, he could keep his family well supplied for a week. With that amount of money he could smile at the butcher, bow openly to the grocer, and look the rest of the world as squarely in the face as did the village blacksmith.
If he lived in England seven hundred years ago and wished to regale his family on mutton, he could buy the finest of fat sheep for twenty-four cents, which would almost allow him to give a banquet on a pennyworth of mutton. A cow was more expensive, but one dollar and a half would buy the best he could find in the market, while for a fat hog he need only part with eighty cents.
In the fourteenth century, two cents would buy a pair of chickens, and a nickel for a goose fit to grace any Christmas dinner-table, and a penny would purchase a dozen new-laid eggs; while for two cents the brewer was compelled by law to sell three gallons of beer, the equivalent of forty-eight glasses.
Wheat sometimes fell as low as forty cents a quarter, though after a great storm, or In a time of “grievous famine,” it would rise as high as four and five dollars a quarter. Still, at these prices a good many pounds of bread could be bought for a penny.
Pasture and arable lands were ridiculously cheap—two cents an acre for the former and twelve cents an acre for the latter being considered a fair annual rental. Draft-horses were a drug on the market at seventy-two cents each, and oxen at one dollar and twenty cents. In the days of the second Henry fifty dollars would have equipped a farm with three draft-horses, half a dozen oxen, twenty cows, and two hundred sheep, leaving a balance of two dollars toward the payment of the rent—about five dollars a year.
As for labor, three cents a day was deemed good wages for an ordinary laborer, and even at harvest-time four cents a day was the highest sum expected.
House rent was so absurdly small that the Lord Mayor of London paid only four dollars and eighty cents a year to his landlord; and the Chancellor, with an annual salary of one hundred and ninety-two dollars, seemed poorer than many a cook of our own time. When a father sent his son to a university six centuries ago, four cents a day was considered a comfortable allowance, with a margin for such luxuries as wine at eight or twelve cents a gallon.