SC - Desserts (was planning a German Feast)

[Rosalyn MacGregor]

> Maybe, but let's do a little math exercise here. 1/4 pound, be it troy
> or avoirdupois, for a penny, which is a silver coin commonly thought to
> represent the earning capacity of a laborer for a day. If that's the
> case, then we're talking about an ounce of grains of paradise at roughly
> 1/4 to 1/3 of a laborer's (not the poorest of the poor) daily wage. Of
> course they wouldn't be buying an ounce a day or anything, but given the
> percentage of likely savings and/or disposable income for a laborer,
> what would you guess the likelihood was that grains of paradise were a
> regular part of the diet of, say, the lower middle class, whatever that is...

Uh. A 'laborer' isn't lower middle class. Laboreres are part of the class
we never talk about in the US any more: the lower or working class. A
number of the economic history books I've been perusing tend to believe
that the 'laborer' in question would be someone along the lines of an
assistant or helper-- basically the medieval equivalent of the guys Bruce
Springsteen sings about. ;) If a peasant was working as a laborer, that
would probably be in addition to whatever the ledger balance was on the
farm at home. 
An interesting page for comparison purposes is the Medeieval Prices page
in the Halsall Medieval Sourcebook.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/medievalprices.html


 -- 
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
"I do my job. I refuse to be responsible for other people's managerial 
hallucinations." -- Lady Jemina Starker