What was it worth when it was made?
Put in a price and the year it was paid, any year from 1209 to 2025. You get two answers, because there are two honest ones — and for anything old they are very far apart.
£5 in 1890 was about 6 weeks of work, when an average week’s pay was £0.81.
Why two answers, and which one you want
Prices and wages have not moved together. Over three centuries wages have risen far faster than the cost of goods, so the same sum looks modest measured against prices and substantial measured against pay. Neither figure is wrong; they answer different questions.
Use the price figure for ordinary goods and for asking what a sum would cover — rent, bread, a coach fare.
Use the work figure for anything made by hand, which is most of what this catalogue holds. A silver teapot that cost a craftsman’s month of wages was a serious object, however small the price looks on a modern index.
Questions about old money
How much is a guinea?
Twenty-one shillings — one pound and one shilling, or £1.05. It is the trap in old prices, because it looks like a pound and is five per cent more. Guineas were the unit of account for luxuries, professional fees and anything sold at auction long after the coin stopped being minted in 1814, which is exactly the kind of object this catalogue records. A price in guineas is itself a signal: it says the seller thought of the piece as a fine thing rather than a commodity.
What does “5/6” mean?
Five shillings and sixpence — a quarter of a pound, not five pounds six. The slash separates shillings from pence, and “12/-” means twelve shillings exactly. This is the commonest misreading of old prices by a wide margin, and it is wrong by a factor of about twenty.
How was a pound divided before 1971?
Twenty shillings to the pound, twelve pence to the shilling — 240 pence in all. Written £ s d, from the Latin librae, solidi, denarii, which is why a pound is sometimes written with an l. Decimalisation on 15 February 1971 replaced it with 100 new pence.
Why do the two answers differ so much?
Because wages have risen much faster than prices. A working week bought far less in 1800 than it does now, so a sum that looks small against a price index was a large share of what someone earned. For handmade objects the work figure is usually the meaningful one: it tells you how much labour the buyer was exchanging for the thing.
How reliable are the early figures?
Less so the further back you go, and the page rounds accordingly. Figures from the last two centuries rest on official statistics. Before that they are reconstructions from surviving records — wage books, manorial accounts, price series assembled by economic historians — and they describe England, and later Great Britain, rather than anywhere else. They are the best available estimates, not measurements.
Does this work for other currencies?
No. Both series are British, so the answers are only meaningful for sums in sterling. A price in francs, thalers or dollars would need that country’s own price and wage history, and converting at a modern exchange rate first would be worse than not answering.
Where the numbers come from
- Bank of England, A Millennium of Macroeconomic Data for the UK 1209–2016
- Office for National Statistics, series D7BT and KAB9 2017–2025
The two official series were compared over every year they both cover before being joined. The price indices agreed to within 0.03% across the twenty-nine shared years; the earnings series differ by 1.7% across seventeen, because they are measured differently, and the later one is scaled at the join so the result is continuous. No year is interpolated — every one carries a real observation.
Figures are rounded, deliberately. A price from 1712 converted to the nearest penny would be false precision: these are indices reconstructed from surviving records, and they carry real uncertainty the further back you go.