What Things Actually Cost in Tudor England

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A skilled craftsman in early Tudor London earned sixpence for a day's work. I've been staring at that number for ages, because on its own it tells you nothing. Sixpence out of what? Buys what? Compared to whom?So I went digging, and it turns out if you follow that one coin up and down the Tudor social ladder you end up seeing the whole society. The housemaid on a pound a year. The brewer on ten. The king who spent thirty-six thousand pounds on an eighteen-day party in a field.

We get into the coins themselves, which have the best names in the world, including the gold angel that doubled as medicine.

We climb from the bottom of the ladder to the top. We work out what sixpence would actually buy you at a market stall. And then we get to 1544, when Henry VIII started secretly putting less silver in the coins, and everybody's wages stopped working.

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