How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)

https://www.bookandsword.com/2021/05/08/how-much-did-a-tunic-cost-in-the-roman-empire/

by leonry • 4 years ago

271 210 4 years ago

Something that continually just blows my mind is how new spinning wheels are. The most plausible range of time of arrival of the wheel in European contexts is between the mid-1200s to about 1340, which means that textiles produced previously to that were made with drop spindles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_(textiles)#Hand_spindl...

That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ideas like hand-spinning all the fabric for sails for ships, which is a seriously nontrivial amount of time!

lumost2• 4 years ago

It’s curious, if you go back in time far enough with all knowledge from the present, you’d surely arrive at a point where you still need to work your entire life to bring one component of one innovation to life. Even then, the innovation would be unlikely to survive your death due to other missing parts of the supply chain.

Try building a musket in Ancient Greece, you’d need to start with building the steel supply chain - which means drilling into granite with wooden and bronze hand tools…

chopin• 4 years ago

I am pretty sure you could build a musket from bronze. Afaik the early cannons where made of it.

Sourcing of the ingredients for black powder might have been harder.

rsecora• 4 years ago

Right, and getting the finance to start the journey will be problematic.

The elevator pitch for the musket will sound like black magic.

Shaanie• 4 years ago

I wonder which modern information would be actually useful a thousand years ago. Things like electricity, cumbustion engine etc wouldn't be very useful, but perhaps something steam-powered?

One low-hanging fruit would be sterilization and hand-washing for medical operations, at least.

showerst2• 4 years ago

There's a bunch of youtube channels with various takes on "starting from scratch". It seems like a mix of things that are very hard to bootstrap (metal being a big one!), and things that were more coincidental (lathes, saddles and riding gear, spinning looms).

Having a modern high school math education would make you the greatest mathematician in history up to about Newton, but more practically speaking I'm thinking that if you understood the principles behind good charcoal, a wood lathe, and how concrete and mortar actually work you could probably kick civilization up at least a few hundred years.

I'm envisioning something like this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IShxXtAev9U although they do rely on 18th century metals there you could start from less.

There's a great clickspring series where he thinks about what kind of knowledge and tools would be required to build the antikythera mechanism, I think that's a great example of "master tradesman that got surprisingly far by dedication to a few small areas, but then that knowledge was lost".

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

Well even that would vary widely. Some places it's easier to extract iron ore than others, or you could just melt down a meteorite and use that iron/steel to mine more ore.

Drilling also isn't necessarily so hard. Neolithic Chinese built perfectly circular discs out of jade, an extremely hard stone. They had no metal tools. It's possible that they could have developed more sophisticated equipment for mining rock, if they realized what they could do with it once they extracted it. https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/myster...

retrac2• 4 years ago

Yes, you wouldn't be building a steam engine with the tools of Greek artisans in antiquity, not even the ones who built the Antikythera mechanism. But we do know some things that would seem like crazy hacks to the ancients. For example, I know a simple trick. I can multiply numbers, of arbitrary size. And I can do it in a few seconds using just a stylus and tablet. This would have blown the minds of a learned Roman or Greek from that time.

For those who find the general idea enticing, there was a book written about 80 years ago on this idea. What if a time traveller got sent back to Ancient Rome? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall

A couple friends and I are big fans of the book, and premise. We always figured it was far too optimistic. Most likely you'd die of dysentery or be sold off into slavery. But assuming not, I figure the real path to power wouldn't be brandy, but strong acids and electroplating.

bluGill6• 4 years ago

If you have woodworking skills you could make a crude but working spinning wheel in about a week with crude tools. They are simple machines once you understand them, and most of it can be made crude and still work. The idea is what is hard not the construction which is why once one was made it spread fast. I suspect (I think Bret Devereaux would agree) that if the males who were allowed to be creative had thought about women's work at all they would have made one several thousand years before. I wouldn't be surprised is some unknown woman did create something close on her own but society norms meant it didn't spread (if this happened all evidence would have burned/rotted - Luddites of the day may have destroyed it and the inventor).

As a modern educated man I'd turn much of my attention to "women's work" first - in large part because there is low hanging fruit there that would make my life better. The spinning wheel and looms would be a great changer, and something I think just having seen one in a history museum and a few weeks to watch how women work would allow me to make things work, then a few months in the woods to make a prototype.

For "men's work" things are harder because society allowed smart men to think about improvements. Maybe I could create gunpowder, but I would prefer to focus my war efforts on a good defense. I know good steel has controlled amounts of manganese and carbon in it (I'm sure more than those two), but I don't know how to control those amounts and my visits to museums and chemistry classes haven't given me enough information to think I could create those from scratch. That is before we consider the amount of labor needed to get the ore. (though if metal is available I'd make a steam engine)

Note that the above assumes I end up in or near Europe. I have no idea if any of societies on the other continents could support the above efforts.

aledalgrande• 4 years ago

Related to this if you like the topic and anime, watch Dr. Stone.

ajuc3• 4 years ago

There's this "Conrad Stargard" book series about an engineer going back in time to 13th century Poland and starting industrial revolution there. The book is VERY, VERY sexist with a strong dose of ephebophilia, the hero is 100% Gary Stu with Catholic-supremacy mania, but the engineering challenges and solutions are quite well presented. The trick was to get a powerful patron early and adapt the technology to the limitations and the engineering looked pretty realistic to me.

For example he makes rails but no locomotives because pulling standarized cars with standarized containers along low-friction rails already brings most of the benefits of modern transport network and is much easier than designing a steam locomotive in 1230s.

There's a lot about industrializing cloth production there, too and it's quite detailed. I liked it despite all the awful stuff.

pomian• 4 years ago

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. A novel by Mark Twain. it is really fun.

jewel• 4 years ago

There's a book roughly on that topic called "How to Invent Everything" that I enjoyed, but I'm not sure I remember enough of it now to be of any good, so I'm going to be sure to grab it before going back in time.

Also along the same lines is "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm", which I also enjoyed and keep a copy around just in case.

kragen• 4 years ago

Would you? Maybe it depends on how hard you have to struggle merely to survive and how much freedom you have. If you were a helot in ancient Sparta you'd have to be careful not to draw the attention of the Spartiates; they'd kill you for sport if they thought you were too virtuous.

What is this about drilling into granite? The Egyptians were drilling into granite a thousand years earlier using copper tube drills and quartz sand, which they probably could have drilled a lot faster if they'd known about emery, but I don't understand where granite drilling fits into the steel supply chain.

But with freedom and some way to survive you can get pretty far. In only four and a half years, apparently without using modern materials other than a video camera and writing instruments, John Plant was able to bootstrap from sticks and stones up to celt axes, coarse pants (spun of course with a drop spindle), a centrifugal blower, iron smelting powered by it, fired bricks, several huts, ceramic tile roofs, underfloor heating, cob construction, bow and arrow, atlatl, lime cement, wood ash cement, crawfish traps, rock-heated soup pots, charcoal burning, a pump drill, and a monjolo.

He hasn't yet been able to smelt enough iron to make so much as a fishhook, though, and Australian law doesn't allow him to hunt animals for sinew, leather, catgut, bone, and bladder.

A thing he's missing so far is metrology, which is very important for chemistry and for muskets and other machines. He also doesn't have much in the way of chemical resources on his land: no saltpeter and no concentrated salt, though he could perhaps purify them from urine.

Still, imagine how far he could get in 40 years with all the knowledge from the present and without those restrictions. It's an amazing contrast to what most of us have achieved in modern life with much more resources.

https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology

slowhand092• 4 years ago

A lifetime ago I worked in a textile mill in the US. After a several months I worked my way up to be a machine operator, a weaver. I had upwards of 50 weaving machines I kept operating thru my shift. Each of these produced probably 80meters * 6meters of fabric in an 8 hour shift. And at this rate, mills in southeast asia were able to undercut prices so much the US industry collapsed.

ch4s34• 4 years ago

It's pretty amazing how much efficient you can build in if you're starting a process from scratch and know what the first mover did. This is precisely how the US pushed the UK out of the textile business. It's no wonder that it happened again after another series of innovations.

coupdejarnac• 4 years ago

How old were the machinese you operated? I'm imagining turn of the century steam powered weavers. :)

unemphysbro• 4 years ago

I'd imagine creating uniform and robust ball-bearings is not an easy feat.

progman32• 4 years ago

Fortunately poured bearings (i.e., with Babbitt alloys) are much easier to create! You pour it into a shell with the shaft already installed. It's just tin and lead with a couple percent copper and antimony.

Now, getting a perfectly round shaft... also tough.

jacobolus8• 4 years ago

How much faster is a spinning wheel (of typical 500-year-old design, say) vs. a drop spindle, in the hands of someone with 20 years of spinning experience? And can the spinning wheel produce yarn that has similar quality?

From skimming around online, it seems that expert spinners get extremely fast with a drop spindle, and can produce higher quality yarn. But I can’t find a definitive answer about the comparative speed.

nabilhat2• 4 years ago

Drop spindles don't spin continuously, which gives the wheel an uptime advantage.

Even modern spinners who prefer a drop spindle often have a wheel on hand for plying. Spinning a thread out of a blob of fluff can be engaging and interesting, while plying is a tedious process that's hard to get wrong without falling asleep in the middle. There's not really an art or skill to plying. A wheel can knock out this boring part of the spinning process much more quickly.

morsch• 4 years ago

In a similar vein, I was astonished to read how much time was spent on spinning before the invention of the spinning wheel:

Consequently, spinning thread may have been the single most frequently performed work-task in the ancient world (the various farming tasks being more varied and more seasonal, while spinning was being done continuously all year round). We tend to think of the pre-modern world as a world of farmers (and it was) but we ought just as well to think of it as a world of spinnners.

I had no idea! From https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...

The spinning wheel started out being three times more productive (at a somewhat reduced quality) and then, within a century or two, ten times more productive than the previous method.

Needless to say, a reduction in labor time potentially close to an order of magnitude in the most labor-intensive part (again, c. 80% of the labor time!) of textile production had enormous economic impacts (...). English cloth production tripled (measured by weight) between 1315 and 1545 and cloth produced per capita increased five-fold.

bsder• 4 years ago

That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ideas like hand-spinning all the fabric for sails for ships, which is a seriously nontrivial amount of time!

The problem is that there is push and pull.

The Cotton Gin is quite famous about this. Anyone could have invented the cotton gin--and lots probably did. The problem is that nobody needed an order of magnitude more cotton--until they did. And once they did need more cotton--hey, presto--the cotton gin becomes widespread.

dredmorbius10• 4 years ago

Even knitting dates back only to about 1100 AD, which somewhat staggers me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting

hprotagonist2• 4 years ago

Well, yes, but it has very similar ancestors that are a bunch older: naalbinding, for example, is (probably) at least as old as the Mesolithic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding

I know some very … enthusiastic … knitters who are keen to tell me how old knitting “really” is, but it smells a bit like “well, obviously…!” special pleading.

I have a naalbound and then felted cap. It is absurdly warm: unwearable with regular exertion in temperatures above -9C or so.

Fenrisulfr• 4 years ago

There's a great book about the progression of clothing, textiles, and fabric being scarce and expensive to commonplace and cheap. It runs through the various technological innovations (think cotton gin, but plenty more), culture, and economics. The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel. Great quote about Viking sail ships:

"Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight hours a day with a heavy spindle whorl to produce relatively coarse yarn, a spinner would toil 385 days to make enough for the sail. Plucking the sheep and preparing the wool for spinning required another 600 days. From start to finish, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they powered."

duxup• 4 years ago

It doesn't strike me as surprising that the sail would take longer than the boat. The skill to make a boat is impressive but the mechanics of getting it done aren't enormous.

Fabrics and sewing, gathering and prepping those materials and the tedious work seems enormous.

Ekaros• 4 years ago

The sewing of sail fabric is something different. You need to use heavy duty needle and force it through the fabric. It is somewhat similar I would imagine as dealing with leather.

Wood work deals with big pieces comparatively.

taneq• 4 years ago

Reminds me of the comparison between computer software and hardware. Hulls are fairly linear. Sails are combinatorial.

dimitrios1• 4 years ago

I encourage you to watch some videos online of traditional (mostly hand-tools) Shipwrights. Even with the use of a bandsaw to do the rough milling, it is an arduous and lengthy process. Shipwrights also work with some of the longest planks of wood any form of woodworking does. In the days before machines, there would be scores of workers simply preparing the wood and getting it ready for the ship building.

My hunch would be the reason shipbuilding is faster is it is easier to scale to multiple workers, and there are parts you can do in parallel.

kwhitefoot• 4 years ago

100 meters square

I think that might take a bit more than 154 km of yarn.

Presumably you meant 100 square metre. :-)

soperj• 4 years ago

You'd have to cut the trees, get them from the forest to the build site, and then make lumber out of them and dry them. Can't imagine it would be that much different.

Someone2• 4 years ago

In those times, chances are they moved the build site to the trees, and made sure the trees were close to the water (with more forest and a much smaller population, such trees could probably be found fairly easily)

Also, they didn’t dry the wood. https://regia.org/research/ships/Ships1.htm:

“Timber was used green – in other words, shortly after felling. This is different to more modern practice, where the timber is "seasoned" – left to dry for several years. Green wood is easier to work, and more flexible, which can help with some of the more complex shapes found in Viking boats. Wood can be kept "green" for several years by keeping it immersed in water – a stem (or stern) of a Viking style boat was found on the island of Eig in what, a thousand years ago, had been a lake. As it had never been used – there were no indications of rivet holes – it was probably made up when the boat-builder had got a spare piece of suitable timber, and he was waiting for a similar bit for the stern (or stem) which never arrived.

It is also possible to steam green wood without complex equipment like the steam boxes used today. Simply by heating a plank over a fire, the moisture inside the wood heats up and causes the fibres to loosen. This means that – for a few minutes – it can be twisted into shape with less danger of it splitting and breaking. It is highly likely that this was done during Viking times – we know the technique was used to make "expanded" log boats, for example.”

bregma2• 4 years ago

Plucking sheep.

You shear sheep, not pluck them. If you're experienced you can sheer about 100 sheep per day. You can skirt and wash the fleece of those same 100 sheep on day two. How are you spending the remaining 598 days?

While I'm not an expert at spinning (although my spouse may be), I would venture that 12 or 15 village women carding and spinning 10 to 12 hours a day would be able to go from sheep to sail in about 3 months. Spindle spinning is very portable and something a woman would do during pretty much every spare moment when her hands were not busy doing something else. Making sails would have been a drop in the bucket when it came to yarn consumption since she also had to make all the clothes and cloth for other uses like sacking, ticking, blankets, etc.

Someone2• 4 years ago

Shearing requires advanced technology that the Vikings may not have had. https://www.griggsagri.co.uk/blog/sheep-shearing-a-brief-his...:

“The sheep were shorn using very basic tools, such as metal, or sharp glass, fashioned into an implement to take whole clumps of wool off at once. Over time, the tools were adapted into scissor-like blades to make the job easier.”

I think you can call that plucking. People use tools to pluck grapes, too.

And 100 a day without a powered tool? Is that realistic?

pdw• 4 years ago

12-15 women working for 3 months is close to 4 person-years of work. That's higher than the numbers in Fenrisulfr's quote.

sandworm1012• 4 years ago

Plucking is the ancient form of sheering. You literally pull the hair off the sheep by hand. You aren't yanking it out by the roots, the shaft generally broke rather than the root put out of the skin, but I doubt the sheep enjoyed the process. In short: gathering wool from sheep was very different before ready acess to steel shears.

https://www.chassagne.ca/index.php/the-croft-mainmenu-30/the...

"Before the invention of shears, the sheep were plucked or “rooed”, a Scandinavian word for plucking, and this tradition was still carried out on the Shetland Island until about forty years ago."

AdamN2• 4 years ago

100 sheep per day ... with a flat blade since you don't have sheers yet ... while doing all the other chores required to maintain yourself ... accounting for the time it takes for the sheep to grow a coat long enough to sheer in the first place?

Koshkin• 4 years ago

154 kilometers (60 miles)

154 km = 95.7 mi

amelius• 4 years ago

Clothing remains expensive, except we don't see the true cost.

ska2• 4 years ago

Clothing remains expensive, except we don't see the true cost.

Not really comparably. Lots of externalities and some weird market distortions, sure. But still, we're an order of magnitude or two cheaper now at minimum. Especially if you are comparing day-to-day functional clothing, where it's more likely 3.

brianwawok• 4 years ago

More like three. Went from $1500 to $1.50. At a minimum wage job in the US, you can buy multiple shirts per hour worked. It would literally blow the mind of ancient people (maybe even moreso than something like a Computer), as it's something they have and work with - but the price is so different.

ch4s34• 4 years ago

Basically only the sewing is done by hand now, and that's done with the aid of machines. That alone saves mountains of labor. Cotton has some problems with water and pesticide use, but it's insanely productive today even compared to 50 years ago. Even if you priced in every externality it would probably still be cheaper to buy a shirt today than it would have been 50 years ago.

Ensorceled2• 4 years ago

What hidden costs are accounting for the 2-3 orders of magnitude difference in clothing prices vs. minimum wages?

dredmorbius10• 4 years ago

In at least part, environmental damage, fuel, and resource costs.

The actual input cost of fossil fuels is ~5 million times the market price based on the time-cost of formation.

See Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine", 2003.

ctdonath• 4 years ago

Au contraire, it’s even cheaper than portrayed. Even though a “basic tunic” today can be had for less than an hour of minimum wage work under very comfortable conditions, the price additionally covers advertising, intercontinental shipping, extensive regulatory compliance, extensive insurance, great HVAC, etc.

Yes you can find “tragedy of the commons” and other concerns for modern production. Realize the tradeoffs, that ancient circumstances denied many benefits enjoyed today, that were we to subject workers today to those circumstances you’d be far more outraged.

yboris• 4 years ago

A marvelous book comparing income and wealth across centuries is The Haves and the Have-Nots - A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic.

One way to compare wealth is to see how many people's labor an individual could purchase. It differs across time and countries (labor is cheap in India currently for example). This book is a careful historic look by an economist - using evidence from literature, history, etc. Branko uses a variety of ways to compare individuals across history.

https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/branko-milanovic/the-haves...

wongarsu• 4 years ago

So a linen weaver would need to work for (500 / 2×40 to 500 / 2×20) 6 to 12 days to earn the price of the simplest linen tunic

So translating to modern wages (in US/Western Europe) somewhere between $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and $21000 for the finest quality.

That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's clothes into perspective.

Lorin• 4 years ago

This is what I was looking for in the article, thank you!

Ensorceled2• 4 years ago

That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's clothes into perspective.

Also probably the source of the "they'd take the shirt of his back" saying.

emaginniss• 4 years ago

The phrase is usually "he'd give you the shirt off his back." That's much nicer

mhalle• 4 years ago

Probably not. "Steal the shirt off someone's back" means to take everything from a person, even the most basic and least significant item of clothing that they are wearing, and leave them with nothing.

mynameishere• 4 years ago

Modern business suit prices in other words or thereabouts.

devenson• 4 years ago

The cost is a feature, not a bug. It must be pricey to signal status.

xxpor• 4 years ago

And people wonder why nobody wears suits any more

samstave4• 4 years ago

What were the poor people wearing?

How did women earn these - were linen garments a form of payment to effective prostitution?

YES: Source; Kimono.

monkeynotes• 4 years ago

I imagine poor people wore rags, discarded material crudely sewn together.

xyzzyz4• 4 years ago

The poor would typically make their own clothes. This was of course very labor intensive, but back in the day, benefits from division of labor weren’t that huge, and the poor often did not have better employment opportunities (that’s why they were poor in the first place).

vkou• 4 years ago

What were the poor people wearing?

Dollar analysis like 'how much did X cost in a pre-industrial economy' is incredibly unsuitable for answering these kinds of questions.

The answer is - most people weren't wage workers. Most people didn't have money. Most people were subsistence peasants, and they paid taxes, rent, and for many services in goods. What money they had would usually go towards buying things they couldn't make.

Most people wore homespun. Clothing a typical Roman peasant family[1] would take ~3,000 hours of domestic labour a year - every year, most of it devoted to spinning flax. Being domestic labour, done by the family, for the family, most of it, was, of course, unpaid. Being the kind of labour that you can do on-and-off throughout the day, as you are waiting on other tasks, it was mostly done by women. [2]

[1] https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/distaff

qwytw2• 4 years ago

An average worker in Ancient Rome is not really comparable to a worker in a modern country (e.g he likely would had spent >50% of his income on food, so equivalent wage would probably below the minimum wage in US).

The prices in Diocletian's degree don't really make much sense, e.g. for 40 Denarii you could buy ~5 pounds of beef or only 8 pounds of rye/barley. So likely the price for tunics is quite a bit higher than the real market price. Based on 1st AD prices/wages a tunic cost 15 sestertii which is equal to around 3-4 days wage (a "worker" likely earned ~ 4 sestertii per day)

zach_garwood• 4 years ago

The average worker in ancient Rome was a slave.

helloworld11• 4 years ago

Diocletian's price control decrees were for this reason and many others widely hated, widely ignored and widely worthless at stemming rampant inflation. (just as draconian price controls today suffer a similar fate in countries where leaders try to stem the consequences of their own economic mismanagement with arbitrary rules of fluid prices.)

nabilhat2• 4 years ago

That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's clothes into perspective.

Cloth was so valuable that the words for both the robber and the extremely valuable robes they stole and plundered share a common origin:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/robe#etymonline_v_15128

jrockway• 4 years ago

This makes me want to set up a tailoring business on the side of the road and call it "Highway Robery"

ardit33• 4 years ago

Yep, in Albanian: Rrobe, means "Cloth". Same origin. It means that 'rober' came from the meaning of 'cloth taker'.

sandworm1012• 4 years ago

> $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and $21000 for the finest quality.

Go look at the price for a nice suit, or a designer dress. Those numbers are not terribly high.

asdfasgasdgasdg2• 4 years ago

"Not terribly high," I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment. It seems pretty high to me. Also you have to get pretty high up into the luxury market before you'll find a suit that costs $7,000. Armanis are synonymous with luxury suits in the public consciousness and they top out at $4,000, according to their website.

The cost of those luxury items don't come from the cost of making them. They come from the fact that they are luxury items -- it's the exclusivity and signaling that you're paying for. For more on this phenomenon see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

causi2• 4 years ago

I wonder how the longevity compares. Would a tunic last much longer than a modern pair of jeans?

lstodd• 4 years ago

Even contemporary linen clothes last way longer than a random pair of jeans.

It's not that onesided, good linen trousers are usually somewhat more free-fitting, and usually don't chafe as much as typical jeans models. But still.

Also superior water vapor exchange is superior.

asdff2• 4 years ago

Even a modern pair of jeans sent to ancient rome would last longer than a modern pair of genes today. All the washing and drying we do is what makes your jeans go threadbare in the knees in a few years time.

narrator• 4 years ago

The enormous cost of clothes is why people in the bible tearing their clothes when they were extremely upset was such a big deal. It'd be like someone today throwing their smartphone in the ocean.

f1refly• 4 years ago

Smartphones are usually rather cheap. I think it would be more like setting your car on fire.

BurningFrog• 4 years ago

You're only 1-4 generations removed from ancestors who only owned one set of clothing, not necessarily including shoes.

Something that's stuck in my mind is how prosperity in India, not that many decades ago, meant that women could wash one Sari in the river without being naked, since they now owned two.

When I see people complaining about too much "disposable" clothing, I am not impressed.

tidenly• 4 years ago

Your conclusion doesn't follow. People can be against fast fashions urge for people to constantly be cycling out their wardrobes with short-lived clothing while still supporting everything have what they need. I think that is the main argument - use what we need and no more, or at least reduce waste.

bocytron• 4 years ago

If my calculations are correct, that would be ~$700 to $1400 for a linen tunic.

bodhiandpysics1• 4 years ago

a lovely little factoid is that in elizabethan england, a set of clothes could easily cost more than a house (Shakespeare paid a 60 pounds for the rather large house New Place, while a very fancy set of clothes could cost hundreds of pounds). This makes sense when you consider that the clothes could take more labor than the house!

glanzwulf• 4 years ago

Well, now that would depend on who's making the tunic. Is it a Armanicus? Or was it made by the fabled three stripe master, Adidacus?

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 4 years ago

Robbers in Italy or debt collectors in Egypt often stripped the clothes off their victims’ backs,

With regard to debt collection, what is interesting is the Bible requires that cloaks that were taken as collateral had to be returned by sunset so the person could sleep in them.

Exodus 22:26 - If you take your neighbor’s cloak as collateral, return it to him by sunset, because his cloak is the only covering he has for his body. What else will he sleep in?

etskinner• 4 years ago

Kind of contradicts the purpose of the collateral, doesn't it? Does the lender retrieve it as collateral again the next morning? Do they only make same-day loans?

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 4 years ago

My understanding was that the lender would the retrieve it again every morning.

rahimiali• 4 years ago

This sentence stood out to me most: “executioners often claimed the clothes that their clients wore to the execution”. The word “client” is what shook me.

missedthecue4• 4 years ago

seems they'd be a little bloody after the fact

bagacrap• 4 years ago

if I got blood on a $2k shirt, I'd probably bother to clean it

tristor• 4 years ago

The word “client” is what shook me.

Executioners in the past would often be paid by the people they were set to execute or their families. That payment included the cost of taking care of the body afterwards, and in many cases a fee for services as the alternative to an executioner was usually much more grim and painful, whereas a good executioner guaranteed a quicky and nearly painless death.

There's a fascinating video on YouTube by a channel called Weird History with more on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQqdoJ5rfT4

rolleiflex• 4 years ago

Not the author, don't know him, no connection – but I caught a glimpse somewhere on the blog that he is currently unemployed. As an open-source maintainer, I feel like it is my duty to plug him so he can perhaps get some patrons or donations, the blog is great. https://www.bookandsword.com/support/

He is also not a software engineer or in tech in any meaningful way, so his 'tip to total income' ratio is probably off the chart compared to, say, me.

As an aside, now that everybody is asking for 'tips' of some sort, it is getting quite difficult to figure out for whom these tips are essential (i.e. him) and for whom they are just gratuities. I wish I had a good answer for this.

Zababa• 4 years ago

As an aside, now that everybody is asking for 'tips' of some sort, it is getting quite difficult to figure out for whom these tips are essential (i.e. him) and for whom they are just gratuities. I wish I had a good answer for this.

That's a good point. On twitter, I see very often people asking for money for a surgery, an accident, or just in general. I feel like I see this way more often than before, but I don't have any hard data to back this up. Just like you, I don't have any good answer to that.

AdamN2• 4 years ago

Your online social milieu is likely getting poorer over time. In the olden days, online meeting grounds like Twitter were elite locations. Now they're commons. I notice this the most on Reddit where I'm sometimes reminded how many blue collar people there are (and also what a wide age range exists there).

dfxm12• 4 years ago

I feel like I see this way more often than before, but I don't have any hard data to back this up. Just like you, I don't have any good answer to that.

Maybe your network is growing or, more realistically, the global pandemic we happen to be in is causing issues than normal. IMO, the answer to this would be voting for politicians who support a welfare system where an accident doesn't bankrupt you (regardless of things like employment status).

aksss• 4 years ago

His blog had a mildly interesting post on rereading one of the SM Sterling novels, Against the Tide of Years. I really enjoyed those books, and in the comments it appears SM Sterling is actually there engaging, which is very cool!

pixodaros• 4 years ago

Thanks! I updated the link on the blog post and on my support page to point to my Canadian paypal account which is more accessible while I am overseas than my Austrian paypal account.

I think the issues funding open-source are very similar to the issues funding writing.

cwoolfe• 4 years ago

This is helpful context in understanding the saying: "If anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well." (Matthew 5:40) The ethic described in the modern vernacular is to "go the extra mile." (verse 41)

hcarvalhoalves• 4 years ago

So, the word "robber" is because they would strip you out of your robe?

jacobolus8• 4 years ago

Actually it is the opposite.

The word “rob” comes from a proto-indo-european root meaning to “tear” or “strip”, and has apparently been used in the modern sense of taking things by force for thousands of years, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...

The word “robe” is the derivative word, originally meaning the spoils of robbery, e.g. a stolen garment. It has only meant a specific kind of long loose garment for hundreds of years.

The English words “rip”, “reave”, “bereave” also come from the same origin.

eitally• 4 years ago

There are a bunch of similar articles describing costs in the Middle Ages. Here's one example (there's another on the bookandsword.com site, too):

https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-...

1-6• 4 years ago

Must be a slow day on HN when we're talking about tunics.

dymk• 4 years ago

At least it's not another article about web3 or Amazon

jedberg• 4 years ago

Up until very recently, durable goods were very expensive and labor was very cheap. In some parts of the world, that's still the case today.

Just the other day was an article about how Agatha Christie was considered middle class even though she had a live in maid and nanny, because she couldn't afford a car, because the cost of the car was the same as 5 years of salary for both workers.

JoeAltmaier• 4 years ago

What about the price of materials? Take that off of the 500 to start with, they'd have to work longer to make ends meet.

wanderer_• 4 years ago

Nice website, bookmarked

WalterBright• 4 years ago

Women used to spend all day either tending the stove or making thread, cloth, and sewing. It's no surprised that the Industrial Revolution started with the textile industry.

meerita• 4 years ago

Nice article. You can read also from Titus Livius, in his work *Ad Urbe Condita, that in many occassions, if not all of them, when an army won the battle they stripped all their defeated army clothing, leaving them only with a small underwear back to their own cities. That was the price of defeat.

bmn__• 4 years ago

Also see:

• Prices and wages in Medieval England (2014) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882389> 2022-01-10, 119 comments

• Medieval Price List <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669787> 2019-12-01, 147 comments

• List of price of medieval items <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15680005> 2017-11-12, 48 comments

• List of prices of medieval items (2009) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11613093> 2016-05-03, 38 comments

K0balt• 4 years ago

An interesting takeaway here is the wages with and without “maintenance”. From earlier reading, I take “maintained” workers to have been provided food, fuel, and housing.

Since “maintained” workers earned half of “unmaintained” workers, we can extrapolate that the pay was approximately equal to the cost of food, fuel, and housing, which would point to discretionary income at a much higher rate vs basic costs of living than contemporary laborers.

Many other factors are involved of course, including services and automation which greatly increase quality of life while reducing the need of discretionary spending, and also the comparative wage hierarchy of textile workers, but it is an interesting comparison nonetheless.

How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)

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