Author:
I was working on the spreadsheet of a budget sheet for the county of Maurice for my story 'The Bride's Groom'. After I'm done with it though, I notice a problem. The amount of gold being handled in a small island country such as Maurice is too much! Considering that 1 gold can buy a man two loaves of french bread, the amount here is incredible. Yes, I know, someone will say that "No way they have such advanced taxation system in Victorian England or the decimals." Well, I choose to have advanced taxation system, because for the purpose of the story, I can't use an annual tax type. What I want to know is, are these numbers plausible?
For the purpose of understanding things, this island is something like an colonial island south of India.
| Income | Expenses | ||
|
Income tax Industry tax Commerce tax Land rent Farmland rent House rent Donations |
25457.25 7150.69 6363.98 306000 239250 76550 3280 |
Maintenance Security Infrastructure Construction Countess Salary Governance Wages Donations King's Fee |
155096.8 153923.73 59758 200 900 14157 217350 500 50000 |
| Total Income | 664051.918 | Total Expenses | 656385.532 |
| Balance | 7666.386 |
Comments
depends ...
... on how common gold is.
if a piece of gold buys two loaves of bread, then either bread is ridiculously expensive, or gold is really cheap.
a relatively standard european exchange rate for copper to silver and silver to gold is something like 12 copper to one silver, twenty silver to one gold (by weight, so the coins for more precious metals are smaller if they're just as heavy). this gets complicated by availability and purity and so on. but let's pretend that simple is approximately accurate.
then the common folks use copper, almost exclusively, and daily wage is in copper. as in: one penny is a decent laborer's daily rate, and the daily wage can buy a couple loaves of bread, a piece of fruit or bunch of vegetables in season, maybe an egg. a 'living wage' in the sense that it's enough to live on. so at a rate of 240 copper to one gold, that one gold buys 480 loaves of bread, 20 dozen eggs, and bushels of fruit and veg. heck, this laborer could afford meat, even beef or lamb.
so ... figure that the above spreadsheet is in pennies rather than guineas, and all serene.
Pounds, shillings and pence (and guineas)
In the dim and distant past (when Beverley Taff, Angharad and I were far more innocent) there were:
twelve copper pennies to a silver shilling
twenty shillings to the pound
A guinea is (now) a pound and a shilling and is still in use to buy horses, but in the past equalled a quarter of an ounce of gold.
A don't forget the farthing (.25 of a penny), the ha'penny (.5 of a penny), the tuppence (2d), the thripenny bit (3d), the groat (4d), the sixpence (6d), The florin (2s), The half crown (2s 6d), The double florin, the crown and the half guinea.
We certainly had a firm grounding in mathematics :)
Persephone
Non sum qualis eram
Gold is typically worth quite a bit.
The current price for a gold Krugerrand is US$1326 or so.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/121460812601?lpid=82
The old (original) Mother’s Cookies building in Oakland, CA, was purchased and renovated for a total cost of US$7000 in gold in the year 1912. It was a pretty fancy building, for its day, and the façade looks much less imposing the the building really was, since it extended from the front porch all the way back to the next street behind, a good long block.
http://leeanne.com/homebuilding/
Any sort of Gold coins for a loaf of bread would be very expensive bread indeed.
Back in the olden days, when the "US Dollar" was the Spanish Real, silver dollars were so valuable that they were often cut into pieces of eight, so the US "Quarter Dollar" was quite often called "Two Bits." Such is the resistance of language to lasting change (if you’ll pardon the pun) that a "Quarter" is still called "Two Bits" by many.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dollar
Doubloons were twice the weight of a Real. Most of us can still recognise both Doubloons and "Pieces of Eight" as coins, even if we may not have any clear idea of their value.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Large budgets existed even in Colonial days.
Large budgets existed even in Colonial days.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/britains-colonial-shame-slaveowners-given-huge-payouts-after-abolition-8508358.html
There are many large fortunes all around the world that were built on the backs of slaves and serfs, including many wealthy families in the USA as well. Notice that the payouts for single families with holdings on colonial islands totalled in the millions, and they kept the plundered land and whatever precious metals they "found," as did all the colonial powers.
In the USA, thanks to the unlawful Rebellion of the Southern States, during which no compensation was paid, except in the city and Federal District of Washington, DC, where a compensation bill passed through both Houses and President Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act on April 16, 1862. This law prohibited slavery in the District, forcing its 900-odd slaveholders to free their slaves, with the government paying owners an average of about $300 for each slave. The remaining slaves in the USA at the end of the war against the Southern Rebels were freed without compensation by the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in very US State and Territory.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
It wasn't the 'real', but
It wasn't the 'real', but rather the 'real de a ocho', that led to the name Pieces of 8. That particular coin was worth 8 reals. That is NOT the same as a 'dollar', which comes from the Joachimsthaler, then thaler. (Also 'daler' in Nordic countries) The 'dollar' ended up referring to any number of silver coins of the same weight and size, from a number of different countries.
(Dollar is even mentioned in at least two of Shakespeare's works)
The reason that _all_ of the English colonies ended up with the dollar instead of the pound (Australia, Canada, U.S.) is because the English government wouldn't allow the minting of any English coinage outside of the island. Thus, the colonies had to make do with what they could use - and since, at the time, the Spanish and Portugese were busy raping South and Central America, stealing everything that wasn't nailed down, and prying up anything nailed down so it was available for theft, Spanish, Portugeuse and French coins were the most readily available - those were all referred to with the general 'dollar'/'thaler'. (The Spanish empire not only stole all the precious metals from the preexisting empires, they opened up silver mines and churned out more. This then led to them destroying their own economy. A fitting end.)
Interestingly, New South Wales (Down Under) punched out the center of Spanish dollars to make two sets of coins, and mark them as being the only ones allowed for that colony. You have to wonder why the British Empire worked so hard to overstamp, etc, when it wasn't _that_ hard to melt and reforge silver. For that matter, the reals de a ocho that were made in Mexico during one period of time look like _crap_, because they were just lumps of silver hit with a hammer, rather than actually minted.
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Anyway - on the subject of the budget, don't worry so much about the amounts. FIRST, figure out what will be your currency and its relative value(s). A silver dollar in 1890 could buy four pounds of butter, or 7 gallons of milk, etc. The other is _what can people buy_? Historically, money has been spent on food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and tithe/taxes. I guess you could include health and death, but that's been pretty recent that it made a big difference. Nowadays, we have an enormous amount of other goods that, to be honest, people don't need, but they want because they're shiny. (Even so-called necessities like telephones are technically luxuries) In the 1880's, you would have (mostly) paid for your home(house/apartment, bedding, furniture, cooking necessities), food, clothes, fuel(coal, oil, candles, wood), sales taxes (import taxes, mostly), and some small luxury items. (jewelry, decoratives). Today, you include water, gas (heating/cooking), electricity, petrol, automotive costs (insurance,etc), insurance, telephone bills, income taxes, sales taxes, luxury/punitive taxes (alcohol/tobacco), enormous amounts of clothing, and so forth.
So, once you know what things cost, and what people will be wanting/needing to buy, you then can figure out what the government is supposed to be supplying and how much/what they tax.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.