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Old 07-17-2009, 04:56 AM   #22
Agemegos
 
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
Default Re: Medieval Horse Types and Traits

Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Carnifex View Post
As horses become useful for more things, the number of people willing to pay for a useful horse goes up. More people start breeding and raising them, and the relative price starts to go down.
Grazing land is converted to cropland, prices go up. People die off -> fields abandoned and revert to pasture -> livestock prices go down.

Quote:
So horse prices can vary wildly over the European Middle Ages, depending on factors like the horse collar, whether or not there's been war or famine recently, and so on.
And in particular, there was a general upward trend in real prices (that is, prices in terms of labour) of horses and butcher's meat over the course of the Middle Ages. Between c. 1100 and the eve of the Black Death, the real price of horses, beef, pork, and mutton in Western Europe roughly doubled. Population expanded, waste land was assarted, grazing became scarcer, and the price of livestock rose.

Over the same span of time the price of ironmongery fell by about the same factor, driven by economic development in the iron-making and ironworking industries. So in the late 11th century the knight's mail was more costly than his horse, while in the early 14th century his horse was more costly than his armour (which furthermore was probably better-made and stronger).

And to make the whole thing even more confusing, the output of silvermines (in Germany and Austria, I think) increased the money supply faster than the economy grew, so that nominal price levels (i.e prices of food and labour in money terms) steadily rose.
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