Looking for fantasy/medieval weapon & equipment lists

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Novembermike

This stuff is going to need a lot of assumptions I wouldn't feel comfortable making. In the butter vs cream example, if cream spoils more quickly than butter (I think it does because I think butter was traded while cream was local) then cream will have to be bought fresh from farms while the butter can be stored.

But compare fresh butter to fresh cream. You can buy a pint of cream for, say, 3d. Now, if you want butter, you have to make it from cream. If you won't pay at least 3d for as much butter as you get from that pint of cream, then the dairyman has no reason to sell you the cream to make the butter; he can always get more for selling to people who want fresh cream. And then, of course, there's the labor of churning to make the butter; you have to add on a bit to cover that.

Now, if it's not milking season, there's no cream to be had; the price of cream is infinite. But there still may be butter to be had. But as the butter gets used up, its price is going to rise; it will come to cost more than fresh made butter, because of scarcity. Or if you require uniform prices year round, the price of butter will be higher year round.

I think it takes some really arbitrary assumptions about what you're comparing with what to get butter to be cheaper.

Bill Stoddard