Since everyone is talking about #recession indicators, how would we define #poverty in the (high) #middleages? First, we need to consider what a person in, say, 1290 #England actually needed to live. 1) #Bread. How much? Enough for roughly ~4 people (assuming a smallholding here). 2) some clothes (basic, rough things for all 4 people) 3) some wood to fuel the hearth (assuming our smallholders use bought wood, not dung or peat). Now we put all of this in a #basket. If the #salary of the smallholding buys at least 1 basket, we are on the very line of true poverty. More than 1 basket? Not extremely poor! Cottagers (those that had too little land to grow grain) occasionally fell under the basket-value. Of course, if one lived through 1346-1353, a whole lot of baskets were suddenly purchasable! (For the small price of all your friends & family being dead.) #economics #history #medieval #plague