Hi folks,
I’ve migrated about 70% of the prices from their hardcoded luaexec format into a proper table (see my last post here for context). There’s still a few books worth of facts and figures that I need to migrate. I just wrapped up migrating all of the ones that came from A History of Agriculture and Prices in England V5 and V6; I actually ended up getting a lot more out of these sources than I originally had, so I should be able to get some good graphs and such for some goods (e.g. you’ll be able to see how the price of say…iron bars or pewter vessels changed over the course of time (centered on 1638)).
Overall, I’m really pleased with how this is going, but at the same time, after doing it, I realize I should have done it like this to begin with because it was such a huge time sink, at least initially. I had to dig out the old books, try to find the year of the transaction…that kind of thing. The nice thing is that I can now easily reference all sorts of things just by looking stuff up in the table. I’ve also created a few other separate tables: labor and carriage (and real estate, but that’s still in progress). I moved these out and into their own separate tables because they’re just so different from regular consumer goods that it made more sense to get the flexibility of a completely different table (for example, in the Carriage Table, I can have specific columns for the origination and destination…whereas these two columns would have made very little sense in the context of buying say, a ream of paper, or litmus.
I’ve also made a few more purchases which I’m really excited to go through once I finish transcribing things. Thank you Patrons for funding these: “Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men, & Warfare, 1649-1689” and “The Furie of the Ordnance: Artillery in the English Civil Wars”. These two books in particular have a wealth of information on…well…boats and cannons! They kept getting referenced in articles I came across so I decided to spring for them.
Finally, if you’re a Patron, please send an email to mario@sadbasilisk.press if you’re interested in participating in the “beta” for the Prices and Wages database. The way it will work is, you’ll have access to a more polished subset of what I have so far (I’m thinking of limiting it to foodstuffs for now, since those are basically done). As time goes on, I’ll include more and more stuff in the “Beta Table”. I’m going to dual license its use under CC BY-NC 2.0 and a limited commercial license (you’re choice). The details of the limited commercial license will be hammered out, but it will essentially let you use as many of the prices and figures for a certain number of printed copies for free, and some percentage (1% to 5%) of the sales price for every printed copy after that. At the end of the day, I want this data to be used and useful, so I’m fairly flexible on the licensing fees, especially for early birds.
Let me know whaty you think here.
Tags
historical gaming, historical table-top role-playing games, historical random tables, history random tables, early modern period role-playing games, economic history role-playing games, prices and wages, prices, wages, prices in the seventeenth century, wages in the seventeenth century, prices and wages in the seventeenth century