Medieval Money 101: Livre, Sou, and Dernier
Nothing kills a bit of medieval fiction faster than a character casually paying “fifty pounds” for a loaf of bread, so let’s sort out how money actually worked — and, importantly, why the answer changes depending on which side of the Channel you’re standing.
England ran on pounds, shillings, and pence — twelve pence to a shilling, twenty shillings to a pound — the same basic structure that survived, remarkably, right up until decimalisation in 1971. Cross into northern France, though, and the same three-tier structure reappears under different names: the livre, the sou, and the denier, with twelve denier to a sou and twenty sou to a livre. The pound itself often wasn’t a physical coin at all, in either country; it was more of an accounting notation, a tidy way of keeping the books rather than something you could actually drop in a well and wish upon. In practice, the actual coins jangling in anyone’s purse varied hugely in value depending on their metal content and how much silver had been quietly shaved off the edges by the last three people who handled them.
Things got messier still during the Hundred Years War, when England and France both experienced a wave of coinage debasement — essentially, governments quietly making coins with less actual silver in them to stretch their money further, a medieval version of printing more banknotes. The English penny had managed to hold its silver content steady (92.5%, weighing about 1/240 of a pound) from 1279 all the way to 1344 — genuinely impressive fiscal discipline for the period — before being reduced in stages: a fifth less by 1351, another sixth by 1412, another fifth by 1464. France’s own coinage went through comparable rounds of debasement over the same period, driven by much the same wartime pressure on the treasury.
The practical upshot for anyone writing medieval fiction: a coin in 1250 was not worth the same as the same coin in 1400, prices genuinely did creep up as currencies were quietly debased, and any character handling money — English or French — would have been half-consciously assessing whether the coin in front of them was full weight or a clipped disappointment. It’s the medieval equivalent of checking your change twice.
Step into 14th-century England—start reading The Draychester Chronicles today.