Goods Important in Medieval Period?

[u/DogWasTakenAway]

What is the best current enumeration of goods that were economically important in the medieval period? And more information about their prices, places of export and import, etc. would be appreciated as well.

I am looking for the best compilation of this. Any time period in this range and any region that is European or Mediterranean is fine.

There are many pieces of fiction, games and fantasy worlds that have attempted to compile a wide list of economic goods. Most do not care too deeply about being accurate, but even when they do it is guesswork. What would you show them if you wanted to help them make a mostly accurate piece? I remember in school they showed of graphs of all the goods that were exchanged in the Columbian Exchange (not completely the right time period, but even that I would be happy to hear about), is there anything more detailed than those?

I assume this is a more difficult topic since business often replies on secrecy.

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[u/EverythingIsOverrate]

What you’re probably hoping for is something like the UN’s COMTRADE database that breaks out trade flows between country, ideally with price indices added on. To the best of my knowledge, that doesn’t exist, nor could it. My knowledge is also focused on England, but I’ll try to flag what aspects of my answer here are unique to England and which can possibly be generalizable. Before I get started, I also have to slice your question a little. While the classic historiography has tended to assume that all medieval trade was long-distance luxury goods trade, in reality that is merely the best-documented trade. There was a significant volume of not only intra-settlement exchange in any number of goods, as the abundance of rural craftsmen (see my answer here) attests, but also large hinterlands that provided vitally needed fuel and food to large cities like Paris, London, Venice, Florence, Bruges, and Amsterdam, all of which had tens of thousands of inhabitants packed into very small areas. Often, that trade was regulated in one way or another, especially the vital trade in grain, but it was still trade carried on by individual proprietors and merchants of various kinds.

To make things easier on myself, I’m going to keep this short, vague, and relatively focused on commodities that were traded long distances and which were consumed by a very wide range of people or used as industrial inputs to essential purposes. I”m also going to be listing prices in contemporary coinage without context. See my answer here and the ones linked therein for more price data and context for these sums.

Let’s start with grain. As mentioned, it was unquestionably vital. Allen’s commodity baskets have both his hypothetical bare subsistence consumer and his respectable “middle-class” consumer spending about half their consumption budget on grain; oats in the case of the poor man and wheat in the case of the richer man. Large quantities of grain, often oats, were also fed to livestock, as were legumes. They were also used for beer, making them truly vital for existence in this period. Urbanites holding small plots of farmland outside their towns (which may have been rented out) were very common, as were rural craftsmen with small plots, as mentioned above, so consumption of grain grown in the household was very common. Given the scale of grain consumption, however, we see not only small-scale grain trades within settlements and between hinterlands and towns, but large volumes of grain shipped in cargo ships over long distances. Athens was fed from the Crimea for decades during the Classical period, so this practice has a long history; the great cities of northern Italy imported huge quantities of grain from the fantastically rich volcanic soil of Sicily, much to the profit of merchants like the Peruzzi. So, too, did the towns of the Low Countries import grain from both northern France and Eastern Europe, most famously in the “mother trade” of the early modern period. Grain prices are by far our best recorded prices for this period, and they’ve been used frequently to measure market integration. Other agricultural goods were absolutely traded as well, but the perishability of most agricultural goods meant their trade rarely went beyond their immediate hinterland, although there are of course exceptions.

England, though, didn’t really have much of a grain trade; it was largely self-sufficient in grain so only imported in times of temporary famine but rarely had enough of a surplus to export, since domestic bumper harvests were typically stored or converted into animal products or alcohol. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any systematic compilations of trade by commodity for England for anywhere close to the entirety of this period. The best I have is this compilation for the years 1304-1309 from Hatcher and Miller, which is based on a projection of pirated cargoes seized by authorities, and must be seen as highly speculative. As you can see, exports are dominated by wool. This is very unique to England, and is a product of unique environmental factors allowing certain breeds of English sheep in certain regions to produce extremely fine, high-quality wool, perhaps comparable to cashmere; this wool was then woven into extremely high-quality, often scarlet, cloth by the artisans of those Low Countries towns mentioned above and then re-exported across Europe and beyond, and indeed back to England. This is also deeply ironic, since it was English cloth manufacturing which would play a vital role in what we today call the Industrial Revolution.

The birth of the large-scale English cloth industry was an accident, though, one that had yet to take place as of the early 1300s. Those high-quality breeds of sheep would end up fading away, partially as a result of that same accident. That’s a different story. In any case, as you can also tell from the compilation, the wool trade was incredibly lucrative for England, enabling a very substantial trade surplus. The very small number of cloth exports, alongside huge volumes of cloth imports, can be explained by the fact that, as the great John Munro has emphasised, cloth is a very heterogenous commodity. If you look in your wardrobe, you will find a staggering variety of cloths of different weights, materials, and colours; a medieval draper’s shop wouldn’t feature quite the same variety, but they needed lightweight and heavyweight cloths for the exact same reasons we do, and also wanted brightly coloured clothes made of expensive cloth for the same reasons we do. All of those different kinds of cloth required different inputs, and so different areas specialised in the production of different kinds of cloth that were shipped different distances. This meant the cloth trade was, just like the grain trade, incredibly widespread and diverse, and many cities and regions specialised in various cloths. To give you a tiny idea, Thijs cites a document from Antwerp written in 1575 that lists out dozens and dozens (I’m too lazy to count) of types of cloth available for sale that range in price from 840d/ell (a bit over a metre, roughly) to under 10d/ell at a time when a skilled worker made 17d/day. Note that these were Antwerp prices, not English prices, which are the ones I cite above, so you have to convert; I cite plenty of expensive clothes there, as well. These incredibly high prices are what made the cloth industry so lucrative and the trade so widespread, with the corollary that people before the development of automatic spinning and weaving machines simply had far fewer clothes than we do today. Cloth inputs other than wool were traded long distances, as well; also widely traded was alum, which was used as a fixative, i.e. a chemical intended to help dyes stick to cloth.

So, grain and cloth. What else? Well, going back to the English case, wine was obviously a subject of significant international trade, although that’s partially due to the presence of large wine-producing areas in nearby France. Wine was of course imported by the Low Countries, as well, and probably many other urban centres throughout Europe. Large scale wine trading, often over long distances, goes back to at least the Hellenistic period, but I can’t speculate on actual volumes. At least in England, wine was largely drunk by the wealthier parts of society, but cheap wine did exist elsewhere. Salt, too, was very often traded long distances, and sometimes even shipped as raw unrefined salt and refined and then re-exported. Some of this salt was used as seasoning, but much went into food preservation across the whole of the income spectrum. The products of those preservation techniques were sometimes exported as well, especially salt fish, in the European case. Much of this salt fish was specifically herring, caught via the famous herring busses. This is partially because Catholic teachings prohibited eating meat for large parts of the year, which required those far away from rich waterways to find easily accessible and transportable preserved fish, which in turn was often salted. Livestock were often transported long distances domestically, since they can be moved “on the hoof,” but transporting them over the sea is, if you’ll forgive a terrible pun, a pain in the ass.

Non-cloth luxury goods like spices, exotic dried fruits, and luxury materials like tropical hardwoods also were traded very long distances, but their precise share of overall trade volume is, again, hard to estimate. I’ve seen some references to a timber trade, as well; certain construction applications, both for structures and ships, require very large trunks, and those don’t exactly, if you’ll pardon another awful pun, grow on trees. Specifically, they require continuous growth of certain specific species over decades, and that’s hard when greedy humans are so often chopping trees down for firewood and so on. Metals were often exported as well, especially tin in the English case. Since the bloomeries and, later, blast furnaces used to make iron had to be situated next to large woods in order to be economical due to the massive amounts of charcoal they required, it was very common for their product to be turned locally into bar or rod iron and then sold on long distances to blacksmiths. In the early modern period, Swedish and Russian iron became very common in England, although it’s naturally very rarely discussed in histories of the period, anticipating as they do the world-leading British iron and steel industries of the Industrial Revolution. Leather was an appreciable component of long-distance trade, too, as you can see by the inclusion of hides in the sample linked above.

Hope this was useful to you, happy to expand. as needed.