Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

[azato]

I am looking for some basic rules of thumb.

 

Part 1. As from the previous thread, Saltmarsh will be an important port. While not as large as Seaton, it does provide a closer connection to the fort, a quicker way to the Yeomanry and could also provide a secondary port if Seaton was under bad weather.

 

Part 2. I assume that there are two types of people who ship stuff via...well...um a ship. There are those who have a final destination planned past that of the port or those who sell their goods (wholesale bulk) at the port city.

 

Part 3. Lets say we have a percentage of people who fall under "those who sell their goods (wholesale bulk) at the port city". Can we come up with a rule of thumb for prices? Can we go backwards from a retail price to arrive at a rough initial price of any item?

 

Lets suppose a barrel of salted meat costs 10sp retail. The person selling the salted meat is not the person who cured the meat, but rather purchased it directly from the grower. What mark up is necessary for a normal retail operation to stay afloat? Can we assume some general rough rule that a retailer purchases items at some number like 50% of what they will sell it for? Likewise, if there are further middlemen, can we assume the same for them?

 

 

My reason for asking, is that in the adventure I have forthcoming it is quite possible for the characters to acquire some merchant type items, like bolts of cloth, crates of dishes, barrels of meat, etc. It would be nice to give them option to either sell the goods locally for a very small amount or take the items to a city where such would be in demand, in order to get a better price.

 

Not sure if I am making much sense. It has been a long week and the grey matter is a bit stretched and thin.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

I generally assume that for common "commodity" type goods, like your barrel of salted meat, that the profit margin is about 10%. If it's a luxury good, like silk or fine porcelain, the price in areas furthest from its point of origin would be at least two or three times its original price, largely dependent on distance.

[Markdoc]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

Price (especially in medieval times) has little to do with distance and only a nodding acquaintance with cost of production. It's all about rarity and how many sets of hands it had to pass through to get to market.

 

Point in case: in 15th century London, pepper cost about 19 pennies a pound - nearly 3 days' wages for a master tradesman. Saffron, on the other hand came from a closer source (geographically) and sold for around 190 pennies a pound - about a month's wages for a master tradesman. Reason? Saffron is picked from the stamens of a certain flower and produced in far tinier qualities - even today, it costs roughly $1,000 per pound. Back then the markup on saffron from producer to final buyer was in the region of 10,000%. For medieval traders (even for traders, today, really) the other thing that affects price is risk. Pepper was produced in large quantities but was expensive in medieval Europe because a) it had to be brought from far away and there was a fair degree of risk involved in the long voyage - when the crusades opened up the eastern trade routes, even though that added an extra middleman to take his cut, prices on spices such as pepper still fell, because the risk of trans-shipment of goods decreased.

 

This has interesting consequences: goods like spices travelled mostly by sea, up through the Mediterranean. London was a major port from the spice trade, so ships would stop there and unload, and merchants would buy there for shipment back to their own countries - so that pound of Saffron that cost 190 pennies in London cost over 370 pennies in Antwerp, 3 days' sail away. That's a markup of 100%

 

The last thing to notice is that goods generally had higher markups than we are used to today since medieval societies were generally much less consumer oriented: the low markups we enjoy are a result of high volumes of trade and decreased risk.

 

So what I'd do is work out your basic price list and then grade goods by rarity, distance and proximity to major trade routes:

 

Rarity (at the place it is bought)

1. very common, common, uncommon, rare, exotic, unobtainable

Produced:

2. In the same place, in the same province, in a neighbouring province, in a neighbouring kingdom, in far off lands, in legendary locales

Commerce (at the place it is bought - only for goods that are actually transported)

3. On a major sea trade route, on a minor sea trade route, on a major land trade route, on a minor land trade route, on no trade route, really out of the way.

 

If you take 10% markup to the price and then multiply it by 3 it for each extra step along axis 1, 2 and 3 (+10%, +30%, 90%, 270%, 810%, 2700%) and then add each axis, you should get a rough and ready price calculator.

 

So Saffron in London:

 

It's an exotic good (+810%) produced in far off lands (+810%) - but on a major sea route (+10%) - that's 1630% higher than cost at source. A bit cheaper than in real life, but in the same ballpark - and in Antwerp it'd cost twice as much since Antwerp is on a minor sea trade route.

On the other hand, during the medieval warm period saffron was grown (briefly) in Cornwall - so Saffron was much cheaper in England back then.

Salted fish in Saltmarsh, however, is very common (+10%), produced locally (+10%) and it is not transported (ignore axis 3) so the markup is 20%.

 

Of course you have to look at demand - if you bought a bed in Baghdad and transported it to a small village in the Cotswolds, you are unlikely to get (very common: +10%, far off lands: 810% and on no trade route: 810%) 16 times what you paid for it. You might get someone to buy it as a curiosity, but you'd need to find someone who wanted a strange bed. If there's no such buyer, you end up with a bed you can't sell.

 

You could also use this as an indicator of local costs for luxury goods - scarlet broadcloth cost about 10-40 times the price of ordinary imported linen (up to 228 pennies per yard, in 15th century London). That's because it required dye made from tiny beetles, which were collected from far away. But you don't need to know that - all you need to know is that it is a luxury good, so will cost between 270-810% the cost of normal items of that sort (again, that's a slight under-estimate of historical cost, but it gives you a ball-park figure).

 

cheers, Mark

[mayapuppies]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

Dammit, it won't let me rep Markdoc...someone lend me a rep stick?

[azato]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

Then shouldn't we add demand into the equation or would that be a separate thing? I guess that is where it gets tricky because the lack of demand may work either way as far as price. If you find those very few people who really want it...may not affect the price negatively. But if you don't.....

 

 

 

 

Of course you have to look at demand - if you bought a bed in Baghdad and transported it to a small village in the Cotswolds, you are unlikely to get (very common: +10%, far off lands: 810% and on no trade route: 810%) 16 times what you paid for it. You might get someone to buy it as a curiosity, but you'd need to find someone who wanted a strange bed. If there's no such buyer, you end up with a bed you can't sell.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

Most of that is pretty intuitive. For the exotic bed, you probably won't find a buyer in a small fishing village, or in the tiny crossroads town. You'd have to take it to a big city to get any real chance of finding a buyer. For the poorly made, smelly goblin armor, you won't find a buyer unless you take it to a poor goblin tribe who won't mind the smell.

 

I mean, if you wanted to, you could work up all kinds of supply and demand charts, taking into account price elasticity, production possibility curves, substitution effects, etc, but for the most part, the average GM can eyeball it and get it good enough.

[Blue Jogger]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

Dammit' date=' it won't let me rep Markdoc...someone lend me a rep stick?[/quote']

 

Repped.

[mayapuppies]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

Gracias

[Matt Holck]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

egret eggs would be cheap in a salt marsh

[Old Man]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

Yeah, but the egrets might object. And if you think they're scary, wait till you see the herons.

[azato]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

I don't know how it would work out but.....What if trade rules were like combat, with something similar to OCV/DCV/DEF/DC? The first roll would determine finding a buyer and the second would be how successful the trader was in negotiating a price.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

The theory of demand as applied to medieval goods emphasises that the demand for luxury goods such as spices is highly inelastic. People will pay a high price for luxuries because they are rare, and luxury spending comes from a small pool of discretionary spending. Luxuries of different kinds (furs versus spices) will thus tend to crowd each other out. Even more devilishly, increased supplies will not lower prices, but rather go unsold.

Conversely, staples will have a more elastic supply curve; and capital goods will be infinitely elastic. Basically, every sheep you bring to market will sell at some price, because there is literally nothing an individual has that they will not pay for a sheep if the price is low enough.

 

Another thing to bear in mind is the relative value of money. It is easy enough to put a theoretical price on a unit of sheep-raising labour. That said, a self-sufficient shepherd doesn't care what a shepherd in some far away land is paid, if he isn't being paid at all. He may well be perfectly happy to sell a sheep that is "worth" 10 pennies for one penny, even though that sheep "cost" 5 pennies to produce. The shepherd doesn' have any pennies, doesn't function within a money economy and therefore hasn't costed raising the sheep, and happens to need a penny. It has been argued, quite compellingly, by Chris Wickham, that taxation under the Roman Empire, by requiring shepherds who live outside the money economy to pay taxes in pennies, can be a powerful tool for capitalising the economy and promoting social complexity. (At some cost to the shepherds, mind.) This, then, is an explanation for the unravelling of social complexity at the end of the Roman Empire.

Continuing my extended comparison with the Fenlands and Salt Marsh-as-King's Lynn that you may or may not find helpful, England's precocious social complexity starting after about 800AD is then also to be explained by taxation; most notably, the Danegeld.

 

 

Tedious blue sky digression: Which raises the very interesting question of whether, and to what extent, the "Danish menace" was invented in the context of discussions of this early and burdensome tax. That is, we find regions where imposing the tax was most difficult, such as the Fens and Northhumbria, retrospectively seen as places where the Danish menace was particularly acute. But the historical sources for this are late and to some extent defective. (Obviously they were ravaged by Vikings. The question is whether the Vikings were anything particularly exceptional at the time. After all, there were all kinds of ravagers, from Welsh to everyday bandits. If we knew nothing else about the era, we would suppose that the most powerful and effective ravagers would be the well-organised army of Wessex. And, indeed, most of the relics of the Northumbrian states ended up in places such as Glastonbury, in Wessex. This would suggest that Wessex, and not the Vikings, was the biggest threat to local English communities. But why would we expect the ancestor to the English state, and source of our "official history" to tell us about this?)

[Markdoc]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

Then shouldn't we add demand into the equation or would that be a separate thing? I guess that is where it gets tricky because the lack of demand may work either way as far as price. If you find those very few people who really want it...may not affect the price negatively. But if you don't.....

 

Yeah, we should, but that's a hard one to quantify: if no-one interested, the selling price is zero. If the demand is really high, even local goods normally given away free might be hugely expensive - water, in a terrible drought, for example.

But you could add a demand multiplier, if you like using the same sort of mechanism, but starting with a negative number.

 

cheers, Mark

[Susano]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

To add to Markdoc's comments, remember this -- there's a lot of manual labor, so handcrafted items are inexpensive. For example -- paper was expensive, because it was a time consuming process and not many people had the ability to create it. Thus, books were expensive -- very expensive, even blank ones. A book with text in it had to be hand-written and so the price went up even more. Hand-made leather boots were cheap, because leather was plentiful, it only "cost" physical labor, and a lot of people practiced the craft. These days, paper is fairly cheap because we've automated the process, but hand-crafted leather boots are exceedingly expensive, since few people do that sort of thing any more.

[Markdoc]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

I don't know how it would work out but.....What if trade rules were like combat' date=' with something similar to OCV/DCV/DEF/DC? The first roll would determine finding a buyer and the second would be how successful the trader was in negotiating a price.[/quote']

 

That's what things like PS:Trader are for. In my current game, one of the PCs has awesome trading powers and basically handles all the business deals of the group. After the last adventure, the players gave him most of their left-over cash and asked him to "invest it for them" - which is pretty typical. As a rule of thumb, I usually let the players use these skills to adjust prices based on a skill roll vs skill roll - so Khelsen (the uber-merchant) will usually open with an appraise roll and depending on how much he makes it by, he gets an accurate impression of how much the merchant is likely to settle for. If he thinks he can afford it (even if he is really persuasive, no merchant is going to sell at a loss unless the merchant really, really needs money right now or feels that he simply cannot get a better price from anyone). At that point they haggle (PS: Trader vs PS:Trader) and the price is adjusted based on how much the winner makes it by. If Khelsen wins by 5 or more (often the case! ) he gets the item for a little over the buying price - say 5-10% or even at cost. If he loses (rarely) he may pay a bit over the "real" price calculated roughly as I suggested above - I have a more complex formula based on that approach but it uses defined trade routes in my game rather than the distance. I usually make these rolls myself to keep him from having absolute knowledge and also award bonuses minuses depending on how well he knows the goods in question (Bonuses on things like weapons and armour that he's done lots of trading in, minuses for odd things pulled out of the ruins) and the area.

 

cheers, Mark

 

Edit: and if your players don't have those skills, show no mercy in skinning them alive at market. In areas with informal economies, it's not unusual for likely looking targets to be quoted three times the going rate and some places, I've been the initial bid has been 10x! (F***ing Bemo drivers!) Likewise, if you were ever selling I would expect the initial bids to be ridiculously low. Without bargaining skills PCs should expect to buy high and sell low.

[Susano]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

Here's another thought -- a coat of mail could take a year to make, because you're closing and riveting all of the links by hand. But... you had lots of people who sat around and did just that for (what? 8-10) hours a day, 6 days a week (maybe 7....) A suit of full plate harness costs as much as we'd price a car today... so capturing a guy meant you could take his stuff and/or ransoming it back for akin to a year's wages.

 

What this boils down to, is that D&D's (at least, per 4E D&D's) prices for gear compared to the massive treasure hauls you can get don't really reflect anything based on the real world.

[Markdoc]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

It doesn't take a year to make a suit of mail - even with riveted rings - more on the order of a month or two. It could be longer, depending on how ornate decoration was- according to medieval German guild books, we can see that a mail-maker’s masterpiece was a shirt that would take him 6 months - but that was a masterpiece where the links were engraved and the shirt damascened - as much artwork as protection. However making mail was a specialist task. The problem is not the time spent putting the rings together - like any task requiring fine manipulation, this can be learned and you can get very fast at it. The problem was drawing wire that you could use for mail and then generating those rings in large quantities. Few blacksmiths and even relatively few whitesmiths had either the tools or the expertise needed to do that.

 

A skilled smith, using period tools can join and rivet about 2-3 links a minute. Given your average hauberk has 20-30,000 rings, you are talking about roughly 16 work days to join all the rings into a hauberk. A master smith might be faster, but probably not too much. On the other hand, the very finest mail has rings only 5 mm in diameter - this can contain many times as many links (and is probably where the 6 month masterpiece armour comes in). However, it takes much longer to make the rivets and links. It's been estimated (by the mail research society) that the finer suits contained over a year's work time (this is where the mistaken idea that it took a year to make a mail suit comes from, probably). But that doesn't mean it takes a year to make such a hauberk - much of the work is in making rings, which isn't especially skilled work and multiple people could do that: if you have a workshop with 6 people, you could probably turn out 2-3 mail shirts a month - or one every couple of months of the very highest quality. That also depends on how much automation was involved - I know we think of the smith hunched over his anvil pottering away, but by 1400 in Europe mail making included many specialized, mass-production businesses, using water power extensively.

 

cheers, Mark

 

edit: Oh, I should mention that closing and riveting the links was considered the most skilled part of the work - that was the master smith's job. Ring-making itself was for apprentices and case-hardening and preparing the rings for joining was journeyman's work. Interestingly, when AJ Arkell was Commissioner for Archaeology and Anthropology in the Sudan (back in the days when it was still a british protectorate) he asked Hamid Idris, an elderly craftsman who had made mail for the Mahdi's army to make him a set of mail. It took 6 of them 12 days to make a full suit of mail though as Arkell notes ("probably not working all day") including making the rings. And they were many years out of practice. However, the mail was butted, not riveted. Still, it gives you an idea - a week or so to make rings, another few days to harden and prepare them and then another few days to assemble the whole - gives you a time of two weeks for a workshop to produce a suit of mail - roughly what the medieval guildbooks suggest.

[Susano]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

Thanks for the update Mark. Obviously my information is out of date and/or based on older books and sources.

 

Still, some of what I said holds up -- repetitive manual labor was cheap.

 

Oh, and something else I just recalled... there were labor laws! But for things like "no making arrows by candlelight" because they wanted to make sure said arrows were of good quality. Based on the Osprey book I read, you could be fined for making bows and arrows at night!

[Markdoc]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

Thanks for the update Mark. Obviously my information is out of date and/or based on older books and sources.

 

Still, some of what I said holds up -- repetitive manual labor was cheap.

 

Yeah, definately.

 

Oh' date=' and something else I just recalled... there were labor laws! But for things like "no making arrows by candlelight" because they wanted to make sure said arrows were of good quality. Based on the Osprey book I read, you could be fined for making bows and arrows at night![/quote']

 

Yup - there were actually quite a lot of places that had laws forbidding manufacture at night of different products. Part of it was probably quality, but part of it was probably to reduce noise: cobblers and clothiers for example were not limited, but felt-makers (who used heavy counterweighted hammers) were. Many English cities, for example had quite strict rules for when market stalls and shops should be open: surprisingly short times - basically all morning and then a break middle of the day and then closed by mid-late afternoon.

 

cheers, Mark

[Susano]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

Another thing -- even if everyone worked sunrise to sunset 6 days as well, I recall reading there were a lot of feast and festival days in there as well.

[Markdoc]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

Another thing -- even if everyone worked sunrise to sunset 6 days as well' date=' I recall reading there were a lot of feast and festival days in there as well.[/quote']

 

Yup. Saint's days and similar feasts tended to be regional, so it's hard to put a number on them, but 15th century Siena, for example had 26 major feast and holy days (interestingly, Christmas isn't one of them) - plus the Palio, which adds up to about a month. However, these were not always "holidays" as we understand them. In Siena, to stick with the example, St Bernadine's day is a big feast day. Traditionally it started with an early mass and a procession to the hospital (not as big a deal as it sounds, it's just down the street from the cathedral) and presenting gifts to the hospital. Then it turns into a regular work day, but ends with another parade, and another mass. It was probably a shortened work day, but at that time of year (may 20), getting up for a dawn mass meant getting up about 4 am.... The Palio on the other hand, is a full-on holiday festival. No work that day - and probably reduced work in the days leading up to it, as well.

 

cheers, Mark

[azato]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

OK...It looks like this may turn into a commercial style adventure. I think the information I received in this thread, plus the information in other threads, plus another resource, plus my own input can make this work (and I will post this when done)....that being said...

 

I see that by the logic given by MARKDOC that this can be a very lucrative business. What I need to know is what expenses would a ship normally need to pay?

 

TAXES:

PORT FEES:

Perhaps Guild fees (and what would be the benefits):

Typical Graft:

Ship Upkeep:

[Markdoc]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

The biggest expenses for medieval ships were (as you note) taxes and port fees, plus maintenance (wooden ships require a lot of maintenance to keep them seaworthy) and the cost of a crew. Typically crew served for a share of the profits (usually 50%, split among them) rather than a fixed wage, but not always. The biggest brake on medieval style sea commerce was risk. Sailors were paid well - but that's because on long voyages, the rate of loss could be as high as 30% - in other words two ships would come home out of every three you sent - and for crew the death rate could be as high as 50%. You needed high profits to carry that sort of loss! Sailors knew the odds were poor - but a couple of successful voyages could set you up with enough cash to retire to a safer job. Losses were mostly due to shipwreck, and disease and only occasionally to pirates. In a fantasy world, add monsters, and de-emphasise disease if you have healers.

 

To take an example, Cape Town (in South Africa) was established by the Dutch, because the sea voyage from Europe to the East Indies (Indonesia) was killing roughly half their crews. They discovered that about 2 months was the limit for a crew to sail safely: after that they started to die at an accelerating rate. It was vitamin deficiency, but they didn't know that. So what they did was put a crew on a ship, sail it to South Africa and then drop the crew off for a couple of months R&R (with plenty of fresh veggies!). They'd pick up a rested crew there and then sail to their destination. When the crew had rested up, they'd take on the next ship arriving and sail it to its destination, whatever that was.

 

cheers, Mark

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

 

Another thing to bear in mind is that often cargoes were owned in shares. Every merchant in a town might have put a few items of cargo aboard, thereby spreading the risk around. In fact, now that I think of it, that was the arrangement in, of all places, James Schmitz's Witches of Karres.

(So your PCs better watch out lest one of their passengers be carrying a deady Sleem Robot in his luggage!)