Historic Inflation

I find it frustrating and annoying when books about the past mention a sum of money (how much something cost, or how much someone earned) without any attempt to translate the sum into modern values. If someone was paid 7d a day in 1764, was that generous or starvation wages? If a meal cost £1 6s 3d in 1409, was that a bargain or were the diners being overcharged?

Of course, there are all sorts of pitfalls to beware when we try to find modern equivalent prices. Do we base our calculations on the cost of items, and, if so, which items, or on wages, and, if so, whose wages? There are so many variables to try to take into account. If we use, say, the cost of bread as our baseline, today's prices vary wildly. You can buy a loaf in Lidl or similar for under a pound, but it's also easy to pay a fiver for one in an independent bakery. The same variation was presumably true in the past. Similar caveats apply to wages. So we must accept that any attempts to find what historic costs and earnings were worth in 2024 currency can only be approximations. But surely approximations are better than nothing.

When writing I use the Bank of England Inflation Calculator, because that's what comes up when you search, the fact that it's from the Bank of England makes it sound reassuringly trustworthy, and it goes back as far as 1209. (As far as I can tell, there's no great significance in that date - King John being excommunicated by the Pope is the headline event - it's simply that by chance the surviving records begin then.) Other sources exist, including some linked on the Bank of England's site, for example The Son Also Rises, which gives huge amounts of raw data, useful if you want to look further into this subject. There's also this, which is much better at giving an overview at a glance than the Bank of England's site, but goes back only to 1751. It also, for reasons I don't understand, contradicts some of the Bank of England's data; for example, the Bank says that prices in the UK have doubled since 1995, whereas the other site gives 2005 as the date, a whole decade difference. If we can't be sure about inflation just two or three decades ago, how can we trust figures from centuries ago?

All the information below is derived from the Bank of England. One thing that surprises me (no doubt showing my ignorance) is that I've always assumed that inflation is inevitable and constant, albeit at widely different rates. But it seems that, for example, prices were fairly stable in the 14th and 15th centuries, and in fact prices sometimes went down as well as up. 

I've compiled two lists. The first is my attempt to show when some major inflation milestones were reached (but note that, as just stated, prices have gone up and down, so this can't be in any way definitive). The second shows how much prices have increased at half-century intervals.

Prices x 2 since 1995

x 5 1978

x 10 1973

x 25 1952

x 50 1924

x 100 1884

x 250 1606

x 500 1546

x 750 1521

x 1000 1405

x 1500 1211

x 1721 1209

Prices have multiplied x 1721 since 1209

x 1312 1250

x 938 1300

x 964 1350

x 930 1400

x 1006 1450

x 1028 1500

x 451 1550

x 257 1600

x 153 1650

x 173 1700

x 187 1750

x 70 1800

x 183 1850

x 103 1900

x 29 1950

x 1.6 2000