Dollar analysis like 'how much did X cost in a pre-industrial economy' is incredibly unsuitable for answering these kinds of questions.
The answer is - most people weren't wage workers. Most people didn't have money. Most people were subsistence peasants, and they paid taxes, rent, and for many services in goods. What money they had would usually go towards buying things they couldn't make.
Most people wore homespun. Clothing a typical Roman peasant family[1] would take ~3,000 hours of domestic labour a year - every year, most of it devoted to spinning flax. Being domestic labour, done by the family, for the family, most of it, was, of course, unpaid. Being the kind of labour that you can do on-and-off throughout the day, as you are waiting on other tasks, it was mostly done by women. [2]
There was a post on HN `2013 or so, about a wiki for instructions on how to rebuild civilization through plans to start with primitive farming equipment up through more modern equipment...
Dollar analysis like 'how much did X cost in a pre-industrial economy' is incredibly unsuitable for answering these kinds of questions.
The answer is - most people weren't wage workers. Most people didn't have money. Most people were subsistence peasants, and they paid taxes, rent, and for many services in goods. What money they had would usually go towards buying things they couldn't make.
Most people wore homespun. Clothing a typical Roman peasant family[1] would take ~3,000 hours of domestic labour a year - every year, most of it devoted to spinning flax. Being domestic labour, done by the family, for the family, most of it, was, of course, unpaid. Being the kind of labour that you can do on-and-off throughout the day, as you are waiting on other tasks, it was mostly done by women. [2]
[1] https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/distaff