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lot of people tend to forego using such a small unit of currency.

So we see that 1 pound = 4 crowns = 20 shillings = 240 pence

According to a good number of articles and resources on the internet, it would seem to me that a typical peasant who made about three silver pennies per day would be like a modern professional - with people who made 1 penny being like a "wage slave", burger-flipper/store clerk, etc. Since it is the lowest common denominator, I will focus on this 1p/day menial labor rule.

This would make that single penny his day's wages, and for us in modern times, typical day wages are about $48.00 USD if you go with approximately $6.00/hour minimum wage, which may or may not be adjusted for taxes, etc.

$48.00 per day is probably about as low as you go without getting into part-time and waiters/waitresses whose wages are non-standard, and most minimum wage actually now being closer to $7.00+ per hour.

So as you can see, if you base your criteria solely on daily wage, 1 pence = $48.00 if you want to keep it really simple. I have seen other more professional and thorough research which indicates most peasants were lucky to make half a silver a day (about 5 pence) but for the sake of argument and a nice even number, I think the poorest of most of the *free* peasants probably made about a penny a day, some more.

Going on the above assumption that an entry-level unskilled laborer made a penny a day, we have a fantasy/medieval penny basically being worth a modern (2009) USD total of about $48.00, even say $50.00 to even it off.

It takes 12 pence to make a shilling, so ($50 x 12 = $524.00) one shilling would be worth $524.00 USD. This means an unskilled laborer peasant would likely earn still less than a shilling for two weeks of work.

A farthing, being simply a penny cut into fourths, would have been worth about $12.50. This seems a bit much, so let us stop here with this amount, and return to our basic assumption and change the average daily wage from one penny to one shilling.

Let us, in this 1s/day rule, include not just the coin itself for the work, but potentially room and board (food, clothing, amenities), which could obviously not have been the case for the once penny wage, as a full belly and a roof overhead would be worth far more than one shiny penny. So let's take the full combination of the "liquid" payment as well as the abstracts and call it 1 silver shilling per day payment for an unskilled laborer.

Let us now instead make the silver shilling worth

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