In fact he makes
the abuse of money on the part either of a miser or of a spendthrift a
sin against the social order punishable according to the gravity of the
offence in Hell or Purgatory.

To return to the matter of prices in Dante's day. In England a goose
could be bought for two and a half pence. A stall-fed ox commanded
twenty-four shillings while his fellow brought up on grass was sold for
sixteen shillings. A fat hog, two years old,--and this is interesting to
us who pay seventy-five cents a pound for bacon--a fat hog two years old
cost only three shillings four pence and a fat sheep shorn, one shilling
and two pence. A gallon of oysters was purchasable for two pence, a
dozen of the best soles for three pence. A yard of broadcloth cost only
one shilling one pence, a pair of shoes four pence. These figures of
English money are taken from an act of Edward III of England who was
born seven years after Dante's death. Parliamentarian enactment under
the same king fixed a table of wages.

For a day's work at haymaking or weeding of corn, for instance, a woman
got one penny. For mowing an acre of grass or threshing a quarter of
wheat a man was paid four pence. The reaper received also four pence for
his day's labor. Eight hours constituted a working day. The people of
the Middle Ages not only had the Saturday half-holiday but they enjoyed
release from work on nearly forty vigils of feast days during the year.
That they were as well off, e.g. as the unskilled laborer of our day,
who demands from four to eight dollars a day as a wage, is evident from
the fact that while he has to pay forty cents a pound for mutton, the
workman of Edward the Third's day earned enough in four days to buy a
whole sheep and a gallon of ale. So plentiful was meat in England that
it was the ordinary diet of the poor. A preamble of an act of Parliament
of the fourteenth century in specifying beef, pork, mutton and veal
declares that these are "the food of the poorer sort." (The Thirteenth,
the Greatest of Centuries, p. 479.)

Speaking of live-stock leads to the observation that the people of
Dante's time for the most part lived in the country. Cities had not yet
become magnets. London is supposed to have had a population of
twenty-five thousand, York ten thousand four hundred, Canterbury, four
thousand seven hundred, Florence, in the year 1300, according to
Villani, a contemporary of Dante, had "ninety thousand enjoying the
rights of citizens