Six prices worth more than a treaty

I keep a long list of prices I cannot fit into any book, and I will not throw it away. A treaty tells you what a handful of men agreed in a good room. A price tells you what the morning cost everyone else. Here are six I go back to.

A loaf of bread. For most of recorded history the loaf is the true clock of a city. When it holds steady, the chronicles are dull and the streets are calm. When it doubles, the same chroniclers suddenly have a great deal to write about. Half the riots in the history books can be read off the price of flour, and almost none of them mention flour.

A day of a labourer's work. Wages sound abstract until you set them beside the loaf. There are long stretches of the past where a person could work a full day and carry home a little more than the family would eat, and not much more. The margin between a day's pay and a day's bread is the quietest number in history and the one that decides the most.

A candle. Light was expensive for a very long time, and so the evening belonged to the rich. When you read that ordinary people went to bed at dusk, remember they were not being virtuous. They were being careful. The whole shape of a day, when you woke and when you stopped, was priced by the cost of holding back the dark.

A letter. Before the cheap stamp, sending word cost real money, and often it was the person receiving the letter who paid. Families rationed their news the way we ration nothing now. A single sheet, crossed and recrossed to save paper, could carry a year of a life.

A passage by sea. The price of a berth decided who got to begin again somewhere else and who stayed and made do. Whole regions were filled and emptied by the cost of a ticket. The map we argue about today was drawn, in large part, by who could afford the fare.

A burial. At the far end of the list is the price of being seen off properly, which mattered enormously to people who had almost nothing, and which they saved for when they would save for nothing else. You learn a great deal about what a society honoured by looking at what it charged to honour it.

None of these will ever anchor a chapter. They sit in my notes, six small receipts, and between them they tell me more about a century than the signatures at the bottom of its most famous document. The treaty is what the century wanted remembered. The prices are what it actually felt like to be alive in it.

Prices tell the truth in Scratched on the Walls too, a portrait of a real Roman town through the price lists, election posters, jokes and love notes its people left on Pompeii's walls.