Explain the money system to me in the 1100's?

Ok so I just read the book The Pillars of the Earth and it was based in the 1100's and they had a money system based off the Farthing, Pence (i think thats how its spelled), a Pound or something, and a gold one but i can't remember what its called. So basically I want someone to explain to me, durring this time how much someone was paid on average, if the knowledge exists, and how much each on was worth of the other, as in how many farthings made a pence and so forth.



Thanks!Explain the money system to me in the 1100's?
Well, the first record I can find for English farthings dates from the early 1200's, but we'll stretch it...



A farthing was worth 1/4 of a penny, and back in the day, it was made out of silver. About 1600, it was switched over to copper, and other than a short experiment with making them out of tin in the 1680's, it remained copper or bronze until it was last issued in 1956.



In the 1100's, a penny was also made out of silver. There were originally 240 of them in a pound of silver. They continued to be made out of silver until 1797, when they were switched over to copper. Copper, and later bronze, pennies were made until 1967. The usual plural of penny is "pence", so something might cost 1 penny, but if you bought two, you paid two pence (which usually got pronounced "tuppence").



The next coin up was the "shilling", which was equal to 12 pence.



There don't appear to be gold coins issued in England until a couple of hundred years later than the book was set. If a pound coin existed, it probably would have been made out of gold, because if it had been silver, it would have weighed a pound--that's why the British unit of money is called a pound.



Gold coins that have been used since that time include the "sovereign", the "noble", and the "guinea", the "ryal" and the "angel".



I can't help you on what people were paid, but remember that back then, most people were subsistence farmers--they could grow enough to feed themselves (hopefully) but didn't have much extra that they could have sold. People who worked non-farm jobs were probably paid very little, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of info.