A commonly quoted example comes from the Jusserand's book English Wayfaring Life in the 14th Century refers to the case from 1331, when the three people travelling with 4 servants stayed in an inn for one day. Their total bill amounted to 27.25 pence (or 27 pence and a farthing), covering food and lodgings. The travelers ate a hearty meal consisting of bread (4 p), vegetable soup (0.25 p), meat (5.5 p), beer (2 d) and wine (1.25 d) or 13 pence in total. Furthermore, they also paid 10 pence for the horse fodder (we can assume that there had three of maybe four of them). The remaining 4.25 pence were paid for beds (2 p), wood for fireplace (2 p) and candles (0.25 p). On the other hand, the servants who stayed two nights more (possibly waiting for the others) paid only 2 pence per two nights, what gives assumption that they may have been sleeping in the stable or on the benches in common room, i.e. not in beds, hence the price.

Of course, the prices for 1331 might not be very representative, as Western Europe struggled shortly before during the Great Famine that started with sudden temperature drops in 1315 and the unfavourable weather patterns significantly reducing the agricultural output continued in some areas even to 1322.

In 1331, when this event took place, a penny was a most common English silver coin with half-penny and farthing (worth half and one-fourth of a penny, respectively), and sometimes the latter two were made by cutting the penny in two or four. The coin itself was equal to 1/240 of a pound of pure silver weighing 5400 grains (351 grams), meaning that a penny was a rough equivalent to 22.5 grain or 1.46 grams of silver [gAg]. How much it was from the practical perspective? According to equally common data from Dyer's book, an average craftsman was making roughly 25-30 pence a week (apprentices were roughly paid half of that), a mercenary (heavy infantryman) could have made up to 70 pence per week, a regular army archer was paid 17-20 pence a week. Servants were making no more than 1.5 pence a week, although they were usually provided with food and lodgings, meaning that the 'salary' was more of an allowance, as their basic needs were covered by their master.

The monetary system is a good general approximation for the late Middle Ages setting, as it was used in England since the reign of Mercian king Offa (late 8th century) until the reign of Charles II (mid-17th century), with some changes made to the official weight of a pound, although they were not large enough to be important for the matter at hand. It is also mirrored on the continent (no wonder, given it is based on the Carolingian system) and for example, people living in Rheinland (western Holy Roman Empire) roughly in the same (around 1325) used the Köln mark equal to 233.8 grams of silver and divided into 16 schillings and 192 pfennigs (note the similarity in names) meaning that the common pfennig was worth 1.22 gAg. Wages were also quite similar, with craftsmen earning 12 pfennigs, apprentices 7-8 pf and labourers like teamsters or bricklayers usually earning roughly 4-5 pf per day, what indicates wages higher that these quoted by Dyer for England, but Rheinland and especially Köln were rich and quickly developing places, what could have warranted higher income calculated in pure silver.

So, to sum it up, assuming that the price for the meal and lodgings at the inn for a small group of people comprising of three possibly well-off or wealthy people and their four servants was 27.25 p or almost 40 gAg (39.785 to be precise), then we may make a conjecture that an average person would pay only 1/7th of that amount (the costs were definitely not distributed equally, but we're assuming that a travelling person who has money is neither rich nor a servant but rather someone in between, especially in a fictional setting). This makes 4 p or 6 gAg (2.5 p and 4.7 gAg respectively when no horse fodder is necessary) i.e up to a daily wage of a craftsman or half of the daily wage of a good mercenary (by the way, the latter may be a quite reasonable equivalent or a 'fantasy adventurer' when it comes to the costs of hiring).

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Dyer, C., Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Hauschild, U., Studien zu Löhnen und Preisen in Rostock im Spätmittelalter, (Quellen und Darstellungen zur hansischen Geschichte) [Overview of wages and prices in Rostock in Late Middle Ages (Sources and portrayals of the Hanse history)]. Böhlau, Köln, 1973.

Jusserand, J., English Wayfaring Life in the 14th Century. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1931.

Pies, E., Löhne und Preise von 1300 bis 2000 [Wages and prices between 1300 and 2000]. Brockhaus, Wuppertal, 2014.