What is the average price, in silver, for a loaf of bread through history?

Question

I would like to build a graph for the price of a loaf of bread based on exchange of silver. My research has shown that some items or commodities have remained very consistent when priced against other commodities. A cow ready for slaughter for one ounce of gold, for example. Obviously there are some historical aberrations to this but usually because of other influences, war, famine or drought as examples. But otherwise these relations hold long term. The reason or need for this graph is to show that only fiat or paper currency suffers from inflation, with the only exception that I know of being Spain, a gold and silver based economy, after conquering the "new world" and bringing home too much gold. Ultimately what I am looking for are historical quotes for the amount paid with dates and, hopefully location. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This question is unanswerable:

1) Silver is not a useful measure on the scale required: money did not exist to purchase commodities for most of the desired time scale

2) Adequate wage/price series only become available in the mid 19th century, inadequate wage/price series only become available in the early 19th century

2a) Wage/price series are important because silver itself has a price, as discovered in the 19th century by a variety of political economics, Ricardo obviously, Marx gives a useful snapshot of the debate in Grundriesse's chapter on money. To establish some measure of stability, time series are constructed out of measures that appear to have some value over time: %GDP, GDP/capita, or "consumption bundles." Consumption bundles come down to wages through the relatively stable assumptions: workers consume their entire wages immediately or in deferred forms, the social expectations of waged consumption represent a social measure of "acceptable" living. Consumption bundles then give reference to prices in terms of a reflection on the socially accepted standard of living for people who worked for a living. This is fairly useful in that dietary habits don't actually change during crises (Hammond and Hammond's labourers series on the bread / oatmeal / potato consumption habits), which means that price rises in bread become apparent. Not useful in terms of dealing with fiat money, because again, our 19th century political economist friends identified that the paper money supply is a capital, not a domestic wage labourer, consumed commodity.

3) Bread was not bought for money for the vast majority of humanity through-out history, which gives a "no sensible answer" result