Yeah But What Does That Have To Do With The Price Of Beer In Krakow?

We are fans of really long price series including a copy of the old Chicago Board of Trade's wheat chart which started in 1477.
A couple of the English price series that we've highlighted over the years are below the jump.

And speaking of English price series, Professor Bob Allen, author of "Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands 1450-1850" has retired from Oxford but has archived some of his data online:

Enclosure and the Yeoman
​Below is a spreadsheet with data used my book Enclosure and the Yeoman. The data are time series of agricultural product and input prices for England and the south midlands.  The data are used to compute indices of the prices of agricultural output and the inputs land, labour, and capital.  These index numbers are used to show who again from the agricultural revolution in chapter 14 of Enclosure and the Yeoman. They are also used to compute total factor productivity, as shown.  Data sources and weights used in the calculations are detailed in the file on sources. 

English agricultural prices
English agricultural prices datasource

Along with that data, you'll also see live links to many of his papers not otherwise available on the web.

But wait, there's more!

If you click though today you also get:

Data: Wage and Price History

Labourers  Craftsmen  Warsaw
Gdansk      Lwow         Krakow
Vienna       Augsburg   Leipzig
Paris          Strasbourg Madrid
Amsterdam Antwerp     London
Munich       Naples       Northern Italy
India          Valencia

Clicking through the Krakow--and the other cities too but we're using Krakow as our example--data, beyond the oats and beef we find that in 1373 folks were paying 17 grams of silver per litre of beer, which price inflated to 53.4 grams per in 1652 and collapsed to 0.008 grams/L by 1844, also known as "The happy time".

Here's the good professor's Nuffield College site.

And back to the really long series, from a 2010 post,  "The 2012 sunspot sell-off":

...You may want to dip into the big daddy of price series:

"A History Of Agriculture And Prices In England, From The Year After The Oxford Parliament (1259) To The Commencement Of The Continental War (1793)"

by J. E. Thorold‐Rogers, 7 volumes, 1866-1887 which probably influenced Jevons.

Here's another bit o'price series scholarship:

The Price History of English Agriculture, 1209-1914

The paper constructs an annual price series for English net agricultural output in
the years 1200-1914 using 26 component series: wheat, barley, oats, rye, peas,
beans, potatoes, hops, straw, mustard seed, saffron, hay, beef, mutton, pork,
bacon, tallow, eggs, milk, cheese, butter, wool, firewood, timber, cider, and
honey. I also construct sub-series for arable, pasture and wood products. The
main innovation is in using a consistent method to form series from existing
published sources. But fresh archival data is also incorporated. The implications
of the movements of these series for agrarian history are explored.