Coinage and barter for fantasy settings

[The Majestic Leper]

I'd like to inquire about everybodies system for coinage and wealth in commodities. I'm running a new game right now, and would like to incorperate a real-feeling economy.

In other games, I'd just use my D&D books for this stuff, but I read somewhere that peasants rarely saw coins. D&D is all about the coin!
so if anybody has any input, that would be cool.

[Kublai]

I based my economy on what I found off the Web:
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article251.asp

It seems to be an almagamation of prices covering a couple of centuries of medieval history, but it certainly gave me enough of an idea to begin with. It's based on coinage, alas, but it makes it easy enough to convert it to a bartering system.

[Durgil]

Money goes as follows:
1 pound (L) = 20 shillings (s)
1 crown = 5 shillings
1 shilling = 12 pence (d)
1 penny = 4 farthings
1 mark = 13s 4d
What suprised me about this system when I first looked into it was that the shilling and pound were not actual coins in medieval times but accounting terms (ie. if you had 12 pennies, you said you had a shilling and the same for the pound). The half penny or ha' penny was a penny that was broken in half and a farthing was a penny broken into quarters. On one side of the penny, there was an "X" etched into it to aid in breaking it apart. I believe this last part was only in the very early parts of the middle ages (probably pre-1066 AD).

[The Majestic Leper]

Wow! that was very helpful. quite a list, that should keep me satisfied for a while.

thanks!

[Durgil]

Something else that I forgot to include in my previous post was that unlike the copper-like coin of the same name here in the States, the English, medieval coin was silver and slightly smaller both in diameter and in thickness (more like a dime). Also, gold coins existed (either the crown or the mark - I forget which), but most peasants and freemen would live their whole lives without ever even seeing one.

[Durgil]

Lately, I’ve been skimming through a book I recently picked up titled, The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066 – 1284 by David Carpenter. In it there is a chapter called The Economies of Britain. What follows are some statements from this chapter that I think help clarify as well as correct what I wrote in my previous posts:
The only coin in Britain for nearly all of this period was the silver penny, of which there were twelve in a shilling, 240 in a pound, and 160 in a mark (two thirds of a pound). Shillings, marks, and pounds were simply terms of account. There were no coins of these values. Large sums of money had to be transported in barrels full of thousands of pennies...
...Even a penny was a valuable coin – a day’s wages for a labourer. Although it could be cut into halves and quarters (in 1279 Edward I at last minted half pennies and farthings) there was no way, throughout this period, one could simply go into a tavern and buy a drink. At that level it remained a barter (or credit) economy.
I just thought this might help a bit.