What did a medieval countess earn?
About 2,000 pounds a year from your share of the family lands.
About $490,000 a month in today's gold.
A month of that pay weighs about as much as 4 litres of water in gold.
Widowed three times, richer each time, and founded a Cambridge college on the proceeds.
Where the money came from
Elizabeth de Burgh was the youngest sister of the earl of Gloucester, killed at Bannockburn in 1314. Three years later she and her two elder sisters inherited equal shares of the family lands in England, Wales and Ireland, valued at about six thousand pounds a year. Her share lay mainly in East Anglia, run from Clare Castle in Suffolk, and took in the lordship of Usk in South Wales, estates in Dorset and a hunting forest near Tonbridge with ironworks. Married three times, she was a widow from 1322 until her death in 1360. Most of her income went on her household, of up to a hundred people. Over £1,750 a year went on food and drink alone, more than one and a half times a typical baron's yearly income in the early 1400s. Her bakers could make 2,360 loaves in a day, partly because wages were often paid in bread. Her accounts are the best private set to survive from the Middle Ages. On her pilgrimage to Canterbury in 1340, provisions alone cost over £93. On one day of that journey forty-eight of her yeomen, couriers, grooms and pages earned 6 shillings and ½ penny between them, about 1½ pence each. The purchases for the feast of Corpus Christi came to over £6, almost twenty times a day's pay for all forty-eight. She also founded Clare College at Cambridge.
Sources: kentarchaeology.org.uk · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org 2
What a countess's pay bought in 1350
a year's food for one adult: less than a day's pay
a knight's full armour: 3 days' pay
a warhorse: 2 weeks' pay
Harlech Castle: 4 years' pay, more than a whole year of it
the ransom of the King of France: 250 years' pay, more than a whole year of it
Every price of 1350, with its source, is on the prices page.