What did a medieval embroideress earn?
2¾ pennies a day; the men beside you got 4¼.
About $700 a month in today's gold.
A month of that pay weighs about as much as 6 paperclips in gold.
Gold thread on a bishop's robe, stitched at two-thirds of a man's rate.
Where the money came from
English gold embroidery was in great demand across Europe, where it was called opus anglicanum, 'English work', a name never used in England itself. A papal list of 1295 counted more than 113 pieces from England, more than from any other country. By then most of it came from workshops, mainly in London, rather than from convents. In 1330 the accounts of Thomas Copham, who made linen armour for Edward III, named the team behind one royal order, a pair of embroidered covers for a horse's haunches: four designers, ten men and six women. The men were paid 4¼ pence a day and the women 2¾, so a man earned more than half as much again. The best-known embroideress, Mabel of Bury St Edmunds, appears at least 24 times in Henry III's household accounts. For an altar cloth made for Westminster Abbey in 1271, thread, pearls and jewels came to £220, while four women's work for 3¾ years cost £36: the materials cost six times as much. The gold thread was usually silver gilt, a thin metal strip wound round a silk core, and the silk came from Asia by way of Italy or Paris. Royal orders were unpopular, and those who refused the king could be threatened with prison. The embroiderers clustered around St Mary-le-Bow, and England's lead in the craft faded after 1350, perhaps never recovering from the Black Death.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org · the-past.com
What an embroideress's pay bought in 1350
a gallon of ale: less than a day's pay
a day of a master mason: 3 days' pay
a peasant's wool tunic: 3 weeks' pay
a year at Oxford: 3 years' pay, more than a whole year of it
a craftsman's townhouse: 4 years' pay, more than a whole year of it
Every price of 1350, with its source, is on the prices page.