What did a medieval harvest reaper earn?
3 pennies a day plus meals at harvest; the men got 4.
About $1,000 a month in today's gold.
A month of that pay weighs about as much as 2 dice in gold.
Same sickle, not quite the same pay: twenty-one women on the roll took 3 pennies a day, and nine took the men's 4.
Where the money came from
Reaping meant cutting the standing corn with a sickle, and in the years after the Black Death women reaped beside men. Their pay is known because the courts charged anyone who took more than the law allowed. The Statute of Labourers of 1351 held a reaper to 2 pence a day in the first week of August and 3 in the second, with no food on top. At Pocklington on 23 May 1363 the justices charged thirty-three reapers, all but two of them women. The two men had taken 4 pence a day and their board. Twenty-one of the women had taken 3 pence and board, and the other nine the men's 4, so most of the women earned a quarter less than the men. In Wiltshire reapers were paid more often in sheaves than in coin: Nicholas Danyel and his wife Christina got sixteen sheaves for six days of reaping wheat. The work lasted days or weeks at most, and many women spun or wove for the rest of the year. Some walked far for it; Alice, wife of Peter Chauntrell, went from Pocklington to reap at Tibthorpe, ten and a half miles away. No woman mower appears in the records, and mowing paid best: in Lincolnshire in the 1370s women reapers got 4 pence and lunch a day, while mowers, always men, got as much as 8, twice as much.
Sources: web.archive.org · umsl.edu
What a harvest reaper's pay bought in 1350
a gallon of ale: less than a day's pay
a plough: 6 days' pay
a fur-lined garment: 4 weeks' pay
a year at Oxford: 2 years' pay, more than a whole year of it
a craftsman's townhouse: 3 years' pay, more than a whole year of it
Every price of 1350, with its source, is on the prices page.