What did a medieval nun earn?
The house's 44 pounds a year, shared by eight.
About $1,200 a month in today's gold.
A month of that pay weighs about as much as 10 paperclips in gold.
Five and a half pounds a head, seven services a day, and the roof still leaks.
Where the money came from
A nun earned no wage. Church law forbade a convent to demand money from a girl who wished to join, yet many went on asking, and families paid much as they would give a dowry for a marriage. Rusper was a small, poor house of Benedictine nuns in Sussex, but its nuns were often women of good family. It lived less on land than on the churches it owned at Warnham, Ifield, Selham and Horsham. In 1291 those churches were worth more than £31 a year and its lands and rents just over £13, so the churches brought in more than twice as much. Nothing was ever added, and in 1535 the house was worth just under £40 a year. At an inspection in January 1442 there were a prioress and seven sisters, two of them not yet fully vowed. The only fault found was that the prioress had not given an account of how she ran the house. In many convents each nun had a small yearly allowance from the house for her clothes: at Gracedieu it was 6 shillings and 8 pence. When Rusper closed in 1537, the old prioress, Elizabeth Sydney, got a pension of 100 shillings, while her last companion, Elizabeth Hays, who had taken her vows beside her fifty-three years before, got a gift of 60 shillings, three-fifths as much.
Sources: gutenberg.org · british-history.ac.uk
What a nun's pay bought in 1350
a gallon of ale: less than a day's pay
a plough: 5 days' pay
a fur-lined garment: 3 weeks' pay
a year at Oxford: 21 months' pay, more than a whole year of it
a craftsman's townhouse: 2 years' pay, more than a whole year of it
Every price of 1350, with its source, is on the prices page.