What did a medieval parish priest earn?
About 10 pounds a year from church dues and land.
About $2,400 a month in today's gold.
A month of that pay weighs about as much as 5 dice in gold.
A tenth of every harvest, a field and a house. A hired priest earned less than a carpenter.
Where the money came from
A parish priest lived on what his parish owed him. Each household was due to give him a tenth of its harvest and other income, the tithe. He also took small fees for baptisms, burials and weddings, and held a piece of church land, which he could farm himself or let for rent. That income had to keep him, his household and his helpers. In 1291 the pope had every parish church in England and Wales valued so the Church could be taxed, and that survey set church taxes for nearly 250 years; a church worth less than 6 marks, £4 a year, was too poor to be taxed. Where the rector lived elsewhere, the work fell to a hired stand-in whose pay, set by his employer, could be too little for the job. The Black Death killed between 30 and 40 percent of the clergy by one count, and the survivors charged more for their services. In 1349 Edward III told the bishops to make hired chaplains serve for the old salary, and in 1350 Archbishop Islip ordered them to be content with what they had been paid before the plague. In 1379 a chantry priest, paid to say masses for the dead, got £4 13s 4d a year, a little more than a master mason earned in a working year of 210 days at 5 pence a day.
Sources: dhi.ac.uk · en.wikipedia.org · dhi.ac.uk 2 · dhi.ac.uk 3 · en.wikipedia.org 2 · en.wikipedia.org 3 · sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu · en.wikisource.org · en.wikipedia.org 4 · medieval.ucdavis.edu · mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de
What a parish priest's pay bought in 1350
a day of a master mason: less than a day's pay
a peasant's wool tunic: 5 days' pay
an ox: 3 weeks' pay
a craftsman's townhouse: 14 months' pay, more than a whole year of it
a squire's ransom: 19 months' pay, more than a whole year of it
Every price of 1350, with its source, is on the prices page.