No. Even a farm labourer earned more gold in a month. Rung 2 of 20 on the men's ladder of 1350. At the bottom stands the beggar, at the top the king.

Where did a serf live?

Home: a long thatched house shared with the cattle. A long thatched house, one room deep: your family at the upper end, the cattle at the lower, an open fire in the middle and the smoke finding its own way out through the thatch.

What did a serf earn a day and a year?

Paid mostly in grain, plus a few coins twice a year: about a pound a year, a penny a day on average. The record: About £1 5s a year as the manor's ploughman, four-fifths of it in grain, 1325.

What could a serf buy?

A dozen eggs: less than a day's pay; a hen: 5 days' pay; a plough: 3 weeks' pay; a year's food for one adult: 19 months' pay, more than a whole year of it; a one-bay cottage: 19 months' pay, more than a whole year of it.

What is a serf's pay worth today?

About ⁦$300⁩ a month in today's gold. A month of that pay weighs about as much as 19 coffee beans in gold. How a wage in pennies becomes grams of gold at today's price is set out, with every source, on the workings page.

What did a medieval serf earn?

Paid mostly in grain, plus a few coins twice a year.

About $300 a month in today's gold.

A month of that pay weighs about as much as 19 coffee beans in gold.

You plough the lord's fields for sacks of grain and see coins twice a year. Cash is a rumour.

Home: a long thatched house shared with the cattle. A long thatched house, one room deep: your family at the upper end, the cattle at the lower, an open fire in the middle and the smoke finding its own way out through the thatch. Source

Where the money came from

A manor's ploughman was one of the lord's year-round farmhands, hired most often for the whole farming year to plough and to herd the animals. Most such hands were not free in law, and they stayed unfree to the end of the 1300s. Until the 1370s only about a fifth of their pay came in coin. The rest was a fixed measure of grain, which kept them fed whatever the harvest and whatever grain cost. A year's grain weighed between 567 and 1,248 kilograms, so leaving for another master meant giving it up or hauling it away. Small extras came on top. At Barnhorn in Sussex in 1353–54 each ploughman got 2½ pence twice a year, at Christmas and Easter, to give as an offering in church. On some manors the hands also ate at the lord's table, with bread, meat, fish, cheese, eggs and ale. Before the plague the lord's accounts listed them by their job alone, never by name. One historian called these year-round hands the aristocracy of labour, because their work was secure. Yet their pay, about 25 shillings a year on average, took 80 years to double, while a day labourer's doubled in a single year after the plague. The ploughman had the safer place, but the rise a day labourer got in one year took the ploughman eighty.

Sources: vincentdelabastita.github.io