Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg · 1878
Inama-Sternegg investigates early German valuations from the beginnings of documentary evidence to approximately the end of the ninth century. His central distinction is between socially established assessments of usefulness and prices formed in particular exchanges. Monetary figures in customary laws, estate records, and Carolingian legislation cannot, he argues, automatically be treated as market prices.
The essay begins with a theoretical problem: modern commerce makes the contribution of general usefulness to economic value difficult to isolate from the circumstances governing transactions.
Allerdings wird diese in unsrer Zeit reichster Verkehrsentwickelung entschieden verdunkelt durch jene Momente, welche geradezu auf den Preis als die konkrete Feststellung des Verkehrswertes für den einzelnen Fall bestimmend wirken.
English translation: To be sure, in our age of the richest development of commerce this is decidedly obscured by those factors which act directly as determinants upon price as the concrete fixing of exchange value in the individual case.
Early German economic history offers a comparative test because exchange was less developed and valuations could remain embedded in relatively stable household economies. Roman jurisprudence and canon law provide precedents for distinguishing general valuation from individual attachment and market circumstances. Historical investigation thereby becomes a means of separating elements that modern economic life presents in combination.
Inama-Sternegg identifies his evidentiary programme explicitly:
Wir fassen zu diesem Behufe die Volksrechte, die Urkunden und die Gesetzgebung der Karolinger in's Auge und untersuchen zuerst die einzelnen Werthangaben der ältesten Zeit.
English translation: To this end we take into view the folk laws, the charters, and the legislation of the Carolingians, and first examine the individual statements of value of the earliest period.
The examination of Germanic laws compares assessments of enslaved people, livestock, weapons, and other goods. Its essential methodological step is to distinguish the value of stolen or damaged property from the penalty attached to an offence. Ratios between compensation and penalties can support tentative reconstructions, but public-security considerations, textual variants, and changes in monetary units complicate comparison. Even apparently simple numerical schedules require source criticism:
Korrigiren wir nun die Zahlen der Solidi als die aus den Denaren abgeleiteten Grössen, so verändert sich obige Reihe nach der Höhe der eigentlichen Werthe geordnet: 35 : 67.
English translation: If we now correct the figures of the solidi as magnitudes derived from the denarii, then the above series, arranged according to the magnitude of the actual values, changes: 35 : 67.
Such recalculation serves a substantive argument: legal assessments were not ordinary sale prices merely because they were expressed in money. Their governing considerations included quality, customary limits, and the general economic usefulness of the object. Repeated valuations within similar household economies could consolidate individual judgments into a collective standard. Inama-Sternegg thus understands “objective” use-value as emerging from shared practices and expectations, which subsequently made legal tariffs possible. Monetary accounting could preserve these relationships without turning them into continuously adjusted market quotations.
Charters and estate registers extend this interpretation beyond customary law. Their money-equivalents often specified alternatives between cash and payments in kind, or clarified the quality of goods owed. Stable assessments of grain, poultry, and young pigs therefore need not demonstrate stable market prices. Inama-Sternegg contrasts these conventions with contractual language recording the particular agreement of trading parties. He nevertheless leaves the origin of some documentary equivalents uncertain: neither derivation from legal tariffs nor derivation from estate valuations is uniformly demonstrable.
The treatment of Carolingian legislation applies the same distinctions to measures often understood as price regulation. Saxon tariffs demand attention to different solidi and successive textual layers. Inama-Sternegg interprets the Frankfurt grain provisions of 794 chiefly as an adjustment of customary valuations to monetary and metrological reform. Clothing regulations likewise maintained relations between quality, dimensions, and value. By contrast, the famine measures of 806 imposed temporary limits on sales by holders of royal benefices to protect dependants’ subsistence. Exceptional scarcity here brought supply and demand directly into view.
The conclusion restricts what economic historians may infer from the surviving figures. These assessments cannot simply furnish price series or measures of purchasing power. They instead reveal collective judgments of usefulness that could also influence exchange. Inama-Sternegg conjectures that ordinary prices tended to remain near customary use-values unless scarcity or costs substantially disturbed them. The essay’s methodological force lies in requiring historians to establish what a monetary entry measures before comparing it with others; its theoretical ambition is to recover socially shared usefulness as a persistent component of economic valuation.
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