The first thing, then, in finding out the social value of money at any historical period is to find out the purchasing value of a given weight of gold--say, one ounce. Supposing we are comparing the time when Henry VIII. dissolved the monasteries and took their wealth (1536–9) with our own time, before the War, when our currency was still normal and in gold, you will find that with 100 as your base for prices in 1536–9 the Index Number of 1913 is, according to different calculations, somewhere between 2,000 and 2,400. I have gone into it myself very carefully, and I make it out to be at least 2,400 (though historians some time ago, who had not gone into it very fully, used to make it lower); that is, where one ounce of gold would purchase the things which Englishmen regarded as their staple commodities in 1536, 24 ounces of gold would be necessary to-day. That is the first thing you have to consider when you are comparing the social value of money at that time with the social value of money in our own time. You multiply right away by 24. You hear, for instance, that a man had £100 a year paid him by the King for looking after the garrison at Dover. You translate it into modern money, and say that he had £2,400 a year paid him _in our money_. Most people stop there, and that is why they get their answer to the problem all wrong. In reality the _social_ value of money then was _very much more than_ 24 times what it is now, and £100 a year under Henry VIII. meant _a great deal more than_ what £2,400 means now. In order to see how true this is we have to consider the next two points which I mentioned. 2. _The number of purchasable categories._