How the 768-year record is built

The price series

The gold price comes from Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, The Price of Gold, 1257–Present (MeasuringWorth) — the definitive long-run record. The ribbon stitches three segments of it into one continuous US-dollar series:

• 1257–1790 — the British official price (pounds per fine ounce), converted to US dollars at the 1791-fixed ratio of $4.4444 dollars to the pound. This preserves visual continuity across the boundary; the alternative (showing pounds and then dollars) would break the line for marginal accuracy.
• 1791–1949 — the US official price: $19.39 under the 1792 Coinage Act, $20.67 after the 1834 revaluation, and $35 after 1934.
• 1950–2025 — the London market price in US dollars, the free-market benchmark of the modern era.

Nominal versus real

The thin line shows the nominal price on a logarithmic scale — the actual dollar figure of the day. The gold ribbon beneath shows real value: the same gold expressed in constant 2025 dollars, adjusting for inflation. Real value is the heart of the story — it is what reveals gold’s remarkable long-run constancy and its violent modern excursions.

Inflation is measured by the US Consumer Price Index (Officer & Williamson’s reconstruction back to 1774, extended by the Bureau of Labor Statistics). Because that continuous index begins in 1774, the real-value ribbon is shown from 1265 onward; before that date, only the nominal line appears. A British retail-price reconstruction would extend the real ribbon into the medieval era — a planned enhancement.

Monetary regimes

The faint background bands mark five eras: the pre-Newton centuries (before 1717), the Classical Gold Standard (1717–1914), the Interwar disruption (1914–1944), Bretton Woods (1944–1971), and the Free-Float era (1971–present). The boundaries are the canonical dates of monetary history — Newton’s fixing of the price, the suspension of convertibility in the Great War, the Bretton Woods agreement, and the Nixon shock.

Conventions and limits

All figures are annual (end-of-year for the early British series). Pre-1700 prices are historical reconstructions and are necessarily less precise than modern market data — the medieval record exists, but it is sparse, and small differences across sources are unavoidable. This is historical data only: nothing here forecasts the future, and past performance is no guarantee of it.

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