Money as Tally sticks from the Swiss Alps

“A tally was a stock about nine inches or so long with each of the four sides about ½ inch wide. On two of the sides, the value of the “tally” was carved into the wood. On the other two sides, the amount was printed in ink.
“The tally was then split in half lengthwise. One half remained in the treasury and the other half was given to soldiers for their pay, to farmers for wheat, to armorers for armor, and to laborers for their labor.
From War Cycles – Peace Cycles by Richard Hoskins, Virginia Publishing (2000)

Monetary author Ellen Brown makes this interesting observation:
“Modern schoolbooks generally portray the Middle Ages as a time of poverty, backwardness, and economic slavery, from which the people were freed only by the Industrial Revolution; but reliable early historians painted a quite different picture. Thorold Rogers, a nineteenth century Oxford historian, wrote that in the Middle Ages, “a labourer could provide all the necessities for his family for a year by working 14 weeks.” Fourteen weeks is only a quarter of a year! The rest of the time, some men worked for themselves; some studied; some fished. Some helped to build the cathedrals.
Web of Debt by Ellen H. Brown, 2008, Page 60

She continues:
“Economic historians like Rogers and Gibbins declare that during the best period of the Middle Ages – say, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, inclusive – there was no such grinding and hopeless poverty, no such chronic semi-starvation in any class, as exists to-day among large classes in the great cities . . . . In the Middle Ages there was no class resembling our proletariat, which has no security, no definite place, no certain claim upon any organization or institution in the socio-economic organism. Page 61