yes, 150 days, for the lord, how many days on your own property so you didn't starve to death?
they fucking worked all days except Sunday morning to evening, stop romanticizing feudalism ya cunts.
and the church was part of the exploitation od the masses, promising afterlife dor the peasants but not for the rich "insert the bible quote here"
fuck feudalism and fuck the church
Arguments like these are also uncomfortably similar to the arguments slave owners would use to justify slavery. "Look, I take good care of them, feed them, give them clothes, and even built them their own shack next to my plantation house! That means I'm totally not exploiting the people I believe are my property!"
'I allow them to just exist between whipping and beating them, isn't that enough?!'
Yeah "only worked 150 days" glosses over how much work daily life was. If you were lucky you lived with pigs and cows and their shit in your thatch hut and it didn't cave in during the winter leaving you for dead, maybe you survived through your thirties without dying of lung disease, because you'd constantly have fires going in the hut. You'd have to wash clothes in the river even during the winters and hang them up to dry in the smoke of your hut.
On the plus size in good times, and ironically, you could have a healthier diet than the lord. It wasn't like being a lord was a worry-free place to be either, despite all the luxuries they could afford. Christmas was basically 2 months in the winter and festival season could be full of pleasure if you were well situated. "Peasant" encompasses a wide variety of economic arrangements and many of them could live comfortably, relatively speaking. There was no one single "feudalism" and it's debatable whether the term is useful to sum up the period.
Yeah where the hell do those figures come from. They worked around the clock.
Yeah nah they didn't sleep on Sundays, there were stuff to be done on those days too.
I think the number is a realistic estimate for serfdom, as farming is largely seasonal. However, harvests could mean 2 weeks with 16 hours of work per day for everyone including children.
Where do your figures come from?
Lol, that's total bullshit. Medieval peasants didn't work more than people today. And pre-medieval societies worked even less.
"One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night."
"These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind."
Here's the good stuff:
Eight centuries of annual hours
13th century - Adult male peasant, U.K.: 1620 hours
Calculated from Gregory Clark's estimate of 150 days per family, assumes 12 hours per day, 135 days per year for adult male ("Impatience, Poverty, and Open Field Agriculture", mimeo, 1986)
14th century - Casual laborer, U.K.: 1440 hours
Calculated from Nora Ritchie's estimate of 120 days per year. Assumes 12-hour day. ("Labour conditions in Essex in the reign of Richard II", in E.M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History, vol. II, London: Edward Arnold, 1962).
Middle ages - English worker: 2309 hours
Juliet Schor's estime of average medieval laborer working two-thirds of the year at 9.5 hours per day
Calculated from Ian Blanchard's estimate of 180 days per year. Assumes 11-hour day ("Labour productivity and work psychology in the English mining industry, 1400-1600", Economic History Review 31, 23 (1978).
1840 - Average worker, U.K.: 3105-3588 hours
Based on 69-hour week; hours from W.S. Woytinsky, "Hours of labor," in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. III (New York: Macmillan, 1935). Low estimate assumes 45 week year, high one assumes 52 week year
1850 - Average worker, U.S.: 3150-3650 hours
Based on 70-hour week; hours from Joseph Zeisel, "The workweek in American industry, 1850-1956", Monthly Labor Review 81, 23-29 (1958). Low estimate assumes 45 week year, high one assumes 52 week year
1987 - Average worker, U.S.: 1949 hours
From The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, by Juliet B. Schor, Table 2.4
1988 - Manufacturing workers, U.K.: 1856 hours
Calculated from Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Office of Productivity and Technology
I should add that I grew up on a farm in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. We "worked" on the farm of two 10 or 12 hours a day, but the majority of that time was spent not slaving away doing actual work, but moving things around. Driving tractors, animal husbandry, cleaning out barns, transporting feed or harvested crops, or the main labor intensive activities.
Additionally, we spent time doing planning and accounting, as well as ordering products and services that the form required. However, compared to working on a factory floor or in an office job the work was far lower in intensity and did not have the type of oversight that modern office labor incurs.
The other thing is that during the winter, from roughly October through February basically no work happens. Nothing grows, so the only thing you need to do is to feed your animals and keep them clean. That's it. It's like a 4-month vacation, although it still requires some upkeep the workload is a fraction of what you do during the rest of the year. Maybe 1 to 2 hours a day.
There's also the fact that, before the advent of gas and then electric lighting, you really couldn't see shit after dark. Tallow candles allow you to see where you're going, but they don't give off enough light to allow you to do much real work. Thus, throughout the winter there were simply fewer hours in which to do most things.
This is also likely why "dinner" was traditionally at lunchtime, and was also the main meal of the day. This was the time of day when you would most reliably have enough light to prepare a large meal. Then, when artificial lighting became a thing, upper class types started having "dinner parties" late in the evening, and for many dinner became the evening meal. It did not spread everywhere, though, in particular the north of the UK generally still thinks of dinner as lunchtime.
Calls bullshit, facilitates worse bullshit. Classic. I guess I imagined all the hard WORK it took to maintain a home. Remember, if you're not being paid for it, it doesn't count as labor. Fucking hell
Source: your ass
I mean, the actual source for this statistic is usually "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure" by Juliet Schor who in turn got the number from an unpublished paper written by Gregory Clark in 1986. Clark did eventually publish a paper in 2018 where he increased his estimate to 250-300 days (which may still be less than some modern workers work).
And also: this was before the 8h day. People worked until they were done which was sometimes much more but on average less
Farming peasants worked pretty much from sunrise to sunset, sometimes even longer. If you count the number of hours the average medieval peasant worked in a year, it was probably a lot more than we do now.
Feudal lords, insofar as they worked at all, were fighters—their lives tended to alternate between dramatic feats of arms and near-total idleness and torpor. Peasants and servants obviously were expected to work more steadily. But even so, their work schedule was nothing remotely as regular or disciplined as the current nine-to-five—the typical medieval serf, male or female, probably worked from dawn to dusk for twenty to thirty days out of any year, but just a few hours a day otherwise, and on feast days, not at all. And feast days were not infrequent.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs 2018
I worked on a farm down in the Central valley in California about 15 years ago, and all the Hispanic people worked from 5:00 a.m. to noon and that was it. They were done for the day. And this is modern society!
5 to 12 is still 7h, which is almost the usual 8h day but still a good thing
Well 250 days a year is a five day work week for 50 weeks. So that’s pretty much the same thing we do today.
And much more for some
261 days is working every single week 5 days a week.
Most modern "middle class" jobs (which, to be fair, are increasingly scarce) don't work 52 weeks a year with 0 holidays.
Peasants worked sunup til sundown 250-300 days a year.
Life fucking blew as a peasant.
Yes, but let's do a breakdown of the average day in the life of a Medieval European peasant. Let's assume it's a standard 8hr day for a male serf aged 15-20 years.
Sun comes up, start the day with perhaps a half hour for breakfast, another half hour for prayer, depending on the day, then it's out to the fields for 3-4 hours work, which was dependent on the particular produce of the farm where he worked and the season. Livestock tended to, fields plowed, that sort of thing. Then an hour for evening prayer and supper, perhaps some beer with the lads at the tavern before sun down.
Another thing you're forgetting is that we measure time completely differently than they did in Medieval Europe. I'll let David Graeber, of "Bullshit Jobs" explain:
Human beings have long been acquainted with the notion of absolute, or sidereal, time by observing the heavens, where celestial events happen with exact and predictable regularity. But the skies are typically treated as the domain of perfection. Priests or monks might organize their lives around celestial time, but life on earth was typically assumed to be messier. Below the heavens, there is no absolute yardstick to apply. To give an obvious example: if there are twelve hours from dawn to dusk, there’s little point saying a place is three hours’ walk away when you don’t know the season when someone is traveling, since winter hours will be half the length of summer ones. When I lived in Madagascar, I found that rural people—who had little use for clocks—still often described distance the old-fashioned way and said that to walk to another village would take two cookings of a pot of rice. In medieval Europe, people spoke similarly of something as taking “three paternosters,” or two boilings of an egg. This sort of thing is extremely common. In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.
The 8 hour workday is a very modern invention.
Farmers have always worked 12+ hour days, starting before dawn to feed animals and ending their days with the sun going down, serfs we're no different. Once they were done with farm labor at sundown they worked at home on anything that needed mending for the next day, ate boiled veggies and then went to bed.
Farming is a way of life where you dance a razor's edge. You don't have the luxury of time not working.
The 8 hour workday is a very modern invention.
I'll concede that point. And I'd like to add that the modern clocks as we know them are also a very modern invention. Farmers in Medieval Europe certainly did not have a device in their homes which chimed the hour with regular and exact precision. The closest equivalent they would have had were clock towers, starting about the fourteenth century, funded by local merchants guilds. It was these same merchants who were in the habit of keeping a human skull in their offices as a memento mori, reminding them to make good use of their time, as each chime of the clock brought them one hour closer to death. There were no time clocks which a serf could use to punch in or out of work for the day, no payroll and accounting department in the employ of the local lord to keep track of all hours worked, etc. Time was not a grid against work could be measured because the work was the measure itself.
What is a peasant farmer doing during the winter when nothing is growing?
Depends on the area but they were constantly busy. Warm seasons were 7 days a week sunup til sundown.
For the cold seasons:
Wheat and barely were sown in the winter so that when spring showed up the crops sprouted and grew quickly
Logging/forestry work as well as trapping
Mending of tools, spinning of wool/flax into usable fabrics
Weaving baskets/clothes etc
Processing of slaughtered game into foodstuffs
Processing & protection of food stores
Repairs to your house
Ice fishing to augment stores of food
Building and fixing fences
Distilling and pickling foods
Generally anything that improves your chance of survival
And of course:
Hoping and praying that they had enough food to not starve to death.
There is quite the difference between 150/365 and 300/365.
One is about 3/7 the other 6/7 and now look at today when most of us work 5/7 on a normal workweek.
Idk man, somebody else having made a similar wild claim doesn't mean that OP or the memes creator had a source at all.
It's from a famous paper. Linked by gnutrinto elsewhere in this thread,
The church wasnt why peasants worked less. They worked less because there wasn't that much work to be done. During the slow season, there just isn't enough work to justify paying a peasant to work.
paying a peasant to work
Peasants (serfs) were not paid. They were bound to the land they worked, and were given a fraction of the harvest they produced. The rest was property of the Lord who's title controlled the land.
There was a (very small) artisan class where the concept of payment existed, though often it was payment-in-kind - smith the plow for my oxen and I'll give you some food after the harvest. Money was rarely encountered for the vast majority of people.
You're right they were not paid money, but they arguably were provided more goods for their services starting in the 15th century. In western Europe.
Eastern and Western Europe behaved very differently when it came to serfdom. Serfdom, as you described it, began to decline starting in western Europe in the 15th century and was pretty much gone by the 17th century. Meanwhile Eastern Europe started a rise in serfdom as you described it in the 16th century.
Serfs started to get better conditions thanks to the bubonic plague and increasing workers power over lords. In western Europe they were paid a higher share of the crop as a result. They still had a bad life overall, but it got ever so slightly better.
The whole notion that they had 150 days off isn't even necessarily accurate either because record keeping is so bad from those eras on time worked. It's not enough data to provide an accurate assessment of working hours.
What a surprise, capitalism is a relatively new system
Lol is this the tankie take on the above story? You think that sounds like some kind of paradise?
Can you elaborate on your assumptions and why he might assume it's a paradise?
He brings up capitalism out of the blue, for no reason whatsoever, in response to a post about serfdom. With a sarcastic “what a surprise.” Is he implying serfdom is preferable to capitalism?
Not out of the blue. Just summarizing what the person above me said in a captain obvious way.
Also I'm a woman so she/her please.
Well, everybody knows capitalism rose out of feudalism in Europe. @ Cheesus briefly mentions it too.
The sarcasm is a response to the universal assumption that money and wages were always had universally. But @ TheChurn says very few were paid and those were rare.
Reminder: the soviets ran a state-capitalist system. That's not very feudalist.
I think you've misunderstood her quite a bit. Happens a lot on here lol.
Thank you you worded it better than I could have.
Also "Her" if ya don't mind. Am just a woman ^~^. I know it isn't really relevant or important but pronoun preferences
There's no way farming was only done 5 sporadic months of the year, that livestock keeping would allow you to just fuck off and not work that frequently, and they often did things like produce parts of their own cloths etc which I would count that much sewing/darning to be work let along the rest of the homesteading requirements...
but that would still be considered leisure today.
do you know how many times i leave for work wishing i had time to do a load of wash, clean my bathroom, do the dishes or any other chore?
yeah they had chores and we could debate that is work but they had more leisure time absolutely
Medieval chores weren't putting clothes in the washing machine or giving the bathroom a wipe, they were weaving and sewing clothes by hand and then laboriously washing them in the stream, and hauling buckets of shit. Everything was much harder and much less pleasant, and that was how you spent your 'free time'.
Leave it to modern people to 'wish they'd live in mediveal times'
The point is they had all of that to do by hand, and still managed to "work for hire" less time than us in a society where over 90% of the stuff is automated.
You have a misconception of peasant life I believe. They had far more free time for socializing than you'd ever believe and the work they had to do day to day was not this slog you envision.
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I don't know why you think modern people have more leisure time?
Peasant work was seasonal first of all, most work wasn't consistent nor were they afforded wages. Most works resulted in a direct product for the person doing the work, cooking, clothes making, farming.
You don't understand how much leisure peasants had. Most culture we consider today is from peasant work. Dancing, music, song, joking, and while cooking is work cooking is also a social gathering of work and then eating. Peasants weren't the working class we are today, we work far more and have far more chores to do. Making clothes by hand was harder but your quality was higher and clothes lasted, they didn't shop for groceries or deal with car upkeep, they didn't spend 8 hours at work and an hour traveling both ways.
Peasants were peasants because they didn't have work to do and generate income with, it was literally mostly chores or leisure.
This is why the black plague was helpful, less people meant workers could make more demands and we see the beginning of a work culture develop.
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I don't get months of holidays? I haven't had off in years bro. I get two days off from my job a year I don't request, I am a chef.
Peasants always stopped working, work was probably done before the sun was even close to going down. Hunting, fishing, cooking are leisure activities they aren't work you imagine.
It took long to produce clothes but you don't need 47 outfits that are made to fall apart in less than a year.
150 days isn't a myth. It is a stretch of the truth but we work more, we have less time. We have more ability to do things like travel or forms of entertainment but no.
You are confusing the peasants of then with middle class people. The poors, me, we work 40-60 hours a week sometimes two jobs with no vacations often in the hours office workers aren't working because we are running the movie theaters, salting the roads, cooking your food, etc.
A 9-5 is probably not actually the peasantry.
People had more free time and less stressors than we do today.
Phew
I almost said something serious on a silly sub.
They had to do hard labour in the fields, I make pretty pictures in a comfy chair
Too bad there hasn't been a massive increase in productivity since then to be able to have both.
Yea but all the information humanity has collected at my fingertips and a more diverse diet than any king in history is pretty neato.
Not to mention the convenience that is idk... A fucking dishwasher or laundry machines, or heatable ovens to the exact degree of temperature you want, microwaves, literally any device created to enhance the average citizens time spent NOT doing the egregiously long work needed to maintain a home that these hypothetical peasants did. People just braindead tbh when they see shit like this and just nod along like it's so wise.
But that's not really a rebuttal either. How about we have both? Why not all the benefits of progress together with less work?
How about it? I'd sign up, but have you looked around? Do you think those hoarding wealth and power will willingly share it?
With weekends, public holidays and vacation days I work 220 days a year and with 8 hours a day that's probably not far off the total hours of the 150 work day medieval peasant
Most medieval peasantry worked about 20–25 hours a week, usually with no regulation of any kind on taking your own breaks, chatting with your friends, and drinking on the job. Only very poor serfs with atypically cruel lords dealt with restrictions that were so invasive. People typically rose with the sun and stopped working shortly after midday to work on their own projects and go about their own business, and peasants on the sunny side of the mean had good reason to be satisfied with their quality of life. The work was often very hard work, and the disadvantages included both poverty and lack of civil liberties and both of them to degrees that are unthinkable by modern standards, but we're just gonna have to take the L when it comes to the amount of time spent working. They really did have it better in that regard.
This basically backs up what I have read on the subject. I feel like the disconnect comes from what we categorize as "work" often not counting stuff like making stuff for yourself and your own home, lessons, tasks you could do keeping your hands busy while you socialized or talked, housework and so on. Depending on time and place (mostly pre-enclosure) the time and production one owed their lord was relatively low in most places and did come with minor kickbacks. The church did keep a lot of proper holidays and Sunday as a sabbath was observed but again in a society that doesn't really have things like regular sit and watch style entertainments a lot of the things you did on your days off did produce something.
There's also a lot of times of year where one's work in regards to food production was relatively easy and others that required a lot of physical push. The lack of regular steady illumination after dark due to scarcity of material for rushlights and candles did mean more technical downtime but the trade off is there being less options of entertainments one could do in the dark.
Also the amount of incredibly litigious peasants in England was some evidence that in places there were some protection and recourse for lordly overreach. Peasants had surprising rates of literacy in some places but they really didn't use it to read or write for entertainment. They used to to fight for access to stuff.
It's kind of a difficult task to have discussions about how much work a society in time regularly does because of the unstated assumptions everyone has. We are all primed to veiw our modern lives as more convenient where we live better because of all the things we are not on the hook making ourselves which lends to our current hyper specialization... But with that hyper specialization comes an odd stagnation. The way we work with sharp delinineations between what counts as "work appropriate" behaviour and social ones is fairly mentally taxing and not what our ancestors did. The amount of formal interpersonal communication required by our tasks is higher. The diversity of tasks we do regularly is less. The people we are expected to impress regularly with high outputs and not just meeting a fairly low bar quota are relatively new. The amount of time we work is inflexible to the amount of energy we have during different seasons with expectations being that we operate at a steady efficiency over the course of the year. The idea that the amount of hours per day one works is fixed regardless of what actually needs doing before we have free time is different. The amount of time we can do tasks after dark has altered how we as a society operate. Work has changed to be utterly unrecognizable between the eras. There's definitely some bonuses like to stability of food supply and efficiency of output but there's a lot we do now that really works against our own needs as creatures so it's really difficult to compare what counts as "work" and what doesn't.
This is such a load of horse shit.
It's not about the amount of horse shit, it's about haw fast can you load it on the cart.
Once done, there is no more horse shit to load for the day. And if Timmy out there doesn't feel like loading his half of the horse shit one day, you were allowed to punch some sense into that thick skull of his.
You don't know what you're talking about
To all people asking for source and saying bullshit : it takes 1 second to find results on Google showing that it's in factnot bullshit
You only worked for a LORD for 150 days of the year.
You still had to provide for yourself from scratch outside of that. Work today may be shit, but it wasn't that shit.
Also, there was 3-4 months where nothing grew.
So it was normal to work everyday, all-day, for long stretches, and then do little in the winter other than try and stay warm.
Winter was still spent productively. Hunting/trapping/fishing/livestock all need handling. Farm land needs preparing, wood needs to get chopped. It was also a time to create & repair tools and housing or work on side hustles such as processing raw materials in a low level artisanal way ( e.g. weaving / fabric spinning ).
Yes, very true. And let's not forget that child rearing and elder care also had to be provided by the family, which usually all lived under one roof. Public schools are a relatively recent development too, during the Middle Ages schools only provided education in Latin for people to become clergy (hence the term grammar school.
The notion that we have it worse than Medieval peasants is absolutely ridiculous.
Half your labour value being taken by your employer for their own benefit? I wouldn't rush to say they take less now - that'll vary by role, but I know that last time I had a billable rate, it was ~7x my salary - the rough equivalent of working 319 days for my lords.
Back then, you worked for the state essentially for free.
You were also not working 8 hour days, you were working basically from sun up to down, you also had to work if you were sick unless you were so sick that you were bedridden.
And remember how I said that you basically had to work outside of that? That means you had to run shops, grow and maintain your own food, etc.
What I'm getting at is that this was not work that provided living for you, you still had to pay taxes after this as well. This applied to basically everyone except for nobles.
That's very much not true. Workdays would typically last around 6 hours, not including multiple breaks during the day. Also, your employer would usually provide the food for lunch, and it was acceptable to have a nap in the afternoon.
In winter, even shorter days were common to account for the reduction in daylight. If you were ill, you'd simply not show up and not get paid. In fact it was normal for people to only work for what they needed in the immediate future and stop showing up as soon as they had enough for the week
Why do people invent random bullshit to support a bad point?
This is a shitpost community
See point 1
Like all jokes, shitposts are only funny with a touch of reality
The joke literally breaks suspension of disbelief because it's so ridiculous.
*fewer holidays
Ben Le Man?
More like Stannis Le Mannis
I fucking swear I see this mistake every single day these days. Does no one know the difference between less and fewer anymore?!?
There's a growing amount of people (sic) who are unaware of the difference between countable and uncountable nouns. Just watch any YouTube video that happens to involve quantities of any kind. "Amount" has become the standard term. And it's similar with "less".
Isn't less a superset of fewer though?
No, fewer is for countable nouns, while less is for uncountable nouns.
However, like is often the case with the English language, there are various exceptions to the rule.
That was because the other 200 days they had to do their own work lol, not the lord's one
But we still have to do our own work the rest of the time
No, you throw a load into the washer and push a magic machine that sucks up the floor dirt for a half-hour and then drive your speed carriage to a plethora of stores for two hours to pick up supplies. Then you come home and put your supplies in the magic ice box that is powered 24/7, throw your laundry into the dryer, and check on the dinner in the box that slow-cooks your food without any stirring needed.
Then, instead of going to bed, you turn on all the lights and enjoy 5 hours of free time, where you can see perfectly fine because magic.
I'm sorry, I wish I could fling you back to that time to give you a reality check. Do we work too much? Yes. Do we work more than midevil peasants did? Absolutely not.
Any direct comparison between the labour of medieval peasants or craftsmen and modern workers is largely not possible due to the completely different character of these two types of labour organization. Please note that today, in developed countries, whether capitalist, communist or adopting a different form of economic principles, the most common way of working is a wage labour based on an employment contract and strict division between the performance of labour and ownership of means of production. In other words, most people work by performing specific tasks for the persons (physical or legal) who own the means of production used to generate value and then receive a remuneration for the work done, usually in form of money they can spend freely. Such organization of labour, completely obvious to modern people, was something highly unusual in Middle Ages though.
Modern organization of labour is largely shaped by the industrialization that separated the work from its results, at least from the perspective of the workers involved. In an industrial setting, workers were obliged to work their shift, i.e. an artificially set amount of time, producing goods that were a property of the factory owner. Thus, there was no 'start' and 'end' of the work that theoretically could have been conducted all year round, without pause, if the shifts were organized so and demand for the product warranted such supply intensity.
Now, this is a far cry from how the labour looked like in the Middle Ages. In opposition to the workers in the industrial and post-industrial settings, most peasants and craftsmen were essentially sole traders, who were utilizing their assets that were either owned (especially in case of urban craftsmen) or loaned (usually in the case of peasants) to generate wealth for themselves and were only obliged to pay taxes determined by the local authority. It should be noted however, that the 'taxes' might have not necessarily been the part of produce or a specific sum of money, but also various services, such as forest clearing, transportation of goods or fortification maintenance.
It is sometimes said that in the Middle Ages (and in early Modern period), holidays could have amounted up to a third of the year. This is true, but it does not differ that much from the situation most modern workers from developed or developing countries are in. They usually work a standard 40-45 hours per week, meaning 8-9 hours of work on each of the five days, and the free Saturdays and Sundays alone contribute to 104 free days. In Europe, most countries have roughly 8 national or religious holidays each year with 20-25 days of paid vacation on top of it, bringing the average number of free days to 135 or 37% of all the days in a year. Sure, some countries have e.g. less leave holidays or vacation days, but it still gives us one-third of the year being free from work.
Now, the principal work of the medieval peasants was usually more complex than it is sometimes presented, as it is not uncommon to assume that peasants were only farmers and their fields were unicultural (i.e. only one type of crops were grown there). This is not really correct. Agricultural production almost everywhere in Europe was localized, meaning that all products local people needed and that could have been obtained in a given place, were produced locally, requiring farmers to grow various crops simultaneously. As the medieval farmers were using crop rotation techniques, usually two-field system known in the Early Middle Ages or three-field system introduced in the times of Charlemagne and popularized across Europe only in the High Middle Ages (four-field system was introduced in 18th century), they were sowing and harvesting twice a year at a minimum. In reality there were much more crops with a different vegetation times, with winter cereals, spring cereals, lentils, rape, flax and hemp being the most common. Agricultural work was not limited to field work though, as virtually every homestead had a vegetable garden where every family was growing various plants for their own use (various tubers, herbs, root vegetables, cabbage, cucumbers etc.) that required occasional tending.
Second, in most homesteads peasants were keeping at least some animals. Hens were ubiquitous as they were low-maintenance, relatively cheap, could reproduce rather easily and acted as an important source of protein (eggs and meat). Cows, sheep and sometimes goats were a source of dairy products. Pigs were raised for meat and leather. Horses and oxen were, of course, ubiquitous working animals. All these animals had to be tended to daily and feeding, mucking, brushing, milking, collecting eggs and related activities were an important part of a daily routine for most peasants. Larger herds had to be led to a pasture, guarded and then brought back making this was an all-day job, quite often delegated to younger people in case of smaller animals. Just to put the amount of work in perspective, an average modern cow requires about 60 litres of water per day, so taking into account the projected differences in size of the medieval farm animals might have meant 30-40 litres per animal that had to be provided in the days when the animals were not grazing. Hauling such amount of water from a nearby source (usually river or stream, as wells would have quickly run dry) might have taken a dozen of trips every day.
Third, as I wrote above, the villages were largely self-reliant, especially in the Early Middle Ages, what means that everything had to be produced by peasants themselves and this includes their very literal daily bread. But even such staple food as bread or oatmeal required preparation from scratch and firing up the primitive stove was in itself a long task given the technology available, so preparation of a decent meal for the entire family could have taken a significant part of a day. On a rare occasion, when the animal was slaughtered, meat and leather had to immediately processed to avoid spoiling - cutting, mincing, sausage-making and smoking could have taken days, depending on the number of people involved. Thus, preparation of food for the entire family could have been construed as a full-time job for a single person, what have not really changed until the introduction of refrigerators, gas and electric stoves and various modern kitchen appliances, what in some rural areas could mean times as close as second half of 20th century.
Of course, food was not the only thing that was made by peasants, who also had to create their agricultural tools used for all the work in the fields and around the house, such as rakes, flails, plows, carts or wheelbarrows. The same can be said of simple containers and utensils, from baskets to spoons to troughs. Carving the wooden tools, forming and firing clay bowls and jars, basket weaving, candles casting - all of these also consumed a lot of time. Clothing was often made locally, what required preparation of materials, and fulling, breaking, carding, spinning, weaving and finally cutting and sewing new garments were a tedious activities usually done in the long evenings, as they were primarily indoor work. With the development of the economic networks and increased amount of money in circulation, more and more goods were simply bought for the money received from the sale of the surplus agricultural or consumer goods, but as far the Middle Ages.
Fourth, some of the comestibles and important resources (wood, mostly) had to be collected in the nearby area. Looking for kindling, wood (usually deadwood, as chopping trees in a forest usually required lord's permission), berries, honey, and mushrooms was a common activity in season and more often than not was also treated as a pastime and an occasion to move away from the homestead. The diet was also enriched by fish if the river or lake was located nearby and in most areas peasants were able to hunt wild birds in the fields (hunting game was generally a lord's privilege). Fishing and hunting were also time-consuming activities.
Fifth, peasants were commonly required to do some work on their lord's behalf. These could include anything related to the maintenance and creation of the local infrastructure - forest clearing, road maintenance, transport etc. It should be remembered that with the transportation limited to the carts drawn by horses or oxen, a seemingly simple work such as moving lumber from the forest to a sawmill or a nearby construction site could have taken weeks, due to low speed and capacity of the vehicles, not to mention that loading the cargo had to be done entirely by hand.
Sixth, the house and other buildings had to be maintained regularly, what usually required repositioning and replacing thatch bundles (especially after a strong wind), filling gaps between logs or replacing crumbling daub, repairing occasional damages caused by animals etc.
Last but not least, there were a lot of holidays, generally matching the number of 'free days' nowadays. On Sundays and ecclesiastical holidays peasants were generally visiting the local church and taking part in the ceremonies, often accompanied with local festivities in case of larger events. The latter also required at least some preparation what was adding to an already busy peasant's schedule. Additionally, any visit of the local lord or his representative due to some administrative work (e.g. judicial proceedings in case of any criminal action or contested claim) were also drawing attention of the entire village and were an local event in its own right.
So, to sum it up, free medieval peasants and craftsmen were not required to 'go to work', as they were essentially sole traders, who had more or less full control over their work and income, but unlike modern people in developed countries, they also spent much more time on various activities we now either do not perform or take for granted. In other words, modern people go to work to get money they use to pay for almost everything they need (e.g. they usually delegate such work to others). Medieval sustenance agricultural work was usually seasonal and less time-consuming overall, but everything else, from daily house chores to procurement of various goods required a lot more time and effort, often much more than the 'work' associated with agriculture. Thus, it is not incorrect to say that medieval peasants had much more work on their hands than modern people.
Bennett, J., A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344, McGraw-Hill, New York 1998.
Hutton, R., The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford University Press, 1996.
Voth, H-J., Time and Work in England 1750-1830, Oxford University Press, 2001.
Posts some shit on Shitposting forum
People ask for sources
Bro did a statement, of course people gonna ask for sources
Can I get a source on that?
Welcome back to c/Lemmy Shitpost, where everything's made up and the points don't matter.
That's a very entertaining and informative video. It totally adds up to what I read by David Graeber, a very smart anthropologist, which makes it even more legit.
But we are living longer now. 35 years old is basically dead.
The babies died making average age less. Doesn't mean those who got to adulthood lived to that age only.
Yeah. If you made it past 10 or so you'd probably live to at least 50, with 60-70 not being common but also far from rare. All those dying kids and babies really bring down the average.
Let's not get too crazy. There's a 15 year period where young men tend to get injured and young women tend to give birth that acts as a major filter. If you plotted death rates on a graph it would look like a trident -- that's life without antibiotics.
It's certainly true that elderly were not a rare sight, but those elderly who could be found were almost universally hardy of constitution or talented at avoiding danger. Quite literally the end of the bell curve.
Family having like 13 kids, only 5 maybe making it to teen age, daughter dies in childbirth, 4 kids to 50 type beat.
Population graph after penicillin is very telling
Depending on where and when you're talking about, if you were a man, if you weren't farming, you were at the front lines of the king's army with a spear and no armor.
That was actually fairly uncommon for most of the middle ages. From the collapse of the western empire until the military reforms c1500, standing armies were few and far between. Peasants could be drafted to fight by their lords, but time in military service was the exception rather than the rule.
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yes, 150 days, for the lord, how many days on your own property so you didn't starve to death?
they fucking worked all days except Sunday morning to evening, stop romanticizing feudalism ya cunts.
and the church was part of the exploitation od the masses, promising afterlife dor the peasants but not for the rich "insert the bible quote here"
fuck feudalism and fuck the church
Arguments like these are also uncomfortably similar to the arguments slave owners would use to justify slavery. "Look, I take good care of them, feed them, give them clothes, and even built them their own shack next to my plantation house! That means I'm totally not exploiting the people I believe are my property!"
'I allow them to just exist between whipping and beating them, isn't that enough?!'
Yeah "only worked 150 days" glosses over how much work daily life was. If you were lucky you lived with pigs and cows and their shit in your thatch hut and it didn't cave in during the winter leaving you for dead, maybe you survived through your thirties without dying of lung disease, because you'd constantly have fires going in the hut. You'd have to wash clothes in the river even during the winters and hang them up to dry in the smoke of your hut.
On the plus size in good times, and ironically, you could have a healthier diet than the lord. It wasn't like being a lord was a worry-free place to be either, despite all the luxuries they could afford. Christmas was basically 2 months in the winter and festival season could be full of pleasure if you were well situated. "Peasant" encompasses a wide variety of economic arrangements and many of them could live comfortably, relatively speaking. There was no one single "feudalism" and it's debatable whether the term is useful to sum up the period.
Yeah where the hell do those figures come from. They worked around the clock.
Yeah nah they didn't sleep on Sundays, there were stuff to be done on those days too.
I think the number is a realistic estimate for serfdom, as farming is largely seasonal. However, harvests could mean 2 weeks with 16 hours of work per day for everyone including children.
Where do your figures come from?
Lol, that's total bullshit. Medieval peasants didn't work more than people today. And pre-medieval societies worked even less.
Here's the good stuff:
Eight centuries of annual hours 13th century - Adult male peasant, U.K.: 1620 hours Calculated from Gregory Clark's estimate of 150 days per family, assumes 12 hours per day, 135 days per year for adult male ("Impatience, Poverty, and Open Field Agriculture", mimeo, 1986)
14th century - Casual laborer, U.K.: 1440 hours
Calculated from Nora Ritchie's estimate of 120 days per year. Assumes 12-hour day. ("Labour conditions in Essex in the reign of Richard II", in E.M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History, vol. II, London: Edward Arnold, 1962).
Middle ages - English worker: 2309 hours
Juliet Schor's estime of average medieval laborer working two-thirds of the year at 9.5 hours per day
1400-1600 - Farmer-miner, adult male, U.K.: 1980 hours
Calculated from Ian Blanchard's estimate of 180 days per year. Assumes 11-hour day ("Labour productivity and work psychology in the English mining industry, 1400-1600", Economic History Review 31, 23 (1978).
1840 - Average worker, U.K.: 3105-3588 hours
Based on 69-hour week; hours from W.S. Woytinsky, "Hours of labor," in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. III (New York: Macmillan, 1935). Low estimate assumes 45 week year, high one assumes 52 week year
1850 - Average worker, U.S.: 3150-3650 hours
Based on 70-hour week; hours from Joseph Zeisel, "The workweek in American industry, 1850-1956", Monthly Labor Review 81, 23-29 (1958). Low estimate assumes 45 week year, high one assumes 52 week year
1987 - Average worker, U.S.: 1949 hours
From The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, by Juliet B. Schor, Table 2.4
1988 - Manufacturing workers, U.K.: 1856 hours
Calculated from Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Office of Productivity and Technology
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
I should add that I grew up on a farm in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. We "worked" on the farm of two 10 or 12 hours a day, but the majority of that time was spent not slaving away doing actual work, but moving things around. Driving tractors, animal husbandry, cleaning out barns, transporting feed or harvested crops, or the main labor intensive activities.
Additionally, we spent time doing planning and accounting, as well as ordering products and services that the form required. However, compared to working on a factory floor or in an office job the work was far lower in intensity and did not have the type of oversight that modern office labor incurs.
The other thing is that during the winter, from roughly October through February basically no work happens. Nothing grows, so the only thing you need to do is to feed your animals and keep them clean. That's it. It's like a 4-month vacation, although it still requires some upkeep the workload is a fraction of what you do during the rest of the year. Maybe 1 to 2 hours a day.
There's also the fact that, before the advent of gas and then electric lighting, you really couldn't see shit after dark. Tallow candles allow you to see where you're going, but they don't give off enough light to allow you to do much real work. Thus, throughout the winter there were simply fewer hours in which to do most things.
This is also likely why "dinner" was traditionally at lunchtime, and was also the main meal of the day. This was the time of day when you would most reliably have enough light to prepare a large meal. Then, when artificial lighting became a thing, upper class types started having "dinner parties" late in the evening, and for many dinner became the evening meal. It did not spread everywhere, though, in particular the north of the UK generally still thinks of dinner as lunchtime.
Calls bullshit, facilitates worse bullshit. Classic. I guess I imagined all the hard WORK it took to maintain a home. Remember, if you're not being paid for it, it doesn't count as labor. Fucking hell
Source: your ass
I mean, the actual source for this statistic is usually "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure" by Juliet Schor who in turn got the number from an unpublished paper written by Gregory Clark in 1986. Clark did eventually publish a paper in 2018 where he increased his estimate to 250-300 days (which may still be less than some modern workers work).
And also: this was before the 8h day. People worked until they were done which was sometimes much more but on average less
Farming peasants worked pretty much from sunrise to sunset, sometimes even longer. If you count the number of hours the average medieval peasant worked in a year, it was probably a lot more than we do now.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs 2018
I worked on a farm down in the Central valley in California about 15 years ago, and all the Hispanic people worked from 5:00 a.m. to noon and that was it. They were done for the day. And this is modern society!
5 to 12 is still 7h, which is almost the usual 8h day but still a good thing
Well 250 days a year is a five day work week for 50 weeks. So that’s pretty much the same thing we do today.
And much more for some
261 days is working every single week 5 days a week.
Most modern "middle class" jobs (which, to be fair, are increasingly scarce) don't work 52 weeks a year with 0 holidays.
Peasants worked sunup til sundown 250-300 days a year.
Life fucking blew as a peasant.
Yes, but let's do a breakdown of the average day in the life of a Medieval European peasant. Let's assume it's a standard 8hr day for a male serf aged 15-20 years.
Sun comes up, start the day with perhaps a half hour for breakfast, another half hour for prayer, depending on the day, then it's out to the fields for 3-4 hours work, which was dependent on the particular produce of the farm where he worked and the season. Livestock tended to, fields plowed, that sort of thing. Then an hour for evening prayer and supper, perhaps some beer with the lads at the tavern before sun down.
Another thing you're forgetting is that we measure time completely differently than they did in Medieval Europe. I'll let David Graeber, of "Bullshit Jobs" explain:
The 8 hour workday is a very modern invention.
Farmers have always worked 12+ hour days, starting before dawn to feed animals and ending their days with the sun going down, serfs we're no different. Once they were done with farm labor at sundown they worked at home on anything that needed mending for the next day, ate boiled veggies and then went to bed.
Farming is a way of life where you dance a razor's edge. You don't have the luxury of time not working.
I'll concede that point. And I'd like to add that the modern clocks as we know them are also a very modern invention. Farmers in Medieval Europe certainly did not have a device in their homes which chimed the hour with regular and exact precision. The closest equivalent they would have had were clock towers, starting about the fourteenth century, funded by local merchants guilds. It was these same merchants who were in the habit of keeping a human skull in their offices as a memento mori, reminding them to make good use of their time, as each chime of the clock brought them one hour closer to death. There were no time clocks which a serf could use to punch in or out of work for the day, no payroll and accounting department in the employ of the local lord to keep track of all hours worked, etc. Time was not a grid against work could be measured because the work was the measure itself.
What is a peasant farmer doing during the winter when nothing is growing?
Depends on the area but they were constantly busy. Warm seasons were 7 days a week sunup til sundown.
For the cold seasons:
And of course:
Hoping and praying that they had enough food to not starve to death.
There is quite the difference between 150/365 and 300/365.
One is about 3/7 the other 6/7 and now look at today when most of us work 5/7 on a normal workweek.
Idk man, somebody else having made a similar wild claim doesn't mean that OP or the memes creator had a source at all.
"My source is that i made it the fuck up"
It's from a famous paper. Linked by gnutrinto elsewhere in this thread,
The church wasnt why peasants worked less. They worked less because there wasn't that much work to be done. During the slow season, there just isn't enough work to justify paying a peasant to work.
Peasants (serfs) were not paid. They were bound to the land they worked, and were given a fraction of the harvest they produced. The rest was property of the Lord who's title controlled the land.
There was a (very small) artisan class where the concept of payment existed, though often it was payment-in-kind - smith the plow for my oxen and I'll give you some food after the harvest. Money was rarely encountered for the vast majority of people.
You're right they were not paid money, but they arguably were provided more goods for their services starting in the 15th century. In western Europe.
Eastern and Western Europe behaved very differently when it came to serfdom. Serfdom, as you described it, began to decline starting in western Europe in the 15th century and was pretty much gone by the 17th century. Meanwhile Eastern Europe started a rise in serfdom as you described it in the 16th century.
Serfs started to get better conditions thanks to the bubonic plague and increasing workers power over lords. In western Europe they were paid a higher share of the crop as a result. They still had a bad life overall, but it got ever so slightly better.
The whole notion that they had 150 days off isn't even necessarily accurate either because record keeping is so bad from those eras on time worked. It's not enough data to provide an accurate assessment of working hours.
What a surprise, capitalism is a relatively new system
Lol is this the tankie take on the above story? You think that sounds like some kind of paradise?
Can you elaborate on your assumptions and why he might assume it's a paradise?
He brings up capitalism out of the blue, for no reason whatsoever, in response to a post about serfdom. With a sarcastic “what a surprise.” Is he implying serfdom is preferable to capitalism?
Not out of the blue. Just summarizing what the person above me said in a captain obvious way.
Also I'm a woman so she/her please.
Well, everybody knows capitalism rose out of feudalism in Europe. @ Cheesus briefly mentions it too.
The sarcasm is a response to the universal assumption that money and wages were always had universally. But @ TheChurn says very few were paid and those were rare.
Reminder: the soviets ran a state-capitalist system. That's not very feudalist.
I think you've misunderstood her quite a bit. Happens a lot on here lol.
Thank you you worded it better than I could have.
Also "Her" if ya don't mind. Am just a woman ^~^. I know it isn't really relevant or important but pronoun preferences
Lmao on what planet am I a tankie
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Yep. Farming is a bunch of "hurry up and wait". Not that there wasn't plenty of other work, but it only takes so long to feed the animals.
Did someone say ass pennies?
There's no way farming was only done 5 sporadic months of the year, that livestock keeping would allow you to just fuck off and not work that frequently, and they often did things like produce parts of their own cloths etc which I would count that much sewing/darning to be work let along the rest of the homesteading requirements...
but that would still be considered leisure today.
do you know how many times i leave for work wishing i had time to do a load of wash, clean my bathroom, do the dishes or any other chore?
yeah they had chores and we could debate that is work but they had more leisure time absolutely
Medieval chores weren't putting clothes in the washing machine or giving the bathroom a wipe, they were weaving and sewing clothes by hand and then laboriously washing them in the stream, and hauling buckets of shit. Everything was much harder and much less pleasant, and that was how you spent your 'free time'.
Leave it to modern people to 'wish they'd live in mediveal times'
The point is they had all of that to do by hand, and still managed to "work for hire" less time than us in a society where over 90% of the stuff is automated.
You have a misconception of peasant life I believe. They had far more free time for socializing than you'd ever believe and the work they had to do day to day was not this slog you envision.
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I don't know why you think modern people have more leisure time?
Peasant work was seasonal first of all, most work wasn't consistent nor were they afforded wages. Most works resulted in a direct product for the person doing the work, cooking, clothes making, farming.
You don't understand how much leisure peasants had. Most culture we consider today is from peasant work. Dancing, music, song, joking, and while cooking is work cooking is also a social gathering of work and then eating. Peasants weren't the working class we are today, we work far more and have far more chores to do. Making clothes by hand was harder but your quality was higher and clothes lasted, they didn't shop for groceries or deal with car upkeep, they didn't spend 8 hours at work and an hour traveling both ways.
Peasants were peasants because they didn't have work to do and generate income with, it was literally mostly chores or leisure.
This is why the black plague was helpful, less people meant workers could make more demands and we see the beginning of a work culture develop.
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I don't get months of holidays? I haven't had off in years bro. I get two days off from my job a year I don't request, I am a chef.
Peasants always stopped working, work was probably done before the sun was even close to going down. Hunting, fishing, cooking are leisure activities they aren't work you imagine.
It took long to produce clothes but you don't need 47 outfits that are made to fall apart in less than a year.
150 days isn't a myth. It is a stretch of the truth but we work more, we have less time. We have more ability to do things like travel or forms of entertainment but no.
You are confusing the peasants of then with middle class people. The poors, me, we work 40-60 hours a week sometimes two jobs with no vacations often in the hours office workers aren't working because we are running the movie theaters, salting the roads, cooking your food, etc.
A 9-5 is probably not actually the peasantry.
People had more free time and less stressors than we do today.
I’d think everyone doesn’t stop working at the same time, more of a rotation
about to make comment - checks sub-lemmy
Phew I almost said something serious on a silly sub.
They had to do hard labour in the fields, I make pretty pictures in a comfy chair
Too bad there hasn't been a massive increase in productivity since then to be able to have both.
Yea but all the information humanity has collected at my fingertips and a more diverse diet than any king in history is pretty neato.
Not to mention the convenience that is idk... A fucking dishwasher or laundry machines, or heatable ovens to the exact degree of temperature you want, microwaves, literally any device created to enhance the average citizens time spent NOT doing the egregiously long work needed to maintain a home that these hypothetical peasants did. People just braindead tbh when they see shit like this and just nod along like it's so wise.
But that's not really a rebuttal either. How about we have both? Why not all the benefits of progress together with less work?
How about it? I'd sign up, but have you looked around? Do you think those hoarding wealth and power will willingly share it?
..diet…king… Burger King?
Diverse???
🤯
Yeah I'm with you here, but like we have a lot less fewer plagues.
Were you not here the last 3 years?
It didn't kill a third of the population last time I've checked
Fewer
Okay Stannis.
Ah thanks, I fixeded. it
I was 45 years old when I finally mastered the difference myself.
In France, they had roughly this many holidays, but in practice it was only the noble class who could afford to take the time off. Tl;dr BS
The peasants yearn for the fields.
As children yearn for the mines.
See: Minecraft
Misinformation? In the form of a meme on the internet?
The scandal!
There wasn't time off. There were things to be done. There's a reason we have seasonal workers in farms.
With weekends, public holidays and vacation days I work 220 days a year and with 8 hours a day that's probably not far off the total hours of the 150 work day medieval peasant
Most medieval peasantry worked about 20–25 hours a week, usually with no regulation of any kind on taking your own breaks, chatting with your friends, and drinking on the job. Only very poor serfs with atypically cruel lords dealt with restrictions that were so invasive. People typically rose with the sun and stopped working shortly after midday to work on their own projects and go about their own business, and peasants on the sunny side of the mean had good reason to be satisfied with their quality of life. The work was often very hard work, and the disadvantages included both poverty and lack of civil liberties and both of them to degrees that are unthinkable by modern standards, but we're just gonna have to take the L when it comes to the amount of time spent working. They really did have it better in that regard.
This basically backs up what I have read on the subject. I feel like the disconnect comes from what we categorize as "work" often not counting stuff like making stuff for yourself and your own home, lessons, tasks you could do keeping your hands busy while you socialized or talked, housework and so on. Depending on time and place (mostly pre-enclosure) the time and production one owed their lord was relatively low in most places and did come with minor kickbacks. The church did keep a lot of proper holidays and Sunday as a sabbath was observed but again in a society that doesn't really have things like regular sit and watch style entertainments a lot of the things you did on your days off did produce something.
There's also a lot of times of year where one's work in regards to food production was relatively easy and others that required a lot of physical push. The lack of regular steady illumination after dark due to scarcity of material for rushlights and candles did mean more technical downtime but the trade off is there being less options of entertainments one could do in the dark.
Also the amount of incredibly litigious peasants in England was some evidence that in places there were some protection and recourse for lordly overreach. Peasants had surprising rates of literacy in some places but they really didn't use it to read or write for entertainment. They used to to fight for access to stuff.
It's kind of a difficult task to have discussions about how much work a society in time regularly does because of the unstated assumptions everyone has. We are all primed to veiw our modern lives as more convenient where we live better because of all the things we are not on the hook making ourselves which lends to our current hyper specialization... But with that hyper specialization comes an odd stagnation. The way we work with sharp delinineations between what counts as "work appropriate" behaviour and social ones is fairly mentally taxing and not what our ancestors did. The amount of formal interpersonal communication required by our tasks is higher. The diversity of tasks we do regularly is less. The people we are expected to impress regularly with high outputs and not just meeting a fairly low bar quota are relatively new. The amount of time we work is inflexible to the amount of energy we have during different seasons with expectations being that we operate at a steady efficiency over the course of the year. The idea that the amount of hours per day one works is fixed regardless of what actually needs doing before we have free time is different. The amount of time we can do tasks after dark has altered how we as a society operate. Work has changed to be utterly unrecognizable between the eras. There's definitely some bonuses like to stability of food supply and efficiency of output but there's a lot we do now that really works against our own needs as creatures so it's really difficult to compare what counts as "work" and what doesn't.
This is such a load of horse shit.
It's not about the amount of horse shit, it's about haw fast can you load it on the cart.
Once done, there is no more horse shit to load for the day. And if Timmy out there doesn't feel like loading his half of the horse shit one day, you were allowed to punch some sense into that thick skull of his.
You don't know what you're talking about
To all people asking for source and saying bullshit : it takes 1 second to find results on Google showing that it's in factnot bullshit
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-great-debate-idUKBRE97S0KU20130829
You only worked for a LORD for 150 days of the year.
You still had to provide for yourself from scratch outside of that. Work today may be shit, but it wasn't that shit.
Also, there was 3-4 months where nothing grew.
So it was normal to work everyday, all-day, for long stretches, and then do little in the winter other than try and stay warm.
Winter was still spent productively. Hunting/trapping/fishing/livestock all need handling. Farm land needs preparing, wood needs to get chopped. It was also a time to create & repair tools and housing or work on side hustles such as processing raw materials in a low level artisanal way ( e.g. weaving / fabric spinning ).
Yes, very true. And let's not forget that child rearing and elder care also had to be provided by the family, which usually all lived under one roof. Public schools are a relatively recent development too, during the Middle Ages schools only provided education in Latin for people to become clergy (hence the term grammar school.
The notion that we have it worse than Medieval peasants is absolutely ridiculous.
Half your labour value being taken by your employer for their own benefit? I wouldn't rush to say they take less now - that'll vary by role, but I know that last time I had a billable rate, it was ~7x my salary - the rough equivalent of working 319 days for my lords.
Back then, you worked for the state essentially for free.
You were also not working 8 hour days, you were working basically from sun up to down, you also had to work if you were sick unless you were so sick that you were bedridden.
And remember how I said that you basically had to work outside of that? That means you had to run shops, grow and maintain your own food, etc.
What I'm getting at is that this was not work that provided living for you, you still had to pay taxes after this as well. This applied to basically everyone except for nobles.
That's very much not true. Workdays would typically last around 6 hours, not including multiple breaks during the day. Also, your employer would usually provide the food for lunch, and it was acceptable to have a nap in the afternoon.
In winter, even shorter days were common to account for the reduction in daylight. If you were ill, you'd simply not show up and not get paid. In fact it was normal for people to only work for what they needed in the immediate future and stop showing up as soon as they had enough for the week
So... u r telling me that I have to defend YOUR argument ?
Wow....
Yeah, but I have double their life span.
Why do people invent random bullshit to support a bad point?
Like all jokes, shitposts are only funny with a touch of reality
The joke literally breaks suspension of disbelief because it's so ridiculous.
*fewer holidays
Ben Le Man?
More like Stannis Le Mannis
I fucking swear I see this mistake every single day these days. Does no one know the difference between less and fewer anymore?!?
There's a growing amount of people (sic) who are unaware of the difference between countable and uncountable nouns. Just watch any YouTube video that happens to involve quantities of any kind. "Amount" has become the standard term. And it's similar with "less".
Isn't less a superset of fewer though?
No, fewer is for countable nouns, while less is for uncountable nouns.
However, like is often the case with the English language, there are various exceptions to the rule.
Sources:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=7pm-YQGFs8E
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One of the definitions of Less is "Consisting of a smaller number" which feels pretty countable.
That was because the other 200 days they had to do their own work lol, not the lord's one
But we still have to do our own work the rest of the time
No, you throw a load into the washer and push a magic machine that sucks up the floor dirt for a half-hour and then drive your speed carriage to a plethora of stores for two hours to pick up supplies. Then you come home and put your supplies in the magic ice box that is powered 24/7, throw your laundry into the dryer, and check on the dinner in the box that slow-cooks your food without any stirring needed.
Then, instead of going to bed, you turn on all the lights and enjoy 5 hours of free time, where you can see perfectly fine because magic.
I'm sorry, I wish I could fling you back to that time to give you a reality check. Do we work too much? Yes. Do we work more than midevil peasants did? Absolutely not.
Any direct comparison between the labour of medieval peasants or craftsmen and modern workers is largely not possible due to the completely different character of these two types of labour organization. Please note that today, in developed countries, whether capitalist, communist or adopting a different form of economic principles, the most common way of working is a wage labour based on an employment contract and strict division between the performance of labour and ownership of means of production. In other words, most people work by performing specific tasks for the persons (physical or legal) who own the means of production used to generate value and then receive a remuneration for the work done, usually in form of money they can spend freely. Such organization of labour, completely obvious to modern people, was something highly unusual in Middle Ages though.
Modern organization of labour is largely shaped by the industrialization that separated the work from its results, at least from the perspective of the workers involved. In an industrial setting, workers were obliged to work their shift, i.e. an artificially set amount of time, producing goods that were a property of the factory owner. Thus, there was no 'start' and 'end' of the work that theoretically could have been conducted all year round, without pause, if the shifts were organized so and demand for the product warranted such supply intensity.
Now, this is a far cry from how the labour looked like in the Middle Ages. In opposition to the workers in the industrial and post-industrial settings, most peasants and craftsmen were essentially sole traders, who were utilizing their assets that were either owned (especially in case of urban craftsmen) or loaned (usually in the case of peasants) to generate wealth for themselves and were only obliged to pay taxes determined by the local authority. It should be noted however, that the 'taxes' might have not necessarily been the part of produce or a specific sum of money, but also various services, such as forest clearing, transportation of goods or fortification maintenance.
It is sometimes said that in the Middle Ages (and in early Modern period), holidays could have amounted up to a third of the year. This is true, but it does not differ that much from the situation most modern workers from developed or developing countries are in. They usually work a standard 40-45 hours per week, meaning 8-9 hours of work on each of the five days, and the free Saturdays and Sundays alone contribute to 104 free days. In Europe, most countries have roughly 8 national or religious holidays each year with 20-25 days of paid vacation on top of it, bringing the average number of free days to 135 or 37% of all the days in a year. Sure, some countries have e.g. less leave holidays or vacation days, but it still gives us one-third of the year being free from work.
Now, the principal work of the medieval peasants was usually more complex than it is sometimes presented, as it is not uncommon to assume that peasants were only farmers and their fields were unicultural (i.e. only one type of crops were grown there). This is not really correct. Agricultural production almost everywhere in Europe was localized, meaning that all products local people needed and that could have been obtained in a given place, were produced locally, requiring farmers to grow various crops simultaneously. As the medieval farmers were using crop rotation techniques, usually two-field system known in the Early Middle Ages or three-field system introduced in the times of Charlemagne and popularized across Europe only in the High Middle Ages (four-field system was introduced in 18th century), they were sowing and harvesting twice a year at a minimum. In reality there were much more crops with a different vegetation times, with winter cereals, spring cereals, lentils, rape, flax and hemp being the most common. Agricultural work was not limited to field work though, as virtually every homestead had a vegetable garden where every family was growing various plants for their own use (various tubers, herbs, root vegetables, cabbage, cucumbers etc.) that required occasional tending.
Second, in most homesteads peasants were keeping at least some animals. Hens were ubiquitous as they were low-maintenance, relatively cheap, could reproduce rather easily and acted as an important source of protein (eggs and meat). Cows, sheep and sometimes goats were a source of dairy products. Pigs were raised for meat and leather. Horses and oxen were, of course, ubiquitous working animals. All these animals had to be tended to daily and feeding, mucking, brushing, milking, collecting eggs and related activities were an important part of a daily routine for most peasants. Larger herds had to be led to a pasture, guarded and then brought back making this was an all-day job, quite often delegated to younger people in case of smaller animals. Just to put the amount of work in perspective, an average modern cow requires about 60 litres of water per day, so taking into account the projected differences in size of the medieval farm animals might have meant 30-40 litres per animal that had to be provided in the days when the animals were not grazing. Hauling such amount of water from a nearby source (usually river or stream, as wells would have quickly run dry) might have taken a dozen of trips every day.
Third, as I wrote above, the villages were largely self-reliant, especially in the Early Middle Ages, what means that everything had to be produced by peasants themselves and this includes their very literal daily bread. But even such staple food as bread or oatmeal required preparation from scratch and firing up the primitive stove was in itself a long task given the technology available, so preparation of a decent meal for the entire family could have taken a significant part of a day. On a rare occasion, when the animal was slaughtered, meat and leather had to immediately processed to avoid spoiling - cutting, mincing, sausage-making and smoking could have taken days, depending on the number of people involved. Thus, preparation of food for the entire family could have been construed as a full-time job for a single person, what have not really changed until the introduction of refrigerators, gas and electric stoves and various modern kitchen appliances, what in some rural areas could mean times as close as second half of 20th century.
Of course, food was not the only thing that was made by peasants, who also had to create their agricultural tools used for all the work in the fields and around the house, such as rakes, flails, plows, carts or wheelbarrows. The same can be said of simple containers and utensils, from baskets to spoons to troughs. Carving the wooden tools, forming and firing clay bowls and jars, basket weaving, candles casting - all of these also consumed a lot of time. Clothing was often made locally, what required preparation of materials, and fulling, breaking, carding, spinning, weaving and finally cutting and sewing new garments were a tedious activities usually done in the long evenings, as they were primarily indoor work. With the development of the economic networks and increased amount of money in circulation, more and more goods were simply bought for the money received from the sale of the surplus agricultural or consumer goods, but as far the Middle Ages.
Fourth, some of the comestibles and important resources (wood, mostly) had to be collected in the nearby area. Looking for kindling, wood (usually deadwood, as chopping trees in a forest usually required lord's permission), berries, honey, and mushrooms was a common activity in season and more often than not was also treated as a pastime and an occasion to move away from the homestead. The diet was also enriched by fish if the river or lake was located nearby and in most areas peasants were able to hunt wild birds in the fields (hunting game was generally a lord's privilege). Fishing and hunting were also time-consuming activities.
Fifth, peasants were commonly required to do some work on their lord's behalf. These could include anything related to the maintenance and creation of the local infrastructure - forest clearing, road maintenance, transport etc. It should be remembered that with the transportation limited to the carts drawn by horses or oxen, a seemingly simple work such as moving lumber from the forest to a sawmill or a nearby construction site could have taken weeks, due to low speed and capacity of the vehicles, not to mention that loading the cargo had to be done entirely by hand.
Sixth, the house and other buildings had to be maintained regularly, what usually required repositioning and replacing thatch bundles (especially after a strong wind), filling gaps between logs or replacing crumbling daub, repairing occasional damages caused by animals etc.
Last but not least, there were a lot of holidays, generally matching the number of 'free days' nowadays. On Sundays and ecclesiastical holidays peasants were generally visiting the local church and taking part in the ceremonies, often accompanied with local festivities in case of larger events. The latter also required at least some preparation what was adding to an already busy peasant's schedule. Additionally, any visit of the local lord or his representative due to some administrative work (e.g. judicial proceedings in case of any criminal action or contested claim) were also drawing attention of the entire village and were an local event in its own right.
So, to sum it up, free medieval peasants and craftsmen were not required to 'go to work', as they were essentially sole traders, who had more or less full control over their work and income, but unlike modern people in developed countries, they also spent much more time on various activities we now either do not perform or take for granted. In other words, modern people go to work to get money they use to pay for almost everything they need (e.g. they usually delegate such work to others). Medieval sustenance agricultural work was usually seasonal and less time-consuming overall, but everything else, from daily house chores to procurement of various goods required a lot more time and effort, often much more than the 'work' associated with agriculture. Thus, it is not incorrect to say that medieval peasants had much more work on their hands than modern people.
Bennett, J., A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344, McGraw-Hill, New York 1998.
Hutton, R., The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford University Press, 1996.
Voth, H-J., Time and Work in England 1750-1830, Oxford University Press, 2001.
Bro did a statement, of course people gonna ask for sources
Can I get a source on that?
Welcome back to c/Lemmy Shitpost, where everything's made up and the points don't matter.
This video was informative. It links its sources
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This video was informative
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That's a very entertaining and informative video. It totally adds up to what I read by David Graeber, a very smart anthropologist, which makes it even more legit.
The source is I made it the fuck up
Fewer**
But I can talk gooder.
But we are living longer now. 35 years old is basically dead.
The babies died making average age less. Doesn't mean those who got to adulthood lived to that age only.
Yeah. If you made it past 10 or so you'd probably live to at least 50, with 60-70 not being common but also far from rare. All those dying kids and babies really bring down the average.
Let's not get too crazy. There's a 15 year period where young men tend to get injured and young women tend to give birth that acts as a major filter. If you plotted death rates on a graph it would look like a trident -- that's life without antibiotics.
It's certainly true that elderly were not a rare sight, but those elderly who could be found were almost universally hardy of constitution or talented at avoiding danger. Quite literally the end of the bell curve.
Family having like 13 kids, only 5 maybe making it to teen age, daughter dies in childbirth, 4 kids to 50 type beat.
Population graph after penicillin is very telling
Depending on where and when you're talking about, if you were a man, if you weren't farming, you were at the front lines of the king's army with a spear and no armor.
That was actually fairly uncommon for most of the middle ages. From the collapse of the western empire until the military reforms c1500, standing armies were few and far between. Peasants could be drafted to fight by their lords, but time in military service was the exception rather than the rule.
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Oh, bullshit.
Dog everything took longer back then
People's legs used to routinely fall asleep while taking a dump because it took soo long. This is where the term " loo legs" originated from.
Fewer