This is only correct for the field work. Other works like threshing and cleaning grain could take literal months. And idk where did you get the notion that holidays were free of work.
thank you! i am a freak for the middle ages (mostly holy roman empire) and i get frustrated when these lies continue to get spread.
Don’t forget mending tools, tending or butchering livestock, repairing your house…
Yeah, that was already mentioned by other posters. But if you mention the livestock, it’s a neat point to remind that peasants, both medieval and later ones literally lived with their animals especially in winter. In the same room. Chickens, sheep, goats, cows, pigs. And those weren’t your average cute pygmy piglets people keep as pets, pigs were more like wild hogs and there is terribly long list of known cases where pigs assaulted humans and even killed and and devoured weak people and children. Anyone still want to go back to the bucolic medieval life?
Saves time on having to bring food for the pig …
There were also those winter months were you couldn’t do anything outside anyway.
In the field yes, but in and around house there was plenty of work. For example abovementioned threshing was often done in the winter, it was hellish work which took a lot of time up to even the next harvest. Also, what people often forget is that before the agricultural and industrial revolution technic and knowledge wasn’t locked. XVIII and XIX century peasants, depite seemingly living in very similar conditions than their XII century ancestors still had better tools and more knowledge. They did had on average more hands but less land though, that was “recompensed” by serfdom and exploiting peasants from unpaid work.
Medieval peasant would simply be unable to work extra, that’s why serfdom started to appear on wider scale in XV and XVI century after reneissance pushed knowledge forward and population completely recovered after Black Death - it was also beginning of rural capitalism formation, when commodity food production was increasing and of course solution was to squeeze peasant for more unpaid labour (for example, late XVI century Polish landowner could get up to 20 times more money from unpaid labour of peasants on his land than by taxing the same peasants from the same land).
Some of us are painfully aware.
I’m 40 and going through a major midlife crisis. No savings, no hope for a higher paid job than entry level despite two degrees. The thought of having to do this for 25 more years is debilitating.
My votes don’t matter because the parties I vote for are consistently below the 10% threshold needed to get representation. Meanwhile, life gets worse year after year and the goddamn far right gets more votes every election.
Most of us are utterly doomed to serfdom at best and near-chattel slavery at worst. Someone make it make sense, because I sure can’t.
It’s shit, isn’t it.
My mum survived a civil war in her native land, raised without an education, survived a husband who wouldn’t let her work for her own pension, survived the divorce and the lack of safety net, got an education, gets paid peanuts at work whilst watching people more underqualified than her get promoted, gets treated like shit, and still comes home every day smiling.
Her philosophy: “We could all literally go at any time. Might as well enjoy the present.”
Your mother is made of stronger stuff than I am. I have no issues admitting this.
But we also shouldn’t just accept living off the crumbs the elite sweep off their tables. All of us, your mother definitely included, deserve better than that.
Most definitely, but after some point you carve out the small corner of freedom that you have.
literally the house burning dog meme
if the house is always burning and no amount of water will quench it, then yeah, I guess you have to make peace with it
I know the feeling. Change what you can change, the rest you can’t change is pointless to ponder of what the future holds. How ever unlikely things change.
There’s considerable academic debate back-and-forth over how much they worked.
They didn’t get Saturday off: six-day wokweek + Sabbath. But to make up with that they had all the St. Swithin’s Day and St. Brice’s Day and all that stuff stereotypical mediæval peasants talk about.
The real question is ho many hours of work a day held for them. Clearly, spring and autumn would be the most busy, with winter the least busy and summer second least, unless there was a war they had to be pressed into service for.
But that’s relative. Many families would make cloth in the winter when there was little else to do. That’s as much work as it’s keeping sane in those times.
If you exclude that kinda thing, as well as cooking and brewing and such, I do believe the studies that put the work hours per day (averaged) at around 3, giving a work-week of around 20 hours. Especially with a lot of it being physically demanding, that seems realistic.
There’s complexity to the question:
How do we define mediæval? (I low-key hate the words mediæval and Middle Ages, partly because of Eurocentrism). There’s no such thing as a “mediæval peasant” really, there were various people at various times. Let me ask: how many days a year does a proletarian work? How long is a piece of string? Now if you look at the historical debate that spawned this meme, they’re actually talking about England 1200-1600.
Are we talking about necessary labour (subsistence farming), surplus labour (for the lord), or both? There is employment for the lord, but then you’ve got to mend your tools, thatch your roof, gather and chop your firewood, grow your own household’s food, etc.
It seems the 150 day claim comes from Gregory Clark’s 1986 paper ‘Impatience, Poverty, and Open Field Agriculture’. And from Juliet Schor’s book, but I think Clark may be her source.
If you look at Gregory Clark’s 2017 paper with DOI
10.111/ehr.12528it seems he has changed his mind. So is the “150 days” claim based on an obsolete paper from 1986? Bottom of page 17/top of page 18 he says it’s clear people worked 300 days in 1860 because record keeping is good then, but there was an increase TO 300 in the years 1650-1800. Figure 6 does show some very low numbers in the years 1200-1600 (which is presumably what the meme is talking about) taken from ‘British Economic Growth, 1270-1870’ by Stephen Broadberry et al.This is the best source: Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf’s paper ‘Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England’ gives similar conclusions to Broadberry, especiall in Figure 4, i.e. around 200 days 1250-1300, very low (around 100) 1300 to 1500, and rising to approach 365 days a year around 1850. The paper says “Overall, the working year agrees reasonably well with the trend in the independent estimates found in the literature” and then cites 5 papers. Note that the calculation is based on wages, so we are talking about the number of wage-paying days; they would have subsistence farmed on top of that.
It’s conceivable that Marx’s era may have been the single least chill time in all human history: worse than hunter-gatherers, peasants, or modern social democracy.
My computer’s overheating, might edit this comment later.
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https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
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Kenyon, Nora. “Labour Conditions in Essex in the Reign of Richard II,” Economic History Review, April 1934. https://doi.org/10.2307/2589850
Generally, across all historical periods, I’ve rarely seen estimates of anyone working less than 1300 or more than 2300 hours a year.
These are good points and sources, thank you!
To add to it: Matt Christman has said a lot of times that peasants weren’t motivated to work harder than necessary for their survival and I agree with him. It was in the best interest of the Lord to keep his peasants alive of course, but there was absolutely no incentive for the peasant to provide the lord with more produce than the minimum. Supervision probably also wasn’t very stringent. The Lord himself certainly didn’t look over every peasants shoulder. Sure, there would be some village guards or whatever, but they probably didn’t do that either. The peasants were free people at least nominally and you couldn’t force them to do these things without risking unrest etc.
Knowing how hard I work when I know my boss doesn’t have the time to check my work…I think those people slacked off A LOT once their own community had what it needed. Some of these linked papers mention a workday of 12 hours and to that I saw: sure, for a few weeks in spring and autumn that may have been true. But the rest of the time, those peasants would spend a lot of time around the village water cooler.
another thing to consider, they didnt often have the boss watching them while they worked. yes, the endless chores had to be done every god damned day, but your time was yours to manage to a large extent. want to pop off and chat with your neighbor for an hour in the middle of the day? who’s gonna stop you? who’s gonna look at your timesheet? what timesheet?
Those were only holidays off from working as a serf for your landlord. You still had to feed your families by working the rest of the time
But anyways, yeah Americans don’t get enough PTO
My understanding is that the rest of the time peasants were trying to grow their own food and cloth and… you know, survive. This is a bit disingenuous.
That said, I would survive a lot better with 200 days off a year
Would you be better off with only being paid for 10 hours a week? You would have a lot more time to grow your own food and make your own clothes, so you wouldn’t need as much money anyways.
Why do we fucking care about whatever they did in the middle ages? I know I can’t work like this, there’s no need to consult the history books
*fewer
yes, let’s submit our language to the arbitrary opinions of some long dead english gentry idiot, why dont we. never mind how people have actually used the words for literal centuries at this point, we must uphold the bigoted idiocy of the english upper classes!
Literally 1984
ha! no, it’s literally 888.
The oldest use that the Oxford English Dictionary gives for less with a countable noun is a quotation from 888 by Alfred the Great
