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!"
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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...
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'.
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.
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.
From Wikipedia:
While modern life expectancies are much higher than those in the Middle Ages and earlier,[244] adults in the Middle Ages did not die in their 30s or 40s on average. That was the life expectancy at birth, which was skewed by high infant and adolescent mortality. The life expectancy among adults was much higher;[245] a 21-year-old man in medieval England, for example, could expect to live to the age of 64.[246][245]
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.