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> In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze.

• Spooky23 9y ago
  Yeah there is definately an issue with understanding about what constitutes a vacation. The 14th century equivalent of unpaid vacation drinking malt liquor in a trailer isn’t my vision of a life of leisure.
  • emodendroket 9y ago
    In the Middle Ages nobody was taking a "vacation" in the sense we mean it; that's really a more Victorian idea. But enough people today can't actually afford to go away when they have time off.
    • stult 9y ago
      Actually that's not quite true either. Pilgrimages were quite common, and although not necessarily a vacation as we would consider it, many even fairly poor people traveled quite far distances just for the spiritual pleasure of it.
      • emodendroket 9y ago
        That's true, but I think of that as a different phenomenon.
        • mantas 9y ago
          Why? Both are getting away from home purely for spiritual joy.
          • emodendroket 9y ago
            It takes a really muddy definition of "spiritual joy" to argue that a pilgrimage to worship holy relics is the same as going to gawk at the Eiffel Tower and eat fancy food.
            • etatoby 9y ago
              Different ages and cultures will give different spins to the same old human needs and inclinations.
              • emodendroket 9y ago
                I don't think it's a "different spin to the same old human need;" I think it's a phenomenon entirely different in kind. This is, I think, as clearly as I can possibly state my argument.
                • mantas 9y ago
                  It's not different at all. It's traveling somewhere afar without objective practical need. Going to music festivals is sort of like pilgrimage as well. But I definitely count it as vacation. People do classic pilgrimages and call that hiking vacation nowadays. Amateur sports events, especially multi-day stage ones, are totally like pilgrimage. You get together with people with common goal, do shit and hang out. I sure as hell count that as vacation.
                  • 9y ago
• emodendroket 9y ago
  I don't know that I see the relevancy of the chores, though. Do they go away if you work longer hours? Medieval peasants, as far as I know, did drink a lot of beer.
  • adventured 9y ago
    They get automated away, reduced in time demand and reduced in strenuousness. Clothing becomes the click of a button, not sewing for 80 hours. Washing those clothes becomes 5 minutes of sorting and throwing it into a washing machine & dryer, not hours of exhausting manual labor. And so on.
  • TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > I don't know that I see the relevancy of the chores, though. Do they go away if you work longer hours? Yes, because you exchange work for money, and exchange that money for machines that do the chores for you. That's what the last 300 years have given us.
    • notacoward 9y ago
      Or you exchange that money for other people to do those chores. Home cleaning services, landscapers, electricians, plumbers, car mechanics and drivers (including Uber/Lyft/taxi), cooks or restaurant/takeout food (often plus a third party to deliver same), nannies, dog walkers, and so on. Specialization is the name of the game. I can do some of these things myself, but I can also earn enough in one hour to pay for multiple hours of other people's time and expertise (and amortized equipment). That's a pretty big win compared to a 14th-century tradesperson, or even most nobles.
    • emodendroket 9y ago
      When the Industrial Revolution was starting that can't have been the trade-off anyone had in mind, because none of those things had been invented.
      • TeMPOraL 9y ago
        It wasn't. But the article is comparing points in time (14th century vs. 21st century), so the path from one to the other doesn't matter for this discussion.
• crusso 9y ago
  I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant I'd go further than that. I would not want to swap positions with a 14th century monarch.
  • barrkel 9y ago
    I would, FWIW.
    • ctdonath 9y ago
      Why? No HVAC, electricity, running potable hot water, limited literature, long delivery times.
      • ghaff 9y ago
        To say nothing of the fact that let's see the first time he gets an infection or disease or needs surgery given no vaccinations, antibiotics, or anesthetics.
        • barrkel 9y ago
          When was the last time you got an infection or disease that would have struck you down without modern medicine? I never have. In fact if hospitals didn't exist and I never saw a doctor my entire life, I don't think anything would have changed. I don't expect to live much longer than 60 as it is. Most 14th century monarchs, in the brief glance I did on Wikipedia before my answer, lived to 55 or 60 or so before they died of natural causes.
          • ctdonath 9y ago
            I'd be dead four times over (and those are the obvious near-lethal maladies), and I just turned 50.
            • TheDanielD 9y ago
• andrepd 9y ago
  >Bottom line: I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant and I suspect the author would not want to, either. But is that the issue here? What does that sentence even mean, or add to the discussion? The article quotes the historian as finding that peasants in 14th century England put in at most 150 days of work per year. This was, according to them, an abnormal period of especially large wages. That tangent in preen-day America bears little relevance. Also when you say "food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explodes)", you're making a big oversimplification. There are other factors at work: diseases, warfare, etc.
  • ptero 9y ago
    >>Bottom line: I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant and I suspect the author would not want to, either. > But is that the issue here? What does that sentence even mean, or add to the discussion? I think the author of the article (not the author of the quoted research one level down) argues that an average medieval peasant had it better than an average modern worker; thus we should try to nudge in that direction, specifically by providing more vacation. Or at least that is how I read it and what the last sentence argues against. My 2c.
    • emodendroket 9y ago
      I don't think a vague sense that "they had it better" is necessarily what's at issue. The popular image of the peasant is that they must have spent most of their lives toiling away. What the historical record shows is rather different. I don't think any of us are arguing for regressing society to feudalism (well, besides [your least favorite political figure here] at least, ha ha), but looking at the disparity does give us something to interrogate -- why did we adopt the kind of hours we work now? Do they still make sense? (I think the first question is probably easier to answer than the second)
  • ctdonath 9y ago
    That's equating unemployment with vacation. And that's overlooking how hard mundane existence was: heat required collecting firewood, cooling was opening a window, cooking was over open indoor fires, food was hard to preserve, beds were scratchy/lumpy/hard, clothing was hand-made mostly from raw wool (clean, spin thread, weave, hand sew) so wardrobes were sparse, water was often dirty & diseased (beer was more necessity a la purified water than entertainment), etc. Hence the point: the notion of "they had more vacation than we do" is a non-sequitur when our "work" would appeal to them as "luxury vacation", and their "vacation" was prolonged unemployment with few resources. You wouldn't trade your "work" for their "vacation".
• nealdt 9y ago
  Holidays - or time off - usually meant going on pilgrimages to important religious sites (still many routes around Europe that you can follow). Wars also took place in winter when the peasants had time off!
• spodek 9y ago
  > I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant and I suspect the author would not want to, either. I'm glad to have anesthesia, antibiotics, and so on, but if they lived as we do today, the Earth, seas, and air would have been choked with plastic, mercury, greenhouse gases, and so on centuries ago. We're externalizing our costs to future generations, who will have to pay to clean up our messes, or live with them. Would you prefer living in a way that leaves the Earth as clean as you found it? If so, are you? Why don't you?
• Kuiper 9y ago
  The fact that peasants did not work more hours is tied to the fact that they were agrarian laborers. Once you've brought in the harvest, what is there to do but lie around and wait until the end of winter? Indeed, "lie around" is most of what they did, and remaining inactive to lower their metabolism was actually a survival strategy to deal with the limited amount of food they had: burn fewer calories, eat fewer calories. As the article notes, peasant life consisted of working only part of the year, with longer workdays during harvest season, and short work days (or no work at all) during the rest of the year. In some climates, like the Pyrenees and the Alps, people essentially "hibernated" during the winter: they stayed indoors, lived off their food stores, and expended as little energy as possible. Citing Graham Robb's The Discovery of France: 'An official report on the Nièvre in 1844 described Burgundian day-laborers thusly: '“After making the necessary repairs to their tools, these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.” Entering this inactive state was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies.' The time that they spent not working was not some leisurely edifying "vacation" that they enjoyed as a luxury; for French peasants in the 1700's and 1800's, being inactive was a survival strategy. The parent article paints the time spent remaining inactive in a romantic light, remarking that "the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze." The reality is probably closer to the fact that he probably risked starvation if he regularly engaged in any sort of vigorous activity (no surplus calories to burn on frivolities like dancing or sports or other active forms of recreation), and it's quite possible that the afternoon naps may have felt more like an obligation than an opportunity to "relax." Lying around all day doing "nothing" sounds less like a vacation and more like a prison sentence (quite literally, in the sense that it probably resembles the life that some people live inside of modern prisons, doing essentially nothing as they wait for the days to pass).
• Fjolsvith 9y ago
  Well, if you're not paying for health and dental, and you don't have any corporate training programs, and there aren't OSHA requirements and other costly regulations, you really have to give something up as an employer to retain good help.
• jungletime 9y ago
  If you owned land, and did not experience natural disasters, you could eat very well. Chickens are easy to take care of and growing enough vegetables is not that hard. The biggest worry was catastrophic crop failure of staples like wheat or potatoes due to weather, or disease or pests. The other worry was stored food spoiling over winter in cellars. Beans and pickled fruits/vegetables like cabbage is what got you through. Harvest time was busiest season. Winter you more or less bundled up and stayed indoors as much as you could, venturing out to take care of your animals. I spent my childhood at my grandmas farm. Due to communism, life was very primitive.