17 ms·

This analysis is solely focused on the "job" aspects of pre-industrial life and includes almost none of the domestic considerations. I'm not sure if it would be

This analysis is solely focused on the "job" aspects of pre-industrial life and includes almost none of the domestic considerations. I'm not sure if it would be fair to call all non-wage time "leisure". Once work was still over there were still things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. Although, I think it goes without saying that before affordable lighting and heating, we all underestimate how lazy winters were for the average peasant, whether idyllic or not (accounts I have read make it sound incredibly, incessantly dull). And I think the best evidence we have that we are overrating the quality of pre-industrial leisure time is that people developed almost no leisure activities! Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! They supposedly had half a year of doing nothing, and perhaps singing and drinking was sufficient to fill the time, but you'd think they would show lots of other innovations. Or even steal the activities of the rich (organized sports)! Instead you don't see leisure activities develop until the rise of the 40 hour workweek and the availability of consumer appliances. Edit: I hope people understand that the argument the article presents is largely a romanticization of poverty.

yibg 5y ago
I’ve spent a bit of time in the rural areas of a developing country when I was younger visiting extended family. These were farmers that were fairly poor. In the summer months, lots of work, from dawn until dusk. But after the harvest until the next planting season there was no “work” to do. It was not fun. People visited the same people (small village) and talked about the same things day after day. Days consisted of talking, doing chores around the house, eating and sleeping.
asdff 5y ago
Today after work is over I still have things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. today too. Instead of repairing a thatch roof I'm working on shingles, but the amount of labor needed around the home and in domestic life even today is seemingly endless and somehow fills to expand all available free time like a gas in a container.
- legitster 5y ago
  The Hedonistic Treadmill. We're incredibly richer, but we are wired to always want something nicer. We can wash our clothes so much easier but we insist on washing them after every wear. The net result is the same amount of time spent washing clothes (but they are always nicer).
  - varjag 5y ago
    Except you don't wash them, you load and unload the machine. That's substantially less work (literally, in Joules) no matter how you dice it.
    - asdff 5y ago
      Its less work but if you do it multiple times as much its the same work or potentially more in a year.
      - varjag 5y ago
        You get to throw a lot of tees in until it even begins to approach rubbing your robe clean down in the river. And setting on laundry is largely a fixed effort, whether you do one item or thirty. Most people don't do one at a time.
        asdff 5y ago
        I do my laundry once a week if not more frequently with a decently heavy load. I don't go down to the river, but I've lived in apartment complexes where the laundry room was a few hundred yards and several stories away. You still do some stuff on per clothing bases, like folding, ironing, special care like certain things being air dried on hangers or some other surface. Some stuff washed cold or hot even. Some people have to shlep their stuff to off site laundry businesses much a kin to a walk down to the the river. I'm sure back then you'd only be washing a handful of thin linen underclothing regularly, outerwear if at all. These people back then also probably weren't washing bedding. Some doctors say the modern beds, while comfortable, are worse for the spine than a firmer surface still used in some cultures.
asah 5y ago
Yes! Also pre-industrial work was a lot more physical labor, which requires more "rest" time.
- lgrialn 5y ago
  This brought to mind something from Bertrand Russell’s Nobel lecture (all of which is interesting, btw) "I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked twenty-five miles that day."
grawprog 5y ago
https://about-history.com/what-did-peasants-do-for-entertainment-in-the-middle-ages/ https://about-history.com/what-did-peasants-do-for-entertain... >Music and dance Music and dance is as old as humanity itself. The peasantry could not afford to pay professional musicians but plenty of people knew how to dance and sing and enough people knew how to play instruments to have a jolly good time. Occasionally, actors might come to town and put on plays and dramas. >Decorative Arts Decorative arts were applied to clothing, housing, religiously symbolic objects, etc. Embroidery, pottery, basket weaving, carpentry, leatherwork and woodcarving were common skills, often with division of labor by sex. >Sports Sports, including martial arts were also practiced commonly. There were many medieval tournaments allowing people to compete and demonstrate their physical skill in sports like running, log-tossing, or stick-fighting. There were also team events such as kicking a stuffed leather ball.
- varjag 5y ago
  > Embroidery, pottery, basket weaving, carpentry, leatherwork and woodcarving were common skills, often with division of labor by sex. Sounds more like work tbh. Basket weaving may be a hobby now, but unlikely it was in 16th century.
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  - grawprog 5y ago
    Why would something people find fun enough to do as a hobby now not have been fun 500 years ago? Compare it to say a modern profession like software engineering. Despite it being work, there's plenty of programmers who also enjoy programming and do it for fun on their own time as well as work. Why would it have been any different back then?
    - watwut 5y ago
mc32 5y ago
In temperate zones winters were times of diminished activity probably because things were centered around agriculture and some hunting. In winter though you got to chores you didn’t have time for in the plant and husbandry productive months: fence mending, spinning, textiles, fixing thatch, cleaning house, making preserves, storing grain and other produce, etc. In the tropics it was midday when activities ceased because it was too hot. That said, I disagree that people had little in terms of leisure. They had many more days long festivities where people got together and enjoyed some down time typically they coincided with planting, harvesting (more pagan related) and then religious dates.
- legitster 5y ago
  It's worth noting that for all the festival days, they did not have our modern idea of a "weekend" either. When the French revolutionary government created a secular approximation of the church calendar, they only gave off 1 out of every 10 days.
  - mc32 5y ago
    I think they had Sundays off for religious reasons, but not sure how much choice peasants or farmers had given fields need clearing, seeds need planting, crops needed harvesting and animals needed caring, reproducing, feeding, butchering and preserving, irrespective of day of week. Slacking on any of the above could result in starvation the coming Winter as well as possibly losing your animals as well. There was lots of interdependencies which were quite unforgiving.
    - legitster 5y ago
      I guess it depends on the era or region of Europe, but it seems "Sabbath-keeping" was not always assumed - it having Jewish connotations. So it seems that outside of religious holidays, people could have been expected to work every day.
      - ajuc 5y ago
pessimizer 5y ago
> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! The activities of the historical poor and working class are rarely recorded except in fiction written by the wealthy that contains poor or working class characters. Also, your best evidence is a lack of evidence.
- legitster 5y ago
  Fair enough! But I think it would also be fair to say that if we shouldn't assume peasants had idyllic lives just because we compare their medieval timecards to our own.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Maybe we could find people living in similar conditions, say like the amish (or maybe more niche groups) and see what they created. Well even amish people have modern lives compared to middle ages but you get the idea.
    - b112 5y ago
      Indeed! They even have Windows! http://www.microbizz.nl/themanfrommicrosoft.htm http://www.microbizz.nl/themanfrommicrosoft.htm
    - wincy 5y ago
      The Cooperites of New Zealand have an even more secluded lifestyle, very religious, they seem to put on a lot of skits, plays, singing, things like dunk tanks for fun. There’s a lot of working and time for seriousness but they definitely seemed to have a good sense of humor and find time for fun. Plus working communally you’re always around other people socializing. I think our modern lifestyle is astoundingly isolated compared to pre industrial people, even hunter gatherer cultures have hunting parties rather than a lone wolf hunter.
      - agumonkey 5y ago
        That's partly what I assume. I think our social side came from survival in harsh condition. Falsely comfy society remove the need to live together, while subjecting us to a strange chaos. Some war veteran said they preferred the battlefield because even with the threat of death, the life in those times were closer, more intense. Now that's an extreme case but it's telling. And even about art/leisure.. you don't need much to go deep. Singing, playing drums, dancing doesn't require anything modern. People had pigments or crude material to craft but still it's something.
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hogFeast 5y ago
Quite right. I think we are seeing proof of what you are saying with the childcare cost crisis in most developed nations. A good proportion of early years childcare (and often later) was "free". Now that it is being transferred into wage labour in many countries with growing labour force participation amongst women, we are learning that this stuff was very costly. Similarly, all the household tasks then would take a full working day. Also, they did have sports and games. Many of the games we play today have their origins in that period, but they weren't of the formal nature that we have today (and there were far more bloodsports). They had culture of a sort: theatre, singing, music. And they had more mass social events like festivals and market days (life today is far more atomized, back then this was a way for everyone to gather in a place and get business done). The rich didn't do organized sports either (as we conceive)...hunting of course was a huge pasttime. The "innovations" of that period passed into irrelevance when the world changed. Our "innovations" will also pass into irrelevance too. EDIT: btw, someone else has said that only the activities of the rich are recorded...this isn't right, there are lots of social history books which cover the leisure activities of workers in this period (if you Google social history or leisure history, you will find the period you are interested in).
- coldtea 5y ago
  >Similarly, all the household tasks then would take a full working day. Not even close. Try visiting a rural place that still lives in pre-20th century standards (not as hard as it sounds in Central Asia, Africa, etc. Heck, even in most of Europe it was the norm up around the 1950s in almost all rural areas, and in many places in Southern Europe it was quite the same up to the 1970s -- electricity and cars didn't come to lots of rural areas until that decade). In any case, household tasks were an insignificant amount of the day. (Also, contrary to the modern myth, both men and women worked. "Women not working" was a thing for richer families, in poor and rural households women worked just fine, in the same fields and tasks as men - and of course this continued in the industrial era, poor women working in factories was standard. Women "not allowed to work" was a rich-household's problem). As for the kids, aside from school (where that was compulsory, since I include here the 20th century European rural experience), after quite a small age, like 3-4 they mostly roamed around playing and were taken care for by the whole community - not many struggling "parents without nunnies" or helicopter parenting there. And after getting around 10 or so they'd start helping with some chores too. Kids in industrialized nations had it worse. In the 19th century to about 1930, from Paris and London to New York, there were 8-10-12 year old kids working in the chimneys, the factories, even the mines: https://allthatsinteresting.com/child-miners https://allthatsinteresting.com/child-miners
coldtea 5y ago
>Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!* They had tons of fan of several forms, including fabulous festival seasons, and public holidays, complete with dancing, drunkdness, singing and music, and several other things besides... The idea of those "pour people" comes from lorded over overworked peasants in feudal societies, a small part of global history. Even so, the same poor people post industrialization had it worse -- for one, they were forced in many ways (including laws destroying their lands and livelihood) to work in factories, didn't chose it as a lifestyle improvement. And many put up a great fight in the process too
the-dude 5y ago
I clean, cook, fix & do the dishes in 2021. Once in a while, I prepare something. My father had a 40 hr work week and did not do sports, neither did my mother.
- knownjorbist 5y ago
  The wild part is that a human being surviving in much of the world today has to know essentially nothing at all about how to survive in actuality. They just need to find a way to get money in one way or another.
- Jensson 5y ago
  > I clean, cook, fix & do the dishes in 2021. Once in a while, I prepare something. You don't think that cleaning, cooking, fixing and doing dishes is a bit less work today than in pre industrial era?
  - bluGill 5y ago
    It isn't clear. I'm sure I wash my clothes more than they did. I suspect dishes to them were rarely washed, while wash every use. Sure I have machines to do the work, but I suspect I spend more as much time, but im getting better quality results.
  - abyssin 5y ago
    You comment reminds me of this article that I can't put my hands on, that explained that the generalization of washing machines actually increased work time in some situations, because with it came the expectation of wearing cleaner clothes.
  - the-dude 5y ago
    I think I use much more utensils, pans and plates than in those times. Cups too. Also I wear clean underpants everyday ( well, this is a small lie ). I fix and change secondhand clothes, but I do have a sewing machine. Other things I fix were unfanthomable then, some fixes take weeks. My Selectric III for example.
ajuc 5y ago
> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! They had some kind of holiday or celebration every month, often a few in one month. These were often similar to sports (for example Śmigus Dyngus where young boys run around the villages pouring water on girls they like as a pagan fertility custom). Or Noc Świętojańska where girls throw flowers into river and boys compete to get them and jumping over the campfires. Or Andrzejki where they danced whole night and played many kinds of "predict-the-future" games. Every wedding lasted a few days and after the midnight all guests played "wedding games" which were a combination of trivia, folk-song battles, guess what your partner thinks, and dexterity contests. Each church had a saint patron or several of them, and on their days they had church market with traders from all around and various games and dances. Each person had a saint patron as well and their families celebrated on these "namedays". Every trade had their saint patron too, and they celebrated that. To this day it survived for farmers, miners, hunters and firefighters, but back then every possible job had its own holiday. Basically the only time of year where there really was no entertainment was the 40-day fast (and even then there were exceptions - for example some villages to this day celebrate "half-fast-day" with various customs like painting walls of houses with water and calcium and dancing of course). Also family back then was 20 people of all ages living near each other, not 4 like now. When a kid was born you had one party, another when it got baptized, another when it got first communion, then when it got confirmation, then when it married, built a house, bought some big animals and died. Add namedays each year and multiply by 20 people in extended family and you get every week busy. That's just the stuff that survived to modern day in some form or another, there has been a lot more of this back then. Additionally every Sunday mass served partially as entertainment for peasants.
- User23 5y ago
  > example Śmigus Dyngus where young boys run around the villages pouring water on girls they like as a pagan fertility custom Lupercalia always sounded like a good time to me. Who doesn’t want to strip naked and run through the streets whipping willing young women hoping to have their fertility increased?
  - ajuc 5y ago
lr4444lr 5y ago
They had their church, their taverns, brothels, and gambling. They were poorly educated and often illiterate. I think your expectations are unfairly modern.
new_guy 5y ago
> And I think the best evidence we have that we are overrating the quality of pre-industrial leisure time is that people developed almost no leisure activities Dude, what? This is quite possibly the dumbest most ignorant ill-informed take I've seen today. https://victorianweb.org/history/leisure1.html https://victorianweb.org/history/leisure1.html
- kingkawn 5y ago
  Robbing him of his strawman
  - dang 5y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 5y ago
  Please make your substantive points thoughtfully, without name-calling or personal attack. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
mrandish 5y ago
I agree that many people today tend to over-estimate the 'simple' and 'idyllic' aspects of the average pre-industrial person's day to day existence and we should be careful to remember the stark differences as well as to discount the influence of fiction and history's focus on the extraordinary, influential, wealthy and powerful. I've always thought it would be an interesting reality TV show concept to create a historically accurate medieval village populated with well-researched, role-playing actors and then to drop a small group of modern people into that context to see how they do. I suspect the reactions of those who over-estimated the idyllic-ness of the past would make for compelling reality TV fodder.
- sportslife 5y ago
  The issue with modern people is they don't even know how to put on the old clothes. They would be technologically-illiterate trying to use complex pre-industrial tech, and so would have a very hard time, much harder than the people of the time. There have been a number of historical reenactment shows over the years. Continual this-is-hard reax would be a bit tiresome, so usually they include lots of success. If you want struggle, and will accept some industrialization there was "Frontier House" from PBS. Otherwise, I recommend the "Tales of Green Valley" historical farm series and sequels for a well-informed English version. Here is the sequel "Tudor Monastery Farm" on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjgZr0v9DXyK9Cc8PG0ZhDt2i2eQ_PEvg https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjgZr0v9DXyK9Cc8PG0Zh...
null_object 5y ago
> I hope people understand that the argument the article presents is largely a romanticization of poverty I think the opposite is the interesting factor here: late-stage capitalism has demonized the ‘grinding poverty’ and ‘unremitting hardship’ of these earlier ages, to keep our present-day noses to the life-destroying grindstone.
- Ginden 5y ago
  > I think the opposite is the interesting factor here: late-stage capitalism has demonized the ‘grinding poverty’ and ‘unremitting hardship’ of these earlier ages, to keep our present-day noses to the life-destroying grindstone. Yet, no one chooses life of subsistence farmer if they are able to choose.
  - t-3 5y ago
    Really? Who has that choice available to them? I certainly don't - land tax necessitates profits (and $$$$$/acre to buy arable land in the first place!). The diggers and levelers certainly didn't seem interested in being forced off their land.
    - Ginden 5y ago
      Enough arable land to feed family of 4 can be bought in USA for $14k (and you can buy it outside of US). Add $7k for next 50 years of property taxes. You can also join Amish communities, if you are religious. You won't have access to pre-modern supply chain, but you are probably eligible for social security and foodstamps, so you can exchange them for new scythe or something like that.
kebman 5y ago
So they just sat around and were poor all day? All the rich culture being brought through the generations, it meant nothing? I grew up on a farm. It was run pretty much by manual labour up until even the 30's and beyond. Even while tractors and various forms of farm automation became pretty commonplace by the 50's and 60's, they still used age old techniques for preserving hay by drying it on metal threads well into the 80's and sometimes even until the 90's. My grandfather still used the scythe on his fields as long as he was healthy enough to work in 80's. He much preferred the ways of old, and never even bothered installing hot water, much less a water toilet or a shower, in his house. Yet they had time for a lot more holidays back then than we do today. Sure, there was lighter kinds of work you could do while socializing, such as knitting or even baking bread. But then a large amount of people actually thoroughly enjoy doing those things, including woodworking or even hunting or fishing. Is it leisure or work? Well, it's hard to say when you're also dependent on it for survival. These days the fantastic progress of "social media" is making sure I have to answer messages from my boss even on weekends. I don't really think of that as "progress"...
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  Don't a lot of people actually enjoy their coworkers and working, too? I mean, I'm sure almost everyone including farmers had a list of things they'd rather do than work - but are the majority of people today really working jobs that just make them absolutely miserable? One of my best friends is a cashier at Trader Joe's and - for the most part - she genuinely enjoys it. Only two of my friends HATE their jobs, and their desperately trying to find a new job. Almost all of my friends have lots of complaints about their jobs - but they also have a lot of things they like about it, too. Why isn't there a grey area for modern work and leisure but there is one for old work?
throwaway984393 5y ago
> people developed almost no leisure activities! This is clearly not true. They didn't have modern leisure activities, but they had a vast array of activities to keep them from getting bored when they weren't working or doing the arduous, nearly continuous preparation of meals. > Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! No literature, sure, because they were illiterate (and it took the invention of the printing press to create a market for leisure books). But no games/sports? How about boules, bowling, prisoners' bars, blind man's bluff, table games (chess, checkers, backgammon, alquerque, three-in-a-row, mill, the fox and geese, tablut), dice, card games, variations on golf, hand-ball, kick the can, cockfighting, cow-tipping, bull-baiting, a form of rugby, wrestling, fencing, racing, and an innumerable array of local games often surrounding festivals with cultural/spiritual significance? They also did activities like swimming, fishing, hunting, playing music, singing, story telling, dancing, even ice skating. I'm tired from just listing them all! The most common leisure activity for men was probably drinking in the tavern. This shouldn't be understated; this took up a lot of time. And it wasn't because they had nothing else to do, it's because drinking and socializing is often preferable to the above activities, even today. A lot of people today don't play any games at all, but spend hours every day sitting around shooting the shit over cans of Bud. I'm not as familiar with womens' lives, but I imagine they had more responsibilities and less leisure time. Cooking, cleaning (such as it was), sewing/needlepoint, and raising children all takes considerable time, so they mightn't have had as much time for leisure. A lot of the above activities were also intended for men.
- tsegratis 5y ago
  Having lived in semi agrarian societies, can confirm for women too Also once the sun goes down, the work stops -- nobody aint cookin once they cant see the food, not even washing up
- ScarletEmerald 5y ago
  >> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! >No literature, sure, because they were illiterate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_literature (I know you mentioned storytelling in passing, but that rather downplays it. Oral literature was a big deal.)
netcan 5y ago
Honestly I think the work-leisure dichotomy is kinda bust regardless. Do more years of education mean we have more leisure years than previous generations? Maybe the monks' prayer days should count as work. In any case, before industrialisation, wage labour employment was a lot rarer. Peasants were mostly self employed, self sufficient and most work was defined differently. In a lot of cases, medieval people "owed" work as a tax or rent... They were expected to feed themselves. My grandparents were born in mid 20th century Ireland. They grew most of their food, made most of their furniture, harvested fuel. Etc. They also had cash jobs, cash crops and such. But, a lot of the economy was non monetary subsistence even then. Hard to quantify the workweek, in a meaningfully comparable way to our lifestyles. >>comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century Those seventy hour industrial workweeks of the 19th century probably was" normative for domestic servants and other low class workers. They weren't expected* or sometimes even allowed to have families, homes or domestic duties. IMO, instead of taking medieval "data" and defining it in our terms, we should understand their ways in their terms. Renaissance europe ran were "rights and privileges." Those related to being a maid, miner, landlord or artisan. There were guilds that had ranks. These things were referred to as your "station," "position," possibly even a class. Those things dictated a lot about your lifestyle, how much and what kind of work you did.
5faulker 5y ago
Even so, we're getting more educated than ever and with the advent of inflation, it's hard to say that collectively we're getting ahead of our ancestors.
id02009 5y ago
Exactly my thoughts. Mere clothes washing was a full day activity. Go to the well, bring water. Chop wood for heating. Milk cow, tend to chickens. Fix the fence... All this coupled with less then abundant available calories, and the slow paced work does paint a different picture. Maybe they were not that relaxed, but slow paced work came from the necessary energy conservation?

yibg 5y ago

I’ve spent a bit of time in the rural areas of a developing country when I was younger visiting extended family. These were farmers that were fairly poor. In the summer months, lots of work, from dawn until dusk. But after the harvest until the next planting season there was no “work” to do. It was not fun. People visited the same people (small village) and talked about the same things day after day. Days consisted of talking, doing chores around the house, eating and sleeping.

asdff 5y ago

Today after work is over I still have things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. today too. Instead of repairing a thatch roof I'm working on shingles, but the amount of labor needed around the home and in domestic life even today is seemingly endless and somehow fills to expand all available free time like a gas in a container.

legitster 5y ago
The Hedonistic Treadmill. We're incredibly richer, but we are wired to always want something nicer. We can wash our clothes so much easier but we insist on washing them after every wear. The net result is the same amount of time spent washing clothes (but they are always nicer).
- varjag 5y ago
  Except you don't wash them, you load and unload the machine. That's substantially less work (literally, in Joules) no matter how you dice it.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Its less work but if you do it multiple times as much its the same work or potentially more in a year.
    - varjag 5y ago
      You get to throw a lot of tees in until it even begins to approach rubbing your robe clean down in the river. And setting on laundry is largely a fixed effort, whether you do one item or thirty. Most people don't do one at a time.
      - asdff 5y ago
        I do my laundry once a week if not more frequently with a decently heavy load. I don't go down to the river, but I've lived in apartment complexes where the laundry room was a few hundred yards and several stories away. You still do some stuff on per clothing bases, like folding, ironing, special care like certain things being air dried on hangers or some other surface. Some stuff washed cold or hot even. Some people have to shlep their stuff to off site laundry businesses much a kin to a walk down to the the river. I'm sure back then you'd only be washing a handful of thin linen underclothing regularly, outerwear if at all. These people back then also probably weren't washing bedding. Some doctors say the modern beds, while comfortable, are worse for the spine than a firmer surface still used in some cultures.

asah 5y ago

Yes! Also pre-industrial work was a lot more physical labor, which requires more "rest" time.

lgrialn 5y ago
This brought to mind something from Bertrand Russell’s Nobel lecture (all of which is interesting, btw) "I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked twenty-five miles that day."

grawprog 5y ago

https://about-history.com/what-did-peasants-do-for-entertainment-in-the-middle-ages/ https://about-history.com/what-did-peasants-do-for-entertain... >Music and dance Music and dance is as old as humanity itself. The peasantry could not afford to pay professional musicians but plenty of people knew how to dance and sing and enough people knew how to play instruments to have a jolly good time. Occasionally, actors might come to town and put on plays and dramas. >Decorative Arts Decorative arts were applied to clothing, housing, religiously symbolic objects, etc. Embroidery, pottery, basket weaving, carpentry, leatherwork and woodcarving were common skills, often with division of labor by sex. >Sports Sports, including martial arts were also practiced commonly. There were many medieval tournaments allowing people to compete and demonstrate their physical skill in sports like running, log-tossing, or stick-fighting. There were also team events such as kicking a stuffed leather ball.

varjag 5y ago
> Embroidery, pottery, basket weaving, carpentry, leatherwork and woodcarving were common skills, often with division of labor by sex. Sounds more like work tbh. Basket weaving may be a hobby now, but unlikely it was in 16th century.
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- grawprog 5y ago
  Why would something people find fun enough to do as a hobby now not have been fun 500 years ago? Compare it to say a modern profession like software engineering. Despite it being work, there's plenty of programmers who also enjoy programming and do it for fun on their own time as well as work. Why would it have been any different back then?
  - watwut 5y ago

mc32 5y ago

In temperate zones winters were times of diminished activity probably because things were centered around agriculture and some hunting. In winter though you got to chores you didn’t have time for in the plant and husbandry productive months: fence mending, spinning, textiles, fixing thatch, cleaning house, making preserves, storing grain and other produce, etc. In the tropics it was midday when activities ceased because it was too hot. That said, I disagree that people had little in terms of leisure. They had many more days long festivities where people got together and enjoyed some down time typically they coincided with planting, harvesting (more pagan related) and then religious dates.

legitster 5y ago
It's worth noting that for all the festival days, they did not have our modern idea of a "weekend" either. When the French revolutionary government created a secular approximation of the church calendar, they only gave off 1 out of every 10 days.
- mc32 5y ago
  I think they had Sundays off for religious reasons, but not sure how much choice peasants or farmers had given fields need clearing, seeds need planting, crops needed harvesting and animals needed caring, reproducing, feeding, butchering and preserving, irrespective of day of week. Slacking on any of the above could result in starvation the coming Winter as well as possibly losing your animals as well. There was lots of interdependencies which were quite unforgiving.
  - legitster 5y ago
    I guess it depends on the era or region of Europe, but it seems "Sabbath-keeping" was not always assumed - it having Jewish connotations. So it seems that outside of religious holidays, people could have been expected to work every day.
    - ajuc 5y ago

pessimizer 5y ago

> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! The activities of the historical poor and working class are rarely recorded except in fiction written by the wealthy that contains poor or working class characters. Also, your best evidence is a lack of evidence.

legitster 5y ago
Fair enough! But I think it would also be fair to say that if we shouldn't assume peasants had idyllic lives just because we compare their medieval timecards to our own.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Maybe we could find people living in similar conditions, say like the amish (or maybe more niche groups) and see what they created. Well even amish people have modern lives compared to middle ages but you get the idea.
  - b112 5y ago
    Indeed! They even have Windows! http://www.microbizz.nl/themanfrommicrosoft.htm http://www.microbizz.nl/themanfrommicrosoft.htm
  - wincy 5y ago
    The Cooperites of New Zealand have an even more secluded lifestyle, very religious, they seem to put on a lot of skits, plays, singing, things like dunk tanks for fun. There’s a lot of working and time for seriousness but they definitely seemed to have a good sense of humor and find time for fun. Plus working communally you’re always around other people socializing. I think our modern lifestyle is astoundingly isolated compared to pre industrial people, even hunter gatherer cultures have hunting parties rather than a lone wolf hunter.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      That's partly what I assume. I think our social side came from survival in harsh condition. Falsely comfy society remove the need to live together, while subjecting us to a strange chaos. Some war veteran said they preferred the battlefield because even with the threat of death, the life in those times were closer, more intense. Now that's an extreme case but it's telling. And even about art/leisure.. you don't need much to go deep. Singing, playing drums, dancing doesn't require anything modern. People had pigments or crude material to craft but still it's something.

deleted 5y ago

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hogFeast 5y ago

Quite right. I think we are seeing proof of what you are saying with the childcare cost crisis in most developed nations. A good proportion of early years childcare (and often later) was "free". Now that it is being transferred into wage labour in many countries with growing labour force participation amongst women, we are learning that this stuff was very costly. Similarly, all the household tasks then would take a full working day. Also, they did have sports and games. Many of the games we play today have their origins in that period, but they weren't of the formal nature that we have today (and there were far more bloodsports). They had culture of a sort: theatre, singing, music. And they had more mass social events like festivals and market days (life today is far more atomized, back then this was a way for everyone to gather in a place and get business done). The rich didn't do organized sports either (as we conceive)...hunting of course was a huge pasttime. The "innovations" of that period passed into irrelevance when the world changed. Our "innovations" will also pass into irrelevance too. EDIT: btw, someone else has said that only the activities of the rich are recorded...this isn't right, there are lots of social history books which cover the leisure activities of workers in this period (if you Google social history or leisure history, you will find the period you are interested in).

coldtea 5y ago
>Similarly, all the household tasks then would take a full working day. Not even close. Try visiting a rural place that still lives in pre-20th century standards (not as hard as it sounds in Central Asia, Africa, etc. Heck, even in most of Europe it was the norm up around the 1950s in almost all rural areas, and in many places in Southern Europe it was quite the same up to the 1970s -- electricity and cars didn't come to lots of rural areas until that decade). In any case, household tasks were an insignificant amount of the day. (Also, contrary to the modern myth, both men and women worked. "Women not working" was a thing for richer families, in poor and rural households women worked just fine, in the same fields and tasks as men - and of course this continued in the industrial era, poor women working in factories was standard. Women "not allowed to work" was a rich-household's problem). As for the kids, aside from school (where that was compulsory, since I include here the 20th century European rural experience), after quite a small age, like 3-4 they mostly roamed around playing and were taken care for by the whole community - not many struggling "parents without nunnies" or helicopter parenting there. And after getting around 10 or so they'd start helping with some chores too. Kids in industrialized nations had it worse. In the 19th century to about 1930, from Paris and London to New York, there were 8-10-12 year old kids working in the chimneys, the factories, even the mines: https://allthatsinteresting.com/child-miners https://allthatsinteresting.com/child-miners

coldtea 5y ago

>Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!* They had tons of fan of several forms, including fabulous festival seasons, and public holidays, complete with dancing, drunkdness, singing and music, and several other things besides... The idea of those "pour people" comes from lorded over overworked peasants in feudal societies, a small part of global history. Even so, the same poor people post industrialization had it worse -- for one, they were forced in many ways (including laws destroying their lands and livelihood) to work in factories, didn't chose it as a lifestyle improvement. And many put up a great fight in the process too

the-dude 5y ago

I clean, cook, fix & do the dishes in 2021. Once in a while, I prepare something. My father had a 40 hr work week and did not do sports, neither did my mother.

knownjorbist 5y ago
The wild part is that a human being surviving in much of the world today has to know essentially nothing at all about how to survive in actuality. They just need to find a way to get money in one way or another.
Jensson 5y ago
> I clean, cook, fix & do the dishes in 2021. Once in a while, I prepare something. You don't think that cleaning, cooking, fixing and doing dishes is a bit less work today than in pre industrial era?
- bluGill 5y ago
  It isn't clear. I'm sure I wash my clothes more than they did. I suspect dishes to them were rarely washed, while wash every use. Sure I have machines to do the work, but I suspect I spend more as much time, but im getting better quality results.
- abyssin 5y ago
  You comment reminds me of this article that I can't put my hands on, that explained that the generalization of washing machines actually increased work time in some situations, because with it came the expectation of wearing cleaner clothes.
- the-dude 5y ago
  I think I use much more utensils, pans and plates than in those times. Cups too. Also I wear clean underpants everyday ( well, this is a small lie ). I fix and change secondhand clothes, but I do have a sewing machine. Other things I fix were unfanthomable then, some fixes take weeks. My Selectric III for example.

ajuc 5y ago

> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! They had some kind of holiday or celebration every month, often a few in one month. These were often similar to sports (for example Śmigus Dyngus where young boys run around the villages pouring water on girls they like as a pagan fertility custom). Or Noc Świętojańska where girls throw flowers into river and boys compete to get them and jumping over the campfires. Or Andrzejki where they danced whole night and played many kinds of "predict-the-future" games. Every wedding lasted a few days and after the midnight all guests played "wedding games" which were a combination of trivia, folk-song battles, guess what your partner thinks, and dexterity contests. Each church had a saint patron or several of them, and on their days they had church market with traders from all around and various games and dances. Each person had a saint patron as well and their families celebrated on these "namedays". Every trade had their saint patron too, and they celebrated that. To this day it survived for farmers, miners, hunters and firefighters, but back then every possible job had its own holiday. Basically the only time of year where there really was no entertainment was the 40-day fast (and even then there were exceptions - for example some villages to this day celebrate "half-fast-day" with various customs like painting walls of houses with water and calcium and dancing of course). Also family back then was 20 people of all ages living near each other, not 4 like now. When a kid was born you had one party, another when it got baptized, another when it got first communion, then when it got confirmation, then when it married, built a house, bought some big animals and died. Add namedays each year and multiply by 20 people in extended family and you get every week busy. That's just the stuff that survived to modern day in some form or another, there has been a lot more of this back then. Additionally every Sunday mass served partially as entertainment for peasants.

User23 5y ago
> example Śmigus Dyngus where young boys run around the villages pouring water on girls they like as a pagan fertility custom Lupercalia always sounded like a good time to me. Who doesn’t want to strip naked and run through the streets whipping willing young women hoping to have their fertility increased?
- ajuc 5y ago

lr4444lr 5y ago

They had their church, their taverns, brothels, and gambling. They were poorly educated and often illiterate. I think your expectations are unfairly modern.

new_guy 5y ago

> And I think the best evidence we have that we are overrating the quality of pre-industrial leisure time is that people developed almost no leisure activities Dude, what? This is quite possibly the dumbest most ignorant ill-informed take I've seen today. https://victorianweb.org/history/leisure1.html https://victorianweb.org/history/leisure1.html

kingkawn 5y ago
Robbing him of his strawman
- dang 5y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dang 5y ago
Please make your substantive points thoughtfully, without name-calling or personal attack. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mrandish 5y ago

I agree that many people today tend to over-estimate the 'simple' and 'idyllic' aspects of the average pre-industrial person's day to day existence and we should be careful to remember the stark differences as well as to discount the influence of fiction and history's focus on the extraordinary, influential, wealthy and powerful. I've always thought it would be an interesting reality TV show concept to create a historically accurate medieval village populated with well-researched, role-playing actors and then to drop a small group of modern people into that context to see how they do. I suspect the reactions of those who over-estimated the idyllic-ness of the past would make for compelling reality TV fodder.

sportslife 5y ago
The issue with modern people is they don't even know how to put on the old clothes. They would be technologically-illiterate trying to use complex pre-industrial tech, and so would have a very hard time, much harder than the people of the time. There have been a number of historical reenactment shows over the years. Continual this-is-hard reax would be a bit tiresome, so usually they include lots of success. If you want struggle, and will accept some industrialization there was "Frontier House" from PBS. Otherwise, I recommend the "Tales of Green Valley" historical farm series and sequels for a well-informed English version. Here is the sequel "Tudor Monastery Farm" on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjgZr0v9DXyK9Cc8PG0ZhDt2i2eQ_PEvg https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjgZr0v9DXyK9Cc8PG0Zh...

null_object 5y ago

> I hope people understand that the argument the article presents is largely a romanticization of poverty I think the opposite is the interesting factor here: late-stage capitalism has demonized the ‘grinding poverty’ and ‘unremitting hardship’ of these earlier ages, to keep our present-day noses to the life-destroying grindstone.

Ginden 5y ago
> I think the opposite is the interesting factor here: late-stage capitalism has demonized the ‘grinding poverty’ and ‘unremitting hardship’ of these earlier ages, to keep our present-day noses to the life-destroying grindstone. Yet, no one chooses life of subsistence farmer if they are able to choose.
- t-3 5y ago
  Really? Who has that choice available to them? I certainly don't - land tax necessitates profits (and $$$$$/acre to buy arable land in the first place!). The diggers and levelers certainly didn't seem interested in being forced off their land.
  - Ginden 5y ago
    Enough arable land to feed family of 4 can be bought in USA for $14k (and you can buy it outside of US). Add $7k for next 50 years of property taxes. You can also join Amish communities, if you are religious. You won't have access to pre-modern supply chain, but you are probably eligible for social security and foodstamps, so you can exchange them for new scythe or something like that.

kebman 5y ago

So they just sat around and were poor all day? All the rich culture being brought through the generations, it meant nothing? I grew up on a farm. It was run pretty much by manual labour up until even the 30's and beyond. Even while tractors and various forms of farm automation became pretty commonplace by the 50's and 60's, they still used age old techniques for preserving hay by drying it on metal threads well into the 80's and sometimes even until the 90's. My grandfather still used the scythe on his fields as long as he was healthy enough to work in 80's. He much preferred the ways of old, and never even bothered installing hot water, much less a water toilet or a shower, in his house. Yet they had time for a lot more holidays back then than we do today. Sure, there was lighter kinds of work you could do while socializing, such as knitting or even baking bread. But then a large amount of people actually thoroughly enjoy doing those things, including woodworking or even hunting or fishing. Is it leisure or work? Well, it's hard to say when you're also dependent on it for survival. These days the fantastic progress of "social media" is making sure I have to answer messages from my boss even on weekends. I don't really think of that as "progress"...

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Don't a lot of people actually enjoy their coworkers and working, too? I mean, I'm sure almost everyone including farmers had a list of things they'd rather do than work - but are the majority of people today really working jobs that just make them absolutely miserable? One of my best friends is a cashier at Trader Joe's and - for the most part - she genuinely enjoys it. Only two of my friends HATE their jobs, and their desperately trying to find a new job. Almost all of my friends have lots of complaints about their jobs - but they also have a lot of things they like about it, too. Why isn't there a grey area for modern work and leisure but there is one for old work?

throwaway984393 5y ago

> people developed almost no leisure activities! This is clearly not true. They didn't have modern leisure activities, but they had a vast array of activities to keep them from getting bored when they weren't working or doing the arduous, nearly continuous preparation of meals. > Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! No literature, sure, because they were illiterate (and it took the invention of the printing press to create a market for leisure books). But no games/sports? How about boules, bowling, prisoners' bars, blind man's bluff, table games (chess, checkers, backgammon, alquerque, three-in-a-row, mill, the fox and geese, tablut), dice, card games, variations on golf, hand-ball, kick the can, cockfighting, cow-tipping, bull-baiting, a form of rugby, wrestling, fencing, racing, and an innumerable array of local games often surrounding festivals with cultural/spiritual significance? They also did activities like swimming, fishing, hunting, playing music, singing, story telling, dancing, even ice skating. I'm tired from just listing them all! The most common leisure activity for men was probably drinking in the tavern. This shouldn't be understated; this took up a lot of time. And it wasn't because they had nothing else to do, it's because drinking and socializing is often preferable to the above activities, even today. A lot of people today don't play any games at all, but spend hours every day sitting around shooting the shit over cans of Bud. I'm not as familiar with womens' lives, but I imagine they had more responsibilities and less leisure time. Cooking, cleaning (such as it was), sewing/needlepoint, and raising children all takes considerable time, so they mightn't have had as much time for leisure. A lot of the above activities were also intended for men.

tsegratis 5y ago
Having lived in semi agrarian societies, can confirm for women too Also once the sun goes down, the work stops -- nobody aint cookin once they cant see the food, not even washing up
ScarletEmerald 5y ago
>> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! >No literature, sure, because they were illiterate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_literature (I know you mentioned storytelling in passing, but that rather downplays it. Oral literature was a big deal.)

netcan 5y ago

Honestly I think the work-leisure dichotomy is kinda bust regardless. Do more years of education mean we have more leisure years than previous generations? Maybe the monks' prayer days should count as work. In any case, before industrialisation, wage labour employment was a lot rarer. Peasants were mostly self employed, self sufficient and most work was defined differently. In a lot of cases, medieval people "owed" work as a tax or rent... They were expected to feed themselves. My grandparents were born in mid 20th century Ireland. They grew most of their food, made most of their furniture, harvested fuel. Etc. They also had cash jobs, cash crops and such. But, a lot of the economy was non monetary subsistence even then. Hard to quantify the workweek, in a meaningfully comparable way to our lifestyles. >>comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century Those seventy hour industrial workweeks of the 19th century probably was" normative for domestic servants and other low class workers. They weren't expected* or sometimes even allowed to have families, homes or domestic duties. IMO, instead of taking medieval "data" and defining it in our terms, we should understand their ways in their terms. Renaissance europe ran were "rights and privileges." Those related to being a maid, miner, landlord or artisan. There were guilds that had ranks. These things were referred to as your "station," "position," possibly even a class. Those things dictated a lot about your lifestyle, how much and what kind of work you did.

5faulker 5y ago

Even so, we're getting more educated than ever and with the advent of inflation, it's hard to say that collectively we're getting ahead of our ancestors.

id02009 5y ago

Exactly my thoughts. Mere clothes washing was a full day activity. Go to the well, bring water. Chop wood for heating. Milk cow, tend to chickens. Fix the fence... All this coupled with less then abundant available calories, and the slow paced work does paint a different picture. Maybe they were not that relaxed, but slow paced work came from the necessary energy conservation?