6 ms·

The life of a peasant was one of serfdom, watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday. The wheat you grew you had to mill in a landlord's m

The life of a peasant was one of serfdom, watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday. The wheat you grew you had to mill in a landlord's mill and they collected a tax from it. There was no light in the evenings because tallow or other wax was far too expensive so when it got dark there were limited things to do. Floors were covered in rushes instead of carpet and were host to bugs. True medicine was not there, surgery unheard of for the peasant class. The days "free from labour" weren't really free from labour, those "free" days are days spent doing menial boring work that we have industrialised away. days spent butchering animals, repairing clothes and tools, teasing wool. You'd be lucky to own more than 2 sets of clothes. Work was backbreaking and if you couldn't work, you were a pauper. Yeah, if you only look at the "good" (only 150 "work" days a year!) and ignore the bad (all of the above), yeah it sounds great. The reality was not so rosy. For my ancestors, it would undoubtedly have been fucking awful. They'd have loved to this in this world we now have.

null_object 4y ago
I think you gravely misunderstood my comment, I’m certainly not harking back to some romantic ideal of pre-industrial Arcadia. If you were an under-nourished worker, living in the rat-like polluted conditions of an Industrial Revolution town in Northern England (for instance), constantly breathing sulfurous fumes, suffering cholera epidemics, seeing the whole town and all the countryside around it blackened by the ash from the local factories, while still seeing children die prematurely from all the same diseases and accidents that were common in the Middle Ages, but with less access to fresh air and your own vegetables and (to some extent) your own livestock, then making the life of a peasant seem less attractive than it maybe was in reality, is not such a far-fetched possibility. > watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics. I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to, instead of evaluating whether the life was actually more nuanced (especially in relative terms to those richer than themselves at the time).
- qwytw 4y ago
  True, most socio-economic 'revolutions' e.g. agricultural, industrial, Rome conquering/"brining civilization [to]" most of the know world had huge negative effects for the majority of the population at least in short and medium term,
  - JackFr 4y ago
    That makes no sense. The immediate result of the Industrial Revolution was a significant improvement in the material well being of vast classes of people.
    - qwytw 4y ago
      > immediate result If we agree that the first phase of the industrial revolution began in the mid 18th century and lasted until the 1840s. The material well being for most people did not really start improving until the middle if not the end of that period. For instance: - average height of men in England peaked around 1740 and continued decreasing until at-least the 1830s or 40s or even later. Similar trends are noticeable in France and Holland. In the United Stated it was even worse, the trend didn't reverse until the late 19th century (of course this was mostly driven by immigrants from Europe, since the 18th century Americans were considerably taller than average Europeans). - similar things could be said about real income. According to estimates real wages in England peaked around 1600 and then collapsed during the civil wars and other calamities in the 17th century. Then returned to similar levels just on the eve of the industrial revolution (1740s) when they crashed again and didn't surpass their past height until around 1820.
- guntherhermann 4y ago
  > I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to You might be reading my comment as if that were the case, but I assure you that my thoughts are not that. Humans adapt to any situation, that's why we are the superior species, we are the world's greatest adapters. Peasant life wasn't misery all the time, but there was FAR MORE misery on a FAR GREATER scale than there is for the average Brit. That's my point. I think it's important to understand how many things we have that most of us take for granted (refridgeration, essentially infinite light, the world's information at your fingertips, I could go on). I have read a few articles over the past few days about people waxing lyrical about how great medieval peasants had it, and my comment is merely counterpointing those arguments. > As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics. I think picking one bit of all of my examples, countering it, and then treating the rest of my argument as if it is worthless is a really bad way to engage with people. It's why I stopped commenting on HN, it's full of pedantic tripe like that. Take care.
qwytw 4y ago
> watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday It was that much better for aristocracy/middle class. Obviously access to better nutrition and conditions improved the chances of survival. However mortality was still huge and not really that distinguishable between social classes from a modern perspective. > True medicine was not there, surgery unheard of for the peasant class Which might have been a good thing in some cases. For many illnesses and diseases the methods used by highly paid 'doctors' might have as well done more harm than good. I agree with the general sentiment however. Yet in many ways life for upper classes wasn't that great either.
- frostburg 4y ago
  Yes, the upper class was actually endlessly tormented by doctors during most of history. Until germ theory you would generally have been better off avoiding them.
sigg3 4y ago
A couple of notes: The child mortality rate was equally high among the upper classes, which is why motherhood was a outsourced occupation. The likelihood of death was conceived as such a stressor it might ruin a woman. There are counter examples (parents rearing their own) that we know about precisely because it, being extraordinary, was a topic of conversation. Your description of daily life is striking. It's also why I like reflecting on our folklore: it is usually very dark, full of fear, sickness and death. I live in Norway, and there are specific supernatural explanations for almost anything: death, malformed babies, rape, incest, abortion, suicide, insanity etc. "hidden" in what is usually presented as rosy fairytales and omens.
Retric 4y ago
Light in peasant houses didn’t use candles but rush dipped in fat or tallow. Rushlights took minimal effort to create and rush was basically free. Candles where more consistent and significantly longer lasting though vastly more expensive, while rushlights where plenty useful and cheap. The major cost was you could also eat the fat, but an hour of light every night would cost you something like 1% of the calories you needed to survive. Making them viable outside of true starvation situations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushlight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushlight Similarly, work was intense during planting and harvest, but slowed down the rest of the year. So people would do things like take pilgrimages surprisingly often. Rather than long days of backbreaking labor the major issue was they lacked productive work most of the year. I am not saying life was good, but rather it was very different than we imagine.
- _a_a_a_ 4y ago
  > was they lacked productive work most of the year. I'm surprised. Do you have a good source for this?
  - Retric 4y ago
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/2589850 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2589850 To be clear work never ended and got really intense for part of the year, but productive labor was limited by raw materials, transportation issues etc.
    - _a_a_a_ 4y ago
      Couldn't read your link but did a quick dig myself and found this, backing up what you say https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
      - watwut 4y ago
        That article ignores quite a lot of activity that needs to be done. It seems to count only some kind of field work or work for landlord as work and ignores everything else that needs to be done. Or take this: > t stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. This literally describes full day of work, but tries to make it sound like it is less then that. It is made to sound like it is somehow less, because there is time for lunch, dinner and a break once in two to three hours.
bodhiandphysics 4y ago
It really depends where. England ended serfdom in the 14th century, and in much of western europe (Italy notably, but also Scotland and Spain) serfdom never really developed. In central and eastern europe, peasants were ensurfed into the 19th century, though in most places this was an imposition in the 16th - 17th century. It's also important to remember that peasants weren't a homogenous group. There were rich peasants and poor peasants, often in the same village, and they lived different lives.
ricardobayes 4y ago
It's interesting to look at feudal tax rates. It varied between countries but the concept of "thirteenth" seems to be common, based on what I see it used to be between 2% and 10% of "revenue". I wonder when did we normalize 40-60% taxation. Seems we made a wrong turn somewhere. Perhaps our convenient modern life wouldn't be sustainable on such low taxes, but maybe it would - looking at Monaco or Dubai firmly at 0%.
- rpvnwnkl 4y ago
  Average tax rate in the US appears to be less than 20%
- HEmanZ 4y ago
  Idk what country you’re paying 40-60% tax in. I make very good money in the US and I don’t pay close to that. Using the US as an example, most people pay an effective tax rate of 20%. This is equivalent to a peasant getting a 10% tax and their 10% tithe to the church, so it’s not far off. Basically we’ve moved redistribution/welfare from the control of the church to the state. In medieval times these were effectively the same thing anyways.
  - arbuge 4y ago
    You are probably not counting all the other US taxes: payroll, property, sales, state income tax, business taxes, etc. If you only consider personal federal income tax, the picture will of course appear rosier than it really is. Once you include other taxes, the overall figure climbs rapidly. It's already almost 30% counting just federal income tax, social security, and medicare, and none of the other taxes mentioned above. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-the-average-american-pays-in-taxes-4768594#:~:text=The%20OECD%20reported%20that%20the,worker%20was%2028.4%25%20in%202021 https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-the-average-american-pa.... "The OECD reported that the U.S. "tax wedge" for the average single worker was 28.4% in 2021." ... "The OECD tax wedge only includes these three taxes: income, Social Security, and Medicare. It doesn’t include sales, property, vehicle, or state income taxes."
  - ricardobayes 4y ago
mountainb 4y ago
Aristos also covered floor with rushes and other scented herbs. Serfdom generally didn’t exist in the West unless you are using the term over broadly.
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
Taxes should probably fall into the "good" column as the cuts the landlords took was paltry by any modern standard (though I'm sure they would have taken more if the economy could support it).
still_grokking 4y ago
Most of the "bad things" were independent of social class. This was just the way people lived back than. > watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday > There was no light in the evenings because tallow or other wax was far too expensive so when it got dark there were limited things to do. (Not even rich people could afford much light!) > Floors […] were host to bugs. > True medicine was not there But just think about the work days and hours. Most people (even the poor ones) were not working the most time of the year. Only in summer it was possible to work the whole day. That's why industrialization needed to "teach" the "lazy people" to "actually work".
culi 4y ago
This might be true, but being working class during the industrial revolution might be even worse than this. You move away from your loved ones to go to a big city, sleep in extremely cramped spaces, work extremely demanding and repetitive jobs for sometimes 12 hours a day, etc. If a policeman sees you strolling on the streets they'd question why you're not working and you better have some fucking proof that your boss asked you to go somewhere. Diseases and illnesses were at similar levels in this lifestyle as well. The modal lifespan of a human in hunter gatherer groups is around 70 years old. The artificially low lifespans of the medieval period in Europe was mostly due to peasants being forced to live in close quarters with all of their animals, making it a prime breeding ground for zoonotic diseases to spread (worth noting, every major human plague has been zoonotic in origin). Working in a factory doesn't expose you to as many zoonotic diseases but there's a whole host of novel risk factors and pollutants that also lower your lifespan. Not to mention, indentured servitude was the norm and is not much better than serfdom. Peasants also at least had more overall freetime than even the modern American worker. As you pointed out, only 150 days of work each day (though hunter gatherer groups still worked even less than this)
watwut 4y ago
The "only 150 "work" days a year" is fundamentally stupid, because it ignores all the work that needs to be done in the winter, childcare, repairs of tools, wood chopping for fire etc.
LarryMullins 4y ago
> Floors were covered in rushes instead of carpet and were host to bugs. What do you think the carpets owned by rich people were made out of? It certainly wasn't synthetic fibers. I don't see any reason to believe their carpets weren't host to pests as well. The rich class were doubtlessly covered in lice and other parasites.
Nomentatus 4y ago
There's a big divide here though, between pre-Black Death (poverty as you describe) and the couple centuries afterward. It took forever for population numbers to recover (more than two centuries, in England) and things were much better during that period. Infant death remained very high until recent times, of course.

null_object 4y ago

I think you gravely misunderstood my comment, I’m certainly not harking back to some romantic ideal of pre-industrial Arcadia. If you were an under-nourished worker, living in the rat-like polluted conditions of an Industrial Revolution town in Northern England (for instance), constantly breathing sulfurous fumes, suffering cholera epidemics, seeing the whole town and all the countryside around it blackened by the ash from the local factories, while still seeing children die prematurely from all the same diseases and accidents that were common in the Middle Ages, but with less access to fresh air and your own vegetables and (to some extent) your own livestock, then making the life of a peasant seem less attractive than it maybe was in reality, is not such a far-fetched possibility. > watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics. I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to, instead of evaluating whether the life was actually more nuanced (especially in relative terms to those richer than themselves at the time).

qwytw 4y ago
True, most socio-economic 'revolutions' e.g. agricultural, industrial, Rome conquering/"brining civilization [to]" most of the know world had huge negative effects for the majority of the population at least in short and medium term,
- JackFr 4y ago
  That makes no sense. The immediate result of the Industrial Revolution was a significant improvement in the material well being of vast classes of people.
  - qwytw 4y ago
    > immediate result If we agree that the first phase of the industrial revolution began in the mid 18th century and lasted until the 1840s. The material well being for most people did not really start improving until the middle if not the end of that period. For instance: - average height of men in England peaked around 1740 and continued decreasing until at-least the 1830s or 40s or even later. Similar trends are noticeable in France and Holland. In the United Stated it was even worse, the trend didn't reverse until the late 19th century (of course this was mostly driven by immigrants from Europe, since the 18th century Americans were considerably taller than average Europeans). - similar things could be said about real income. According to estimates real wages in England peaked around 1600 and then collapsed during the civil wars and other calamities in the 17th century. Then returned to similar levels just on the eve of the industrial revolution (1740s) when they crashed again and didn't surpass their past height until around 1820.
guntherhermann 4y ago
> I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to You might be reading my comment as if that were the case, but I assure you that my thoughts are not that. Humans adapt to any situation, that's why we are the superior species, we are the world's greatest adapters. Peasant life wasn't misery all the time, but there was FAR MORE misery on a FAR GREATER scale than there is for the average Brit. That's my point. I think it's important to understand how many things we have that most of us take for granted (refridgeration, essentially infinite light, the world's information at your fingertips, I could go on). I have read a few articles over the past few days about people waxing lyrical about how great medieval peasants had it, and my comment is merely counterpointing those arguments. > As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics. I think picking one bit of all of my examples, countering it, and then treating the rest of my argument as if it is worthless is a really bad way to engage with people. It's why I stopped commenting on HN, it's full of pedantic tripe like that. Take care.

qwytw 4y ago

> watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday It was that much better for aristocracy/middle class. Obviously access to better nutrition and conditions improved the chances of survival. However mortality was still huge and not really that distinguishable between social classes from a modern perspective. > True medicine was not there, surgery unheard of for the peasant class Which might have been a good thing in some cases. For many illnesses and diseases the methods used by highly paid 'doctors' might have as well done more harm than good. I agree with the general sentiment however. Yet in many ways life for upper classes wasn't that great either.

frostburg 4y ago
Yes, the upper class was actually endlessly tormented by doctors during most of history. Until germ theory you would generally have been better off avoiding them.

sigg3 4y ago

A couple of notes: The child mortality rate was equally high among the upper classes, which is why motherhood was a outsourced occupation. The likelihood of death was conceived as such a stressor it might ruin a woman. There are counter examples (parents rearing their own) that we know about precisely because it, being extraordinary, was a topic of conversation. Your description of daily life is striking. It's also why I like reflecting on our folklore: it is usually very dark, full of fear, sickness and death. I live in Norway, and there are specific supernatural explanations for almost anything: death, malformed babies, rape, incest, abortion, suicide, insanity etc. "hidden" in what is usually presented as rosy fairytales and omens.

Retric 4y ago

Light in peasant houses didn’t use candles but rush dipped in fat or tallow. Rushlights took minimal effort to create and rush was basically free. Candles where more consistent and significantly longer lasting though vastly more expensive, while rushlights where plenty useful and cheap. The major cost was you could also eat the fat, but an hour of light every night would cost you something like 1% of the calories you needed to survive. Making them viable outside of true starvation situations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushlight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushlight Similarly, work was intense during planting and harvest, but slowed down the rest of the year. So people would do things like take pilgrimages surprisingly often. Rather than long days of backbreaking labor the major issue was they lacked productive work most of the year. I am not saying life was good, but rather it was very different than we imagine.

_a_a_a_ 4y ago
> was they lacked productive work most of the year. I'm surprised. Do you have a good source for this?
- Retric 4y ago
  https://www.jstor.org/stable/2589850 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2589850 To be clear work never ended and got really intense for part of the year, but productive labor was limited by raw materials, transportation issues etc.
  - _a_a_a_ 4y ago
    Couldn't read your link but did a quick dig myself and found this, backing up what you say https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
    - watwut 4y ago
      That article ignores quite a lot of activity that needs to be done. It seems to count only some kind of field work or work for landlord as work and ignores everything else that needs to be done. Or take this: > t stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. This literally describes full day of work, but tries to make it sound like it is less then that. It is made to sound like it is somehow less, because there is time for lunch, dinner and a break once in two to three hours.

bodhiandphysics 4y ago

It really depends where. England ended serfdom in the 14th century, and in much of western europe (Italy notably, but also Scotland and Spain) serfdom never really developed. In central and eastern europe, peasants were ensurfed into the 19th century, though in most places this was an imposition in the 16th - 17th century. It's also important to remember that peasants weren't a homogenous group. There were rich peasants and poor peasants, often in the same village, and they lived different lives.

ricardobayes 4y ago

It's interesting to look at feudal tax rates. It varied between countries but the concept of "thirteenth" seems to be common, based on what I see it used to be between 2% and 10% of "revenue". I wonder when did we normalize 40-60% taxation. Seems we made a wrong turn somewhere. Perhaps our convenient modern life wouldn't be sustainable on such low taxes, but maybe it would - looking at Monaco or Dubai firmly at 0%.

rpvnwnkl 4y ago
Average tax rate in the US appears to be less than 20%
HEmanZ 4y ago
Idk what country you’re paying 40-60% tax in. I make very good money in the US and I don’t pay close to that. Using the US as an example, most people pay an effective tax rate of 20%. This is equivalent to a peasant getting a 10% tax and their 10% tithe to the church, so it’s not far off. Basically we’ve moved redistribution/welfare from the control of the church to the state. In medieval times these were effectively the same thing anyways.
- arbuge 4y ago
  You are probably not counting all the other US taxes: payroll, property, sales, state income tax, business taxes, etc. If you only consider personal federal income tax, the picture will of course appear rosier than it really is. Once you include other taxes, the overall figure climbs rapidly. It's already almost 30% counting just federal income tax, social security, and medicare, and none of the other taxes mentioned above. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-the-average-american-pays-in-taxes-4768594#:~:text=The%20OECD%20reported%20that%20the,worker%20was%2028.4%25%20in%202021 https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-the-average-american-pa.... "The OECD reported that the U.S. "tax wedge" for the average single worker was 28.4% in 2021." ... "The OECD tax wedge only includes these three taxes: income, Social Security, and Medicare. It doesn’t include sales, property, vehicle, or state income taxes."
- ricardobayes 4y ago

mountainb 4y ago

Aristos also covered floor with rushes and other scented herbs. Serfdom generally didn’t exist in the West unless you are using the term over broadly.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

Taxes should probably fall into the "good" column as the cuts the landlords took was paltry by any modern standard (though I'm sure they would have taken more if the economy could support it).

still_grokking 4y ago

Most of the "bad things" were independent of social class. This was just the way people lived back than. > watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday > There was no light in the evenings because tallow or other wax was far too expensive so when it got dark there were limited things to do. (Not even rich people could afford much light!) > Floors […] were host to bugs. > True medicine was not there But just think about the work days and hours. Most people (even the poor ones) were not working the most time of the year. Only in summer it was possible to work the whole day. That's why industrialization needed to "teach" the "lazy people" to "actually work".

culi 4y ago

This might be true, but being working class during the industrial revolution might be even worse than this. You move away from your loved ones to go to a big city, sleep in extremely cramped spaces, work extremely demanding and repetitive jobs for sometimes 12 hours a day, etc. If a policeman sees you strolling on the streets they'd question why you're not working and you better have some fucking proof that your boss asked you to go somewhere. Diseases and illnesses were at similar levels in this lifestyle as well. The modal lifespan of a human in hunter gatherer groups is around 70 years old. The artificially low lifespans of the medieval period in Europe was mostly due to peasants being forced to live in close quarters with all of their animals, making it a prime breeding ground for zoonotic diseases to spread (worth noting, every major human plague has been zoonotic in origin). Working in a factory doesn't expose you to as many zoonotic diseases but there's a whole host of novel risk factors and pollutants that also lower your lifespan. Not to mention, indentured servitude was the norm and is not much better than serfdom. Peasants also at least had more overall freetime than even the modern American worker. As you pointed out, only 150 days of work each day (though hunter gatherer groups still worked even less than this)

watwut 4y ago

The "only 150 "work" days a year" is fundamentally stupid, because it ignores all the work that needs to be done in the winter, childcare, repairs of tools, wood chopping for fire etc.

LarryMullins 4y ago

> Floors were covered in rushes instead of carpet and were host to bugs. What do you think the carpets owned by rich people were made out of? It certainly wasn't synthetic fibers. I don't see any reason to believe their carpets weren't host to pests as well. The rich class were doubtlessly covered in lice and other parasites.

Nomentatus 4y ago

There's a big divide here though, between pre-Black Death (poverty as you describe) and the couple centuries afterward. It took forever for population numbers to recover (more than two centuries, in England) and things were much better during that period. Infant death remained very high until recent times, of course.