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Medieval peasants were required to work 150 days a year on their lord’s estate. That was how they paid for the land they had to farm the rest of the time to sur

• hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  I've read a lot on this subject, and unfortunately I think that all sources I've read are introducing a particular bias, which is usually either "capitalism makes people work more!" or "y'all are crazy, people worked way more before the Industrial Revolution". For example, here is a counter reference to your reference: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_.... My own personal take is that, first off, I'm not at all trying to make peasant life as some sort of panacea - far from it. If anything, life before the Industrial Revolution was certainly much more precarious: obviously tons of childhood deaths (not to mention deaths from things like smallpox and the plague), and all it took was a bad harvest to cause major famine. War was much more commonplace. But the lack of a lot of tools that the Industrial Revolution provided meant that, in many ways, there was simply less possible time to do productive work. When the lights went out, it's hard to do a lot by candlelight/torches. The work really did ebb and flow with the seasons. Yes, there was ton to do during the offseason, but I think the analogy with the modern world is that is like the time after a tough deadline and big release - lots of "OK, let clean up some of this code now that we have time". Plus, a lot of the tasks that your reference mentioned would have been clearly divided by the sexes. There is a paragraph from your link that states: > We might also point to the amount of household labour that had to be performed. Yarn had to be spun, cloth to be weaved. Cooking was over open fires: and that firewood had to be collected. Bread baked and so on and on. There was a recent report (rather exagerrated but still) which claimed that in the 1930s it took 65 hours of human labour a week to run a household. Today it takes 3. Things were worse back in medieval days. And nearly all of that work would have been done by women while men worked the fields. There was certainly much more total work to be done to run a household, but the division of labor was more clear cut. So again, I think the reality is probably somewhere in the middle. Life was certainly "harder" back then, but from everything I've read there was undeniably more "downtime", even if there wasn't a ton to do during that downtime. The "having to work 12 hours a day just to keep food on the table" that I was responding to clearly seems to be false from just about every source I've read.
• garciansmith 2y ago
  It really depends on a lot of factors, including time and place. The lot of a "medieval peasant" was not the same across time (1000+ years) and place (all of Europe) and varied a ton. Your link is a response to an article by an economist that notes periods of high wages in the fourteenth century in England, that's it. There were certainly times when peasants had much less labor to perform on their lord's lands, or might have been free peasants and have none, or lived in an area with no demesne-like system, etc. Which just makes the whole thing of looking at the life of peasants and talking about how much free time they had compared to us all the sillier. The point about what else you need to do to live (cook, mend clothes, etc.) is important, but makes it even more difficult to compare to our modern lives, even variation aside.