Bret Devereaux is going through the 'peasant experience' right now here: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-house

Bret Devereaux is going through the 'peasant experience' right now here: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/ https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an... It's not done yet, and I am eagerly awaiting the end results. That said, from what I can tell from his writings, jcrammer is mostly correct. The peasant life - the modal life - was just awful hard work for many decades. It was not nice and it was not better than the factories most of the time. Yes there were bad factories, a lot of them, but they lasted a brief time. The Factory Act in Britian was in 1833, only a few decades after the factories were even a thing. Aside: We really need better education in labor laws overall.