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Statistics about how much time medieval peasants spent working can be misleading, because a lot of what they spent their time on when they weren't doing fieldwo

by pg 13y ago

Statistics about how much time medieval peasants spent working can be misleading, because a lot of what they spent their time on when they weren't doing fieldwork was still work, e.g. tending their own gardens, making implements and furniture, working on their houses. They had to make most of the things they used themselves. So when "work" was over they didn't go home and watch TV. It's hard to be sure exactly what life was like for preindustrial agricultural workers, but the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, despite working conditions we know to have been harsh.

EthanHeilman 13y ago
>the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, despite working conditions we know to have been harsh. I don't find that evidence convincing for two reasons: 1. Many peasant farmers relied on a commons for food production which was being legislatively destroyed at that time ( See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure ). Factories got peasants who were being pushed off their land due to industrialization. Those peasants might not have opted to be factory workers if they had been able to live a traditional peasant life. Note that this same process was repeated when Mexico grew it's industrial base in the 1990's under NAFTA using Article 27 to destroy common land to create cheap factory labor( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement#Zapatista_Uprising_in_response_to_NAFTA_in_Chiapas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agre... ). 2. People going to work in factories may not have be aware of how terrible the conditions were and once they found out they may not have been able to reverse the situation (starvation wages don't make for many options). In much the same way that sex-traffickers promise one job (working as a cleaner) and then once the person is under their power the traffickers force them to work as prostitutes.
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  Factory workers were paid handsomely and competition for such jobs was fierce.
  - jjoonathan 13y ago
    [citation needed]
  - jjoonathan 13y ago
    [citation needed] Also, "handsomely" is relative: if the quality of life of peasants plummeted due to enclosure until it was far below the QOL for factory workers and enclosure happened because of the industrial revolution, it would be disingenuous to say that the industrial revolution provided a handsome alternative to peasant life. The freedom of choice can be immensely powerful or worse than useless depending on circumstances -- a distinction often lost on or intentionally glossed over by free-market drum beaters. If I kidnap you and give you the choice between having your throat slit and your chest stabbed, am I not still a murderer once you lie dead on the floor? I'm not enough of a historian to provide an informed opinion on the situation at hand but I've seen this exact same excuse (the poor people chose X so X was actually good for them) used in so many completely inappropriate circumstances that I had to speak up.
    - Panos 13y ago
      The initial stages of the industrial revolution were not so good for the workers. However, the mass production phase, did increase the standard of living. The best example is "The five-dollar workday": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford
      - sogen 13y ago
        That's the current wage in Mexico!
        alexeisadeski3 13y ago
        Isn't five dollars a day more than double the UN poverty line - even today??
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    That would suggest a surplus of labour competing for high wages. Are you sure about this? Economically it doesn't make sense and we also know that until legislation finally restricted the practice, the factories were employing kids wherever possible to keep wages down.
- pg 13y ago
  The question of the degree to which enclosure was responsible for the supply of factory workers is one people have debated for a century. The idea that it was was as you can imagine very popular with Marxist historians. Which doesn't make it false of course. But it does have the same neatness that drives urban legends, and in a place like HN we should be wary of this. There were in practice a bunch of forces that drove people to work in factories. The rise of international trade, which depressed agricultural prices in comparatively unproductive Europe, was another huge one.
  - EthanHeilman 13y ago
    > Which doesn't make it false of course. But it does have the same neatness that drives urban legends, and in a place like HN we should be wary of this. Agreed. To restate in less argumentative terms, the claim made that: >the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, despite working conditions we know to have been harsh. to be convincing must show that: (1). there was a real alternative between peasant life and industrial life, (2). that peasants made the choice with at least a decent understanding of what factory life was like. 1 is, as you state, debatable which weakens the claim (it certainly is not evidence in the affirmative). On 2 I don't have the expertise or the citations to state one way or the other, but I would love to see some evidence on either side before placing faith in the claim. To generalize, I would say that any argument that "A is better than B, because lots of people from B prefer A" must at minimum meet the test that: it is a true choice, and that the people making the choice have enough information (informed consent). Additionally, I do not consider such arguments truly convincing, in and of themselves, even if they meet both tests because populations can make poor choices (cigarettes, electing bad politicians, buying an inferior product, etc).
  - Retric 13y ago
    There was also a steady increase in labor effecency and total agriculture output which reduced the demand for agricultural workers.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    > The idea that it was was as you can imagine very popular with Marxist historians. Which doesn't make it false of course. Then why do you make this quip? It reads as if you are only including it to sow doubt about the claim by association. Maybe I'm overly cynical, if so I apologize. > The rise of international trade, which depressed agricultural prices in comparatively unproductive Europe, was another huge one. The idea that productivity of Europe was challenged by international trade was/is also wildly popular with Marxist historians - the rise of well-developed international capitalism as a pre-requisite to reaching the productivity levels required for a socialist revolution to be successful is a key part of Marx ideas. The rising competition from increasingly efficient US agriculture and industrialization was even explicitly called out for its effects on Europe in at least one of the prefaces Marx and Engels wrote to translations of the Communist Manifesto.
cia_plant 13y ago
That evidence would be convincing if peasants were enticed from working in the traditional arrangements by the lure of working in a factory; but as I understand it the situation was more complicated. Industrialization proceeded alongside the active dismantling of the feudal property system and the enclosure of formerly common land. A former peasant who became a factory worker may have gone through the intermediate step of being evicted from their land and becoming a vagrant. Edit: wrote this comment before seeing the other reply, which makes almost exactly the same point
asdfdsa1234 13y ago
Not to mention the fact that peasants typically worked from dawn to dusk.
hydralist 13y ago
maybe that was their TV, self projects
DanI-S 13y ago
Perhaps given more time to tend our own gardens, make our own tools and furniture and work on our houses, we'd be a happier and more prosperous civilization.
- davidw 13y ago
  To me, > make our own tools means "hacking on Emacs", and indeed, it is fun.
  - DanI-S 13y ago
    Exactly.
- travisp 13y ago
  I suppose it's possible. Personally, very little has made me as happy as moving from a house to an apartment and never having to tend a garden or make housing repairs ever again.
- qwertzlcoatl 13y ago
  Depends on which modern day activities you are comparing those with.
sown 13y ago
> but the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, They may have needed the money but they sure didn't like it, at least here in the US. There was a large change of working for a wage, on a clock, compared to working on a farm or for a wage, and was a sizable violation of the Jeffersonian ideals of freedom. As to why people left, i dunno. There's probably a history research effort in it.
coldtea 13y ago
>but the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, despite working conditions we know to have been harsh That's extremely innacurate. Workers had to be MADE to work into factories by force, often by laws and regulations destroying their agricultural and traditional occupations to make them fodder for the industry. In a lot of cases, the industrilization was made at gun point (USSR is an example, but it also holds for a lot of the limited industriliazation in the third world). That is known (and has been documented) to have happened almost everywhere there was industrialization.
- pandaman 13y ago
  Do you have any citations about the USSR's industrialization at gun point? From what I know it was opposite - the peasants had been bound to their "kolhoz" (collective farm) and could not leave. It was implemented through internal passports[1], which were not issued to peasants. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolhoz#Kolkhoz_life_under_Stalin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolhoz#Kolkhoz_life_under_Stali...
  - googleitdude 13y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_in_the_Soviet_Union http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_in_the_Soviet_Unio...
    - pandaman 13y ago
      This what I said, peasants were forced to work in agriculture. They were not forced to work in factories, quite the opposite, they had been prevented from working in factories or anywhere else.
      - smsm42 13y ago
        First of all, there was a big Gulag-supplied industry (google White Sea – Baltic Canal, also known as Belomorkanal, not to be confused with popular - in the USSR - brand of cigarettes). Second, even outside of Gulag, you couldn't just choose what you'd be doing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense) If you're not engaging in "socially productive" work, you're going to be relocated to unhospitable areas in the north or in Siberia.
engrenage 13y ago
Don't good engineers also 'make implements', and 'tend their own gardens' when their fieldwork is done?
notahacker 13y ago
There's no real need to speculate about the lives of medieval peasants when similar comparisons could probably be made with many parts of the developing world today, in villages where most people - earning just above subsistence - spend most of the time doing very little, even when there are obvious minor home improvements they could be undertaking given sufficient motivation. As there's nothing they know of that they can do to earn more income or improve their social status in their current environment, they do spend a large proportion of their time watching TV, or playing board games, or snoozing in the shade. The leisure time is real, but so is the lack of real earning opportunity and the certainty of dying - probably prematurely - as poor as the day they were born. And if all their kids survive to adulthood, there'll be even less work to do but perhaps not enough land or other means of earning sustenance to go around... The number of people willingly leaving those peaceful villages to work in appalling conditions for a couple of extra dollars a day in arguably futile pursuit of prosperity definitely outnumbers those moving in the opposite direction.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  It is not that bad, at least in China. Have you heard of Taobao villages [1]? Basically, e-commerce is reaching rural economies also. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2013-08/20/c_132646753.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2013-08/20/c_13264...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ekianjo 13y ago
You do not have to go back in time to find elements of answers. In China peasants live in very poor conditions far from the cities （and I can tell from experience that it is much harsher that what we can imagine before going there） and it is no surprise that they expect to get a better life working at Foxconn or other industries we like to call as sweatshops in the western media. That is the best real life example out there, and it is taking place much faster than in Europe at the time.
alexeisadeski3 13y ago
Not to mention that American adults work, on average, 25 hours per week: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-13/how-average-american-adult-spends-24-hours-each-day http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-13/how-average-america...
wwweston 13y ago
> a lot of what they spent their time on when they weren't doing fieldwork was still work, e.g. tending their own gardens, making implements and furniture, working on their houses. It's certainly true that by and large we benefit from an industrial economy where we hire out ourselves for specialized labor and hire others to do things for us. It'd be something of a challenge to be able to furnish a modern household with a full-complement of typical goods without anything pre-made, and since goods are a lot easier to come by, both in variety and cost, people can afford to be selective about what kinds of self-crafting they'd prefer to engage in (or none at all). On the other hand, tending your own garden, tooling around in the shop, making furniture, and working on home improvement projects are all activities apparently recreational enough that many seem to do them for fun even when it's easier to pop over to Ikea or otherwise hire it out. I hear some people even seem to like build their own software for fun. :) The labor you get to personally enjoy the fruits of -- that you can do to your own standards of need and satisfaction -- is a very different experience than work you're obligated to do as a cog in a institutional production arrangement. And until most people have the option to pick how many days / hours out of the year they'd like to work as an employee, I don't think it's a settled question that the conventional balance we've got right now is optimal or necessarily superior to all past arrangements.
Mordor 13y ago
Dude, where are your sources?

by pg 13y ago

EthanHeilman 13y ago

>the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, despite working conditions we know to have been harsh. I don't find that evidence convincing for two reasons: 1. Many peasant farmers relied on a commons for food production which was being legislatively destroyed at that time ( See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure ). Factories got peasants who were being pushed off their land due to industrialization. Those peasants might not have opted to be factory workers if they had been able to live a traditional peasant life. Note that this same process was repeated when Mexico grew it's industrial base in the 1990's under NAFTA using Article 27 to destroy common land to create cheap factory labor( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement#Zapatista_Uprising_in_response_to_NAFTA_in_Chiapas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agre... ). 2. People going to work in factories may not have be aware of how terrible the conditions were and once they found out they may not have been able to reverse the situation (starvation wages don't make for many options). In much the same way that sex-traffickers promise one job (working as a cleaner) and then once the person is under their power the traffickers force them to work as prostitutes.

alexeisadeski3 13y ago
Factory workers were paid handsomely and competition for such jobs was fierce.
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  [citation needed]
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  [citation needed] Also, "handsomely" is relative: if the quality of life of peasants plummeted due to enclosure until it was far below the QOL for factory workers and enclosure happened because of the industrial revolution, it would be disingenuous to say that the industrial revolution provided a handsome alternative to peasant life. The freedom of choice can be immensely powerful or worse than useless depending on circumstances -- a distinction often lost on or intentionally glossed over by free-market drum beaters. If I kidnap you and give you the choice between having your throat slit and your chest stabbed, am I not still a murderer once you lie dead on the floor? I'm not enough of a historian to provide an informed opinion on the situation at hand but I've seen this exact same excuse (the poor people chose X so X was actually good for them) used in so many completely inappropriate circumstances that I had to speak up.
  - Panos 13y ago
    The initial stages of the industrial revolution were not so good for the workers. However, the mass production phase, did increase the standard of living. The best example is "The five-dollar workday": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford
    - sogen 13y ago
      That's the current wage in Mexico!
      - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
        Isn't five dollars a day more than double the UN poverty line - even today??
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  That would suggest a surplus of labour competing for high wages. Are you sure about this? Economically it doesn't make sense and we also know that until legislation finally restricted the practice, the factories were employing kids wherever possible to keep wages down.
pg 13y ago
The question of the degree to which enclosure was responsible for the supply of factory workers is one people have debated for a century. The idea that it was was as you can imagine very popular with Marxist historians. Which doesn't make it false of course. But it does have the same neatness that drives urban legends, and in a place like HN we should be wary of this. There were in practice a bunch of forces that drove people to work in factories. The rise of international trade, which depressed agricultural prices in comparatively unproductive Europe, was another huge one.
- EthanHeilman 13y ago
  > Which doesn't make it false of course. But it does have the same neatness that drives urban legends, and in a place like HN we should be wary of this. Agreed. To restate in less argumentative terms, the claim made that: >the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, despite working conditions we know to have been harsh. to be convincing must show that: (1). there was a real alternative between peasant life and industrial life, (2). that peasants made the choice with at least a decent understanding of what factory life was like. 1 is, as you state, debatable which weakens the claim (it certainly is not evidence in the affirmative). On 2 I don't have the expertise or the citations to state one way or the other, but I would love to see some evidence on either side before placing faith in the claim. To generalize, I would say that any argument that "A is better than B, because lots of people from B prefer A" must at minimum meet the test that: it is a true choice, and that the people making the choice have enough information (informed consent). Additionally, I do not consider such arguments truly convincing, in and of themselves, even if they meet both tests because populations can make poor choices (cigarettes, electing bad politicians, buying an inferior product, etc).
- Retric 13y ago
  There was also a steady increase in labor effecency and total agriculture output which reduced the demand for agricultural workers.
- vidarh 13y ago
  > The idea that it was was as you can imagine very popular with Marxist historians. Which doesn't make it false of course. Then why do you make this quip? It reads as if you are only including it to sow doubt about the claim by association. Maybe I'm overly cynical, if so I apologize. > The rise of international trade, which depressed agricultural prices in comparatively unproductive Europe, was another huge one. The idea that productivity of Europe was challenged by international trade was/is also wildly popular with Marxist historians - the rise of well-developed international capitalism as a pre-requisite to reaching the productivity levels required for a socialist revolution to be successful is a key part of Marx ideas. The rising competition from increasingly efficient US agriculture and industrialization was even explicitly called out for its effects on Europe in at least one of the prefaces Marx and Engels wrote to translations of the Communist Manifesto.

cia_plant 13y ago

That evidence would be convincing if peasants were enticed from working in the traditional arrangements by the lure of working in a factory; but as I understand it the situation was more complicated. Industrialization proceeded alongside the active dismantling of the feudal property system and the enclosure of formerly common land. A former peasant who became a factory worker may have gone through the intermediate step of being evicted from their land and becoming a vagrant. Edit: wrote this comment before seeing the other reply, which makes almost exactly the same point

asdfdsa1234 13y ago

Not to mention the fact that peasants typically worked from dawn to dusk.

hydralist 13y ago

maybe that was their TV, self projects

DanI-S 13y ago

Perhaps given more time to tend our own gardens, make our own tools and furniture and work on our houses, we'd be a happier and more prosperous civilization.

davidw 13y ago
To me, > make our own tools means "hacking on Emacs", and indeed, it is fun.
- DanI-S 13y ago
  Exactly.
travisp 13y ago
I suppose it's possible. Personally, very little has made me as happy as moving from a house to an apartment and never having to tend a garden or make housing repairs ever again.
qwertzlcoatl 13y ago
Depends on which modern day activities you are comparing those with.

sown 13y ago

> but the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, They may have needed the money but they sure didn't like it, at least here in the US. There was a large change of working for a wage, on a clock, compared to working on a farm or for a wage, and was a sizable violation of the Jeffersonian ideals of freedom. As to why people left, i dunno. There's probably a history research effort in it.

coldtea 13y ago

>but the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, despite working conditions we know to have been harsh That's extremely innacurate. Workers had to be MADE to work into factories by force, often by laws and regulations destroying their agricultural and traditional occupations to make them fodder for the industry. In a lot of cases, the industrilization was made at gun point (USSR is an example, but it also holds for a lot of the limited industriliazation in the third world). That is known (and has been documented) to have happened almost everywhere there was industrialization.

pandaman 13y ago
Do you have any citations about the USSR's industrialization at gun point? From what I know it was opposite - the peasants had been bound to their "kolhoz" (collective farm) and could not leave. It was implemented through internal passports[1], which were not issued to peasants. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolhoz#Kolkhoz_life_under_Stalin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolhoz#Kolkhoz_life_under_Stali...
- googleitdude 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_in_the_Soviet_Union http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_in_the_Soviet_Unio...
  - pandaman 13y ago
    This what I said, peasants were forced to work in agriculture. They were not forced to work in factories, quite the opposite, they had been prevented from working in factories or anywhere else.
    - smsm42 13y ago
      First of all, there was a big Gulag-supplied industry (google White Sea – Baltic Canal, also known as Belomorkanal, not to be confused with popular - in the USSR - brand of cigarettes). Second, even outside of Gulag, you couldn't just choose what you'd be doing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense) If you're not engaging in "socially productive" work, you're going to be relocated to unhospitable areas in the north or in Siberia.

engrenage 13y ago

Don't good engineers also 'make implements', and 'tend their own gardens' when their fieldwork is done?

notahacker 13y ago

There's no real need to speculate about the lives of medieval peasants when similar comparisons could probably be made with many parts of the developing world today, in villages where most people - earning just above subsistence - spend most of the time doing very little, even when there are obvious minor home improvements they could be undertaking given sufficient motivation. As there's nothing they know of that they can do to earn more income or improve their social status in their current environment, they do spend a large proportion of their time watching TV, or playing board games, or snoozing in the shade. The leisure time is real, but so is the lack of real earning opportunity and the certainty of dying - probably prematurely - as poor as the day they were born. And if all their kids survive to adulthood, there'll be even less work to do but perhaps not enough land or other means of earning sustenance to go around... The number of people willingly leaving those peaceful villages to work in appalling conditions for a couple of extra dollars a day in arguably futile pursuit of prosperity definitely outnumbers those moving in the opposite direction.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
It is not that bad, at least in China. Have you heard of Taobao villages [1]? Basically, e-commerce is reaching rural economies also. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2013-08/20/c_132646753.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2013-08/20/c_13264...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ekianjo 13y ago

You do not have to go back in time to find elements of answers. In China peasants live in very poor conditions far from the cities （and I can tell from experience that it is much harsher that what we can imagine before going there） and it is no surprise that they expect to get a better life working at Foxconn or other industries we like to call as sweatshops in the western media. That is the best real life example out there, and it is taking place much faster than in Europe at the time.

alexeisadeski3 13y ago

Not to mention that American adults work, on average, 25 hours per week: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-13/how-average-american-adult-spends-24-hours-each-day http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-13/how-average-america...

wwweston 13y ago

> a lot of what they spent their time on when they weren't doing fieldwork was still work, e.g. tending their own gardens, making implements and furniture, working on their houses. It's certainly true that by and large we benefit from an industrial economy where we hire out ourselves for specialized labor and hire others to do things for us. It'd be something of a challenge to be able to furnish a modern household with a full-complement of typical goods without anything pre-made, and since goods are a lot easier to come by, both in variety and cost, people can afford to be selective about what kinds of self-crafting they'd prefer to engage in (or none at all). On the other hand, tending your own garden, tooling around in the shop, making furniture, and working on home improvement projects are all activities apparently recreational enough that many seem to do them for fun even when it's easier to pop over to Ikea or otherwise hire it out. I hear some people even seem to like build their own software for fun. :) The labor you get to personally enjoy the fruits of -- that you can do to your own standards of need and satisfaction -- is a very different experience than work you're obligated to do as a cog in a institutional production arrangement. And until most people have the option to pick how many days / hours out of the year they'd like to work as an employee, I don't think it's a settled question that the conventional balance we've got right now is optimal or necessarily superior to all past arrangements.

Mordor 13y ago

Dude, where are your sources?