I mean, the actual source for this statistic is usually “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure” by Juliet Schor who in turn got the number from an unpublished paper written by Gregory Clark in 1986. Clark did eventually publish a paper in 2018 where he increased his estimate to 250-300 days (which may still be less than some modern workers work).
And also: this was before the 8h day. People worked until they were done which was sometimes much more but on average less
Farming peasants worked pretty much from sunrise to sunset, sometimes even longer. If you count the number of hours the average medieval peasant worked in a year, it was probably a lot more than we do now.
You guys know a lot about medieval peasants. Which peasantry school did yall go to?
Feudal lords, insofar as they worked at all, were fighters—their lives tended to alternate between dramatic feats of arms and near-total idleness and torpor. Peasants and servants obviously were expected to work more steadily. But even so, their work schedule was nothing remotely as regular or disciplined as the current nine-to-five—the typical medieval serf, male or female, probably worked from dawn to dusk for twenty to thirty days out of any year, but just a few hours a day otherwise, and on feast days, not at all. And feast days were not infrequent.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs 2018
261 days is working every single week 5 days a week.
Most modern “middle class” jobs (which, to be fair, are increasingly scarce) don’t work 52 weeks a year with 0 holidays.
Peasants worked sunup til sundown 250-300 days a year.
Life fucking blew as a peasant.
Yes, but let’s do a breakdown of the average day in the life of a Medieval European peasant. Let’s assume it’s a standard 8hr day for a male serf aged 15-20 years.
Sun comes up, start the day with perhaps a half hour for breakfast, another half hour for prayer, depending on the day, then it’s out to the fields for 3-4 hours work, which was dependent on the particular produce of the farm where he worked and the season. Livestock tended to, fields plowed, that sort of thing. Then an hour for evening prayer and supper, perhaps some beer with the lads at the tavern before sun down.
Another thing you’re forgetting is that we measure time completely differently than they did in Medieval Europe. I’ll let David Graeber, of “Bullshit Jobs” explain:
Human beings have long been acquainted with the notion of absolute, or sidereal, time by observing the heavens, where celestial events happen with exact and predictable regularity. But the skies are typically treated as the domain of perfection. Priests or monks might organize their lives around celestial time, but life on earth was typically assumed to be messier. Below the heavens, there is no absolute yardstick to apply. To give an obvious example: if there are twelve hours from dawn to dusk, there’s little point saying a place is three hours’ walk away when you don’t know the season when someone is traveling, since winter hours will be half the length of summer ones. When I lived in Madagascar, I found that rural people—who had little use for clocks—still often described distance the old-fashioned way and said that to walk to another village would take two cookings of a pot of rice. In medieval Europe, people spoke similarly of something as taking “three paternosters,” or two boilings of an egg. This sort of thing is extremely common. In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.
The 8 hour workday is a very modern invention.
Farmers have always worked 12+ hour days, starting before dawn to feed animals and ending their days with the sun going down, serfs we’re no different. Once they were done with farm labor at sundown they worked at home on anything that needed mending for the next day, ate boiled veggies and then went to bed.
Farming is a way of life where you dance a razor’s edge. You don’t have the luxury of time not working.
What is a peasant farmer doing during the winter when nothing is growing?
Depends on the area but they were constantly busy. Warm seasons were 7 days a week sunup til sundown.
For the cold seasons:
- Wheat and barely were sown in the winter so that when spring showed up the crops sprouted and grew quickly
- Logging/forestry work as well as trapping
- Mending of tools, spinning of wool/flax into usable fabrics
- Weaving baskets/clothes etc
- Processing of slaughtered game into foodstuffs
- Processing & protection of food stores
- Repairs to your house
- Ice fishing to augment stores of food
- Building and fixing fences
- Distilling and pickling foods
- Generally anything that improves your chance of survival
And of course:
Hoping and praying that they had enough food to not starve to death.
Well 250 days a year is a five day work week for 50 weeks. So that’s pretty much the same thing we do today.
