But we are living longer now. 35 years old is basically dead.
The babies died making average age less. Doesn’t mean those who got to adulthood lived to that age only.
Yeah. If you made it past 10 or so you’d probably live to at least 50, with 60-70 not being common but also far from rare. All those dying kids and babies really bring down the average.
Let’s not get too crazy. There’s a 15 year period where young men tend to get injured and young women tend to give birth that acts as a major filter. If you plotted death rates on a graph it would look like a trident – that’s life without antibiotics.
It’s certainly true that elderly were not a rare sight, but those elderly who could be found were almost universally hardy of constitution or talented at avoiding danger. Quite literally the end of the bell curve.
Why do people invent random bullshit to support a bad point?
yes, 150 days, for the lord, how many days on your own property so you didn’t starve to death?
they fucking worked all days except Sunday morning to evening, stop romanticizing feudalism ya cunts.
and the church was part of the exploitation od the masses, promising afterlife dor the peasants but not for the rich “insert the bible quote here”
fuck feudalism and fuck the church
Lol, that’s total bullshit. Medieval peasants didn’t work more than people today. And pre-medieval societies worked even less.
“One of capitalism’s most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit – but rarely articulated – assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.”
“These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.”
Here’s the good stuff:
Eight centuries of annual hours 13th century - Adult male peasant, U.K.: 1620 hours Calculated from Gregory Clark’s estimate of 150 days per family, assumes 12 hours per day, 135 days per year for adult male (“Impatience, Poverty, and Open Field Agriculture”, mimeo, 1986)
14th century - Casual laborer, U.K.: 1440 hours
Calculated from Nora Ritchie’s estimate of 120 days per year. Assumes 12-hour day. (“Labour conditions in Essex in the reign of Richard II”, in E.M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History, vol. II, London: Edward Arnold, 1962).
Middle ages - English worker: 2309 hours
Juliet Schor’s estime of average medieval laborer working two-thirds of the year at 9.5 hours per day
1400-1600 - Farmer-miner, adult male, U.K.: 1980 hours
Calculated from Ian Blanchard’s estimate of 180 days per year. Assumes 11-hour day (“Labour productivity and work psychology in the English mining industry, 1400-1600”, Economic History Review 31, 23 (1978).
1840 - Average worker, U.K.: 3105-3588 hours
Based on 69-hour week; hours from W.S. Woytinsky, “Hours of labor,” in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. III (New York: Macmillan, 1935). Low estimate assumes 45 week year, high one assumes 52 week year
1850 - Average worker, U.S.: 3150-3650 hours
Based on 70-hour week; hours from Joseph Zeisel, “The workweek in American industry, 1850-1956”, Monthly Labor Review 81, 23-29 (1958). Low estimate assumes 45 week year, high one assumes 52 week year
1987 - Average worker, U.S.: 1949 hours
From The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, by Juliet B. Schor, Table 2.4
1988 - Manufacturing workers, U.K.: 1856 hours
Calculated from Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Office of Productivity and Technology
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
I should add that I grew up on a farm in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. We “worked” on the farm of two 10 or 12 hours a day, but the majority of that time was spent not slaving away doing actual work, but moving things around. Driving tractors, animal husbandry, cleaning out barns, transporting feed or harvested crops, or the main labor intensive activities.
Additionally, we spent time doing planning and accounting, as well as ordering products and services that the form required. However, compared to working on a factory floor or in an office job the work was far lower in intensity and did not have the type of oversight that modern office labor incurs.
The other thing is that during the winter, from roughly October through February basically no work happens. Nothing grows, so the only thing you need to do is to feed your animals and keep them clean. That’s it. It’s like a 4-month vacation, although it still requires some upkeep the workload is a fraction of what you do during the rest of the year. Maybe 1 to 2 hours a day.
There’s also the fact that, before the advent of gas and then electric lighting, you really couldn’t see shit after dark. Tallow candles allow you to see where you’re going, but they don’t give off enough light to allow you to do much real work. Thus, throughout the winter there were simply fewer hours in which to do most things.
This is also likely why “dinner” was traditionally at lunchtime, and was also the main meal of the day. This was the time of day when you would most reliably have enough light to prepare a large meal. Then, when artificial lighting became a thing, upper class types started having “dinner parties” late in the evening, and for many dinner became the evening meal. It did not spread everywhere, though, in particular the north of the UK generally still thinks of dinner as lunchtime.
Yeah where the hell do those figures come from. They worked around the clock.
Yeah nah they didn’t sleep on Sundays, there were stuff to be done on those days too.
Yeah “only worked 150 days” glosses over how much work daily life was. If you were lucky you lived with pigs and cows and their shit in your thatch hut and it didn’t cave in during the winter leaving you for dead, maybe you survived through your thirties without dying of lung disease, because you’d constantly have fires going in the hut. You’d have to wash clothes in the river even during the winters and hang them up to dry in the smoke of your hut.
On the plus size in good times, and ironically, you could have a healthier diet than the lord. It wasn’t like being a lord was a worry-free place to be either, despite all the luxuries they could afford. Christmas was basically 2 months in the winter and festival season could be full of pleasure if you were well situated. “Peasant” encompasses a wide variety of economic arrangements and many of them could live comfortably, relatively speaking. There was no one single “feudalism” and it’s debatable whether the term is useful to sum up the period.
Arguments like these are also uncomfortably similar to the arguments slave owners would use to justify slavery. “Look, I take good care of them, feed them, give them clothes, and even built them their own shack next to my plantation house! That means I’m totally not exploiting the people I believe are my property!”
Posts in favour of employee rights.
Must support communist dictatorships!
There have obviously been tons of other improvements, but paid leave is not one of them. That’s the only point of this post, but instead of just accepting it, you have to turn it into some narrative about the Communist Manifesto. It’s just a meme about not getting vacation days.
Source: your ass
The church wasnt why peasants worked less. They worked less because there wasn’t that much work to be done. During the slow season, there just isn’t enough work to justify paying a peasant to work.
paying a peasant to work
Peasants (serfs) were not paid. They were bound to the land they worked, and were given a fraction of the harvest they produced. The rest was property of the Lord who’s title controlled the land.
There was a (very small) artisan class where the concept of payment existed, though often it was payment-in-kind - smith the plow for my oxen and I’ll give you some food after the harvest. Money was rarely encountered for the vast majority of people.
You’re right they were not paid money, but they arguably were provided more goods for their services starting in the 15th century. In western Europe.
Eastern and Western Europe behaved very differently when it came to serfdom. Serfdom, as you described it, began to decline starting in western Europe in the 15th century and was pretty much gone by the 17th century. Meanwhile Eastern Europe started a rise in serfdom as you described it in the 16th century.
Serfs started to get better conditions thanks to the bubonic plague and increasing workers power over lords. In western Europe they were paid a higher share of the crop as a result. They still had a bad life overall, but it got ever so slightly better.
The whole notion that they had 150 days off isn’t even necessarily accurate either because record keeping is so bad from those eras on time worked. It’s not enough data to provide an accurate assessment of working hours.
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.
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.
What is a peasant farmer doing during the winter when nothing is growing?
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.
It’s from a famous paper. Linked by gnutrinto elsewhere in this thread,
