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usually “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure” by Juliet Schor who in turn got the number from an unpublished paper written by Gregory Clark in 1986.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).
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.
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.
I worked on a farm down in the Central valley in California about 15 years ago, and all the Hispanic people worked from 5:00 a.m. to noon and that was it. They were done for the day. And this is modern society!
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.
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.
I’ll concede that point. And I’d like to add that the modern clocks as we know them are also a very modern invention. Farmers in Medieval Europe certainly did not have a device in their homes which chimed the hour with regular and exact precision. The closest equivalent they would have had were clock towers, starting about the fourteenth century, funded by local merchants guilds. It was these same merchants who were in the habit of keeping a human skull in their offices as a memento mori, reminding them to make good use of their time, as each chime of the clock brought them one hour closer to death. There were no time clocks which a serf could use to punch in or out of work for the day, no payroll and accounting department in the employ of the local lord to keep track of all hours worked, etc. Time was not a grid against work could be measured because the work was the measure itself.
There is quite the difference between 150/365 and 300/365.
One is about 3/7 the other 6/7 and now look at today when most of us work 5/7 on a normal workweek.
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.
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.
He brings up capitalism out of the blue, for no reason whatsoever, in response to a post about serfdom. With a sarcastic “what a surprise.” Is he implying serfdom is preferable to capitalism?
Well, everybody knows capitalism rose out of feudalism in Europe. @ Cheesus briefly mentions it too.
The sarcasm is a response to the universal assumption that money and wages were always had universally. But @ TheChurn says very few were paid and those were rare.
Reminder: the soviets ran a state-capitalist system. That’s not very feudalist.
I think you’ve misunderstood her quite a bit. Happens a lot on here lol.
Actually, the collapse of capitalism as introduced by the Romans did a real number on the economies they left behind after the empire collapsed. Things quickly became a lot worse for almost everyone involved, as 80 to 90 percent of the population were farmers, and very few of those had the luxury of owning the land they worked on.
In Rome, being a soldier was a job you took up. In Medieval Europe, you were a soldier if you owned land, or you were a king. Most people didn’t own a square inch of anything, so there weren’t that many soldiers around, but that sure changed the way the economy worked. Lots of forced labour and essentially slavery going around through serfdom.
For a while, money lost its relevance, and it took up until quite late in the medieval period before most normal people could trade with money. Money drove the economy and everyone got richer real quick.
If anything, Medieval Europe is proof that capitalism is a lot better than the systems that preceded it. Feudalism sucked for everyone but the 1% much more than it sucks under capitalism, and neither socialism nor communism had been invented yet. So far communism has failed to prove itself anywhere on earth, so we’re back to capitalism as the best model we can come up with right now.
Source: your ass
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 midevil peasants. Which peasantry school did yall go to?
I weant to Peasantville, there’s a documentary on it if you’re interested
Peasantwarts School of Peasantcraft and Peasantry
Somewhere in Broward county to be sure.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs 2018
I worked on a farm down in the Central valley in California about 15 years ago, and all the Hispanic people worked from 5:00 a.m. to noon and that was it. They were done for the day. And this is modern society!
5 to 12 is still 7h, which is almost the usual 8h day but still a good thing
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.
And much more for some
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:
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.
I’ll concede that point. And I’d like to add that the modern clocks as we know them are also a very modern invention. Farmers in Medieval Europe certainly did not have a device in their homes which chimed the hour with regular and exact precision. The closest equivalent they would have had were clock towers, starting about the fourteenth century, funded by local merchants guilds. It was these same merchants who were in the habit of keeping a human skull in their offices as a memento mori, reminding them to make good use of their time, as each chime of the clock brought them one hour closer to death. There were no time clocks which a serf could use to punch in or out of work for the day, no payroll and accounting department in the employ of the local lord to keep track of all hours worked, etc. Time was not a grid against work could be measured because the work was the measure itself.
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:
And of course:
Hoping and praying that they had enough food to not starve to death.
There is quite the difference between 150/365 and 300/365.
One is about 3/7 the other 6/7 and now look at today when most of us work 5/7 on a normal workweek.
Idk man, somebody else having made a similar wild claim doesn’t mean that OP or the memes creator had a source at all.
“My source is that i made it the fuck up”
It’s from a famous paper. Linked by gnutrinto elsewhere in this thread,
Did someone say ass pennies?
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.
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.
What a surprise, capitalism is a relatively new system
Lol is this the tankie take on the above story? You think that sounds like some kind of paradise?
Can you elaborate on your assumptions and why he might assume it’s a paradise?
He brings up capitalism out of the blue, for no reason whatsoever, in response to a post about serfdom. With a sarcastic “what a surprise.” Is he implying serfdom is preferable to capitalism?
Not out of the blue. Just summarizing what the person above me said in a captain obvious way.
Also I’m a woman so she/her please.
Well, everybody knows capitalism rose out of feudalism in Europe. @ Cheesus briefly mentions it too.
The sarcasm is a response to the universal assumption that money and wages were always had universally. But @ TheChurn says very few were paid and those were rare.
Reminder: the soviets ran a state-capitalist system. That’s not very feudalist.
I think you’ve misunderstood her quite a bit. Happens a lot on here lol.
Thank you you worded it better than I could have.
Also “Her” if ya don’t mind. Am just a woman ~. I know it isn’t really relevant or important but pronoun preferences
Lmao on what planet am I a tankie
How else are you going to rile up discontent toward left ideology unless you’re constantly accusing people of being an extremist?
Actually, the collapse of capitalism as introduced by the Romans did a real number on the economies they left behind after the empire collapsed. Things quickly became a lot worse for almost everyone involved, as 80 to 90 percent of the population were farmers, and very few of those had the luxury of owning the land they worked on.
In Rome, being a soldier was a job you took up. In Medieval Europe, you were a soldier if you owned land, or you were a king. Most people didn’t own a square inch of anything, so there weren’t that many soldiers around, but that sure changed the way the economy worked. Lots of forced labour and essentially slavery going around through serfdom.
For a while, money lost its relevance, and it took up until quite late in the medieval period before most normal people could trade with money. Money drove the economy and everyone got richer real quick.
If anything, Medieval Europe is proof that capitalism is a lot better than the systems that preceded it. Feudalism sucked for everyone but the 1% much more than it sucks under capitalism, and neither socialism nor communism had been invented yet. So far communism has failed to prove itself anywhere on earth, so we’re back to capitalism as the best model we can come up with right now.
Yep. Farming is a bunch of “hurry up and wait”. Not that there wasn’t plenty of other work, but it only takes so long to feed the animals.