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cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/4071058
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Fewer.
i have altered the language, pray i do not alter it further.
Thank you Stannis
Go on, do your duty.
is this some Catholicism whitewashing? the church was party to exploitation of the peasants, fucking don’t aspire to be rich, they don’t get to heaven, but you peasants you will, trust me bro.
also they had time off because they needed to work on their own land so they don’t starve to death get a fucking grip.
*exploitation.
Ensuring everyone remained within their classes. Restricting access to knowledge. Making themselves arbiters of corporeal life and the access to the afterlife.
And also - 150 day’s work would have been for their Lord/landowner/whatever. There would have been plenty of time needed to work for oneself caring for any food/work animals, planting and harvesting one’s own food, maintaining the land, preparing any foods or goods for sale or trade.
So sure…you maybe only owed ~150 days, but the work didn’t stop there.
They didn’t have to work a set number of days in the year. It just didn’t work like that. You had two possibilities: you worked for wages, in this case it was daily wage, if you work that day, you get money for that day. And you had taxes or some kind of tributes, which was either a fix amount of something you owed to the lord, or a part of your production.
The 150 days of work probably comes from what the students did. Students studied with the clergy, and the clergy had a lot of days either without work or dedicated to prayers. Sunday was obviously free, that’s already 52 days in the year. All the special Christian days were obviously free. Carême probably also. And then many other days.
For farmers, there was this whole period of winter when you simply have nothing to do with the farm and the day only last 6h anyway. People still did stuff, but it wasn’t work, it was like you cooking for yourself. It wasn’t a society of consumerism, so they had to make most things they needed, and then some more for the other people of village, depending on their resources obviously.
I think you read a bit much into the 18th century propaganda that depicted the middle-ages as the dark ages of humanity when the church would keep people in ignorance. It didn’t work like that. It wasn’t an utopia either.
But it is a fact that people worked less before the industrial revolution.
Pretty sure the reason agriculture had the most jobs for much of history was cause everybody had to farm or starve
To be fair, a lot of those holidays involved spending 12 hours in church.
To be fair that was technically entertainment in a large warm building you can nod off in.
church service becomes a lot more tolerable when you remember that the church itself is part of the structure of the organ, it’s a bloody massive instrument that to this day remains extremely impressive to listen to.
The past was just so, so, so infinitely more boring that basically anything would be interesting by contrast, and a building-sized instrument combined with a highly trained choir, and presumably some food and drink along with just hanging out with people you otherwise don’t really meet? hell yeah sounds great.
Very true. Another weird fact is that up until ≈1700 huge monumental stone buildings weren’t really engineered they were designed by rules of thumb.
Greec and romans already knew maths and used them for their buildings. The knowledge still carried in the middle ages. Those trebuchets weren’t made at random. But yes, the knowledge was then made into rules of thumbs, as it is still nowadays.
To some extent yes but masonry specifically was held in secrecy and monuments were indeed built on rules of thumb which are still used today as well just not as heavily.
Essentially great great great great grandmaster mason Gary Gregg Gregor did the math back in 500ad so I don’t have to do it today I just have to follow the rule of thumb he left. Which would be like every 50ft in height you build you need to add 6" in wall thickness at the base, so on so forth.
Back then churches were places where people gathered to be social and even did business there.
This thread from that other website which shall not be named goes into some detail:
Noble_Devil_Boruta • 3 yr. ago Any direct comparison between the labour of medieval peasants or craftsmen and modern workers is largely not possible due to the completely different character of these two types of labour organization. Please note that today, in developed countries, whether capitalist, communist or adopting a different form of economic principles, the most common way of working is a wage labour based on an employment contract and strict division between the performance of labour and ownership of means of production. In other words, most people work by performing specific tasks for the persons (physical or legal) who own the means of production used to generate value and then receive a remuneration for the work done, usually in form of money they can spend freely. Such organization of labour, completely obvious to modern people, was something highly unusual in Middle Ages though.
Modern organization of labour is largely shaped by the industrialization that separated the work from its results, at least from the perspective of the workers involved. In an industrial setting, workers were obliged to work their shift, i.e. an artificially set amount of time, producing goods that were a property of the factory owner. Thus, there was no ‘start’ and ‘end’ of the work that theoretically could have been conducted all year round, without pause, if the shifts were organized so and demand for the product warranted such supply intensity.
Now, this is a far cry from how the labour looked like in the Middle Ages. In opposition to the workers in the industrial and post-industrial settings, most peasants and craftsmen were essentially sole traders, who were utilizing their assets that were either owned (especially in case of urban craftsmen) or loaned (usually in the case of peasants) to generate wealth for themselves and were only obliged to pay taxes determined by the local authority. It should be noted however, that the ‘taxes’ might have not necessarily been the part of produce or a specific sum of money, but also various services, such as forest clearing, transportation of goods or fortification maintenance.
It is sometimes said that in the Middle Ages (and in early Modern period), holidays could have amounted up to a third of the year. This is true, but it does not differ that much from the situation most modern workers from developed or developing countries are in. They usually work a standard 40-45 hours per week, meaning 8-9 hours of work on each of the five days, and the free Saturdays and Sundays alone contribute to 104 free days. In Europe, most countries have roughly 8 national or religious holidays each year with 20-25 days of paid vacation on top of it, bringing the average number of free days to 135 or 37% of all the days in a year. Sure, some countries have e.g. less leave holidays or vacation days, but it still gives us one-third of the year being free from work.
Now, the principal work of the medieval peasants was usually more complex than it is sometimes presented, as it is not uncommon to assume that peasants were only farmers and their fields were unicultural (i.e. only one type of crops were grown there). This is not really correct. Agricultural production almost everywhere in Europe was localized, meaning that all products local people needed and that could have been obtained in a given place, were produced locally, requiring farmers to grow various crops simultaneously. As the medieval farmers were using crop rotation techniques, usually two-field system known in the Early Middle Ages or three-field system introduced in the times of Charlemagne and popularized across Europe only in the High Middle Ages (four-field system was introduced in 18th century), they were sowing and harvesting twice a year at a minimum. In reality there were much more crops with a different vegetation times, with winter cereals, spring cereals, lentils, rape, flax and hemp being the most common. Agricultural work was not limited to field work though, as virtually every homestead had a vegetable garden where every family was growing various plants for their own use (various tubers, herbs, root vegetables, cabbage, cucumbers etc.) that required occasional tending.
Second, in most homesteads peasants were keeping at least some animals. Hens were ubiquitous as they were low-maintenance, relatively cheap, could reproduce rather easily and acted as an important source of protein (eggs and meat). Cows, sheep and sometimes goats were a source of dairy products. Pigs were raised for meat and leather. Horses and oxen were, of course, ubiquitous working animals. All these animals had to be tended to daily and feeding, mucking, brushing, milking, collecting eggs and related activities were an important part of a daily routine for most peasants. Larger herds had to be led to a pasture, guarded and then brought back making this was an all-day job, quite often delegated to younger people in case of smaller animals. Just to put the amount of work in perspective, an average modern cow requires about 60 litres of water per day, so taking into account the projected differences in size of the medieval farm animals might have meant 30-40 litres per animal that had to be provided in the days when the animals were not grazing. Hauling such amount of water from a nearby source (usually river or stream, as wells would have quickly run dry) might have taken a dozen of trips every day.
Third, as I wrote above, the villages were largely self-reliant, especially in the Early Middle Ages, what means that everything had to be produced by peasants themselves and this includes their very literal daily bread. But even such staple food as bread or oatmeal required preparation from scratch and firing up the primitive stove was in itself a long task given the technology available, so preparation of a decent meal for the entire family could have taken a significant part of a day. On a rare occasion, when the animal was slaughtered, meat and leather had to immediately processed to avoid spoiling - cutting, mincing, sausage-making and smoking could have taken days, depending on the number of people involved. Thus, preparation of food for the entire family could have been construed as a full-time job for a single person, what have not really changed until the introduction of refrigerators, gas and electric stoves and various modern kitchen appliances, what in some rural areas could mean times as close as second half of 20th century.
Of course, food was not the only thing that was made by peasants, who also had to create their agricultural tools used for all the work in the fields and around the house, such as rakes, flails, plows, carts or wheelbarrows. The same can be said of simple containers and utensils, from baskets to spoons to troughs. Carving the wooden tools, forming and firing clay bowls and jars, basket weaving, candles casting - all of these also consumed a lot of time. Clothing was often made locally, what required preparation of materials, and fulling, breaking, carding, spinning, weaving and finally cutting and sewing new garments were a tedious activities usually done in the long evenings, as they were primarily indoor work. With the development of the economic networks and increased amount of money in circulation, more and more goods were simply bought for the money received from the sale of the surplus agricultural or consumer goods, but as far the Middle Ages.
Fourth, some of the comestibles and important resources (wood, mostly) had to be collected in the nearby area. Looking for kindling, wood (usually deadwood, as chopping trees in a forest usually required lord’s permission), berries, honey, and mushrooms was a common activity in season and more often than not was also treated as a pastime and an occasion to move away from the homestead. The diet was also enriched by fish if the river or lake was located nearby and in most areas peasants were able to hunt wild birds in the fields (hunting game was generally a lord’s privilege). Fishing and hunting were also time-consuming activities.
Fifth, peasants were commonly required to do some work on their lord’s behalf. These could include anything related to the maintenance and creation of the local infrastructure - forest clearing, road maintenance, transport etc. It should be remembered that with the transportation limited to the carts drawn by horses or oxen, a seemingly simple work such as moving lumber from the forest to a sawmill or a nearby construction site could have taken weeks, due to low speed and capacity of the vehicles, not to mention that loading the cargo had to be done entirely by hand.
I remember reading about a self-sustaining village in the remote woods of Maine. They had to do everything. Even something as simple as clothing required that they plant flax, harvest it, process it (a laborious process), make it into thread, weave it, shape and sew it, etc. Due to their remoteness they may have had to make their own looms and tools too. Life back then was 24/7 hard labor.
Just watch Primitive Technology on Youtube, holy shit does it take alot of work just to get basic things like wood, charcoal, rope, or just to build a hut. Just getting enough iron to make a small knife must’ve taken weeks of work, assuming you even knew how to do all that shit.
Yes. It is an eye opener when you realize how much it takes just to do a simple task from scratch. It is no wonder survival back then really required a large family or tribe with everyone depending on everyone else. Most places don’t have access to iron ore so someone would have to travel to trade it or you just stuck to stone tools. If you are lucky you might live in an area with copper nuggets that only require shaping.
Years ago there was a PBS show out of NC called “The Woodwright’s Shop”. I’d watch it out of fascination because his thing was to do carpentry using only the hand tools of the 1800s. It was something watching him use an adze and planers to laboriously shape a log or hand drill everything. I used to joke that it was only a matter of time before he dug up his own iron ore and made his own hand tools.
Most places don’t have access to iron ore so someone would have to travel to trade it or you just stuck to stone tools.
They used Bog iron. Iron ore is more of a late medieval thing.
There was some specialisation of tasks. The making of the bread especially for example. There would be a mill with a family responsible for it. There would be one or more bakers to make the bread. They made it for everyone in the village. It would be highly inefficient to have each house do it for itself, and the oven or mill were complex and expensive things. Likewise, there were people to make the iron tools and the horseshoes. There probably were specialized people for leather work, woodwork and woodcarving, stonework, masonry, etc. Brewery and wine making and other stuff like that were certainly also mutualised.
It wasn’t necessarily a full time job, but it was not something anyone could do when someone knew the job well and had enough time to do it for everyone.
Some of these tasks are still done this way where my parents live: in the area, my father know some people, so they help eachother to gather the wood, they know someone with a tractor to carry the wood home, and then with the machine to chop the wood in smaller pieces. They share expensive, specialized tools too, like tile cutter or that kind of stuff.
That sounds too good to be true. Any sources for this?
This is pretty much debunked, I think the original source for this claim was that they only worked 150 days per year in the service of their lord, but they worked the rest of the time to feed themselves.
Any links to the debunking?
That makes some claims but doesn’t really back it up.
That said, it sounds more reasonable. Cows gotta be milked. You don’t get vacation from that.
They didn’t have days of work for their lord. It just didn’t work like that.
Students worked this number of days because they were thought by monks.
Trust me bro.
This is a myth.
I also don’t toil in a field for ten hours a day, I sit in my pants at my desk working from home 7 hours a day and get weekends off. I’ll accept I only get 40 days a year holiday all things considered.
Added to this, you have a car, place of your own, eat good food and not dirt, have more than one pair of clothes, own a phone, have healthcare, etc. Also I call bullshit on the whole 150 days number. If you know any farmer you’d be calling it too. There are no vacations when you are a farmer.
Why would you accept that? Are humans only a value when they’re grinding themselves down to nothing? We got the keys to do more with less and then convinced each other we shouldn’t be allowed all the free time science has dug up for us.
It’s like shredding your tax refunds.
I don’t feel my job is a grind at all. I do it for 35 hours a week, maybe a fourth of my week. I have reasonable targets, a manager who’s open to listen to my issues, and when I had a mental health issue due to an undiagnosed condition was given several paid weeks off to deal with it.
You’re an exception
Not really, I have the same deal as any other council worker in the UK as it’s a collectively agreed deal. Millions of people across the country have the same conditions.
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Who’s we? Between weekends, holidays, and vacations I only work about half of the year too, and I’m not an exception where I live.
You medieval peasant, lol.
But to OP, before the industrial revolution, there wasn’t that much work to do in winter, so humans also had a kind of hibernation.
Of course animals were still fed and things like repairing a fence or shed would be done, but those weren’t really seen as full work days.
More than that, there just wasn’t much light to do anything meaningful through the winter. All they had were tallow candles, and they emit very little light - enough to do simple tasks, but not any real work. Even preparing and cooking a proper meal would be difficult after dark.
This is incidentally why there is a disparity in when “dinner” should be for different people. Traditionally, dinner (or the main meal of the day) was had at lunch time, because this was the time of day where you could consistently have enough light to make a big meal. The evening meal was more of a light snack. Then, with the advent of gas and then electric lighting, wealthier people started having dinner parties, where they would have big meals in the evening. Thus, for them dinner became the evening meal, while in other places dinner always was and still is lunch.
I don’t think there is more work to be done today than during medieval times. And if there is then roll back industrialization because what’s the point of machines if they create more work.
Disagree on that.
I quite like the products of industrialization.
My machine woven wardrobe, mechanized transportation, temperature controlled dwelling, refrigerator and the internet - not willing to give those up.
Climate change due to industrial emissions and impending ecological collapse leading to food shortages and starvation of most humans?
Disagree on what? That medieval peasants had more work than we do today?
They didn’t. We merely changed the work we do. Before, 90% of the population was working to make food. Now it’s 3%.
Higher quality of life. We live longer, healthier, more productive, more interconnected lives, even if we do the same amount of work.
Today’s problems are not the machines but the capitalists that want their income to grow further, so their order their slaves to work more.
That’s what I think as well
Back then peasant revolts was a thing…
I am revolting
Yes, but we love you anyways.
I’m very ugly too.
Have you tried wallowing I hear it’s the next trend
Assuming you only worked week days (definitely not a given), you’d work about 260 says in a year in our modern times (assuming you’re American; give or take overtime and/or holidays. Europeans might only work 150 days still). So we’ve almost doubled the amount of days that we work per year compared to medieval peasants. Though in some places I think they had dedicated workdays specifically for the landowner or nobility of their region, and/or you might owe so much of your harvest to them
It was actually quite a complicated system that varied by region and time. There’s a book Fief: A Look at Medieval Society from its Lower Rungs that goes into alot of detail about daily life for medieval peasants, incredibly interesting read (if you’re into that sort of thing).
Did the peasants get paid? If so, how much of a living wage?
They didn’t get paid, most people were subsistence farmers meaning they supported themselves through their own farming. Under feudalism they didn’t own their land, they technically rented it from the liege. To pay their rent they were obligated to work on the liege’s land part of the time. These church “holidays” (generally saint’s days) were just days they weren’t obligated to work on the liege’s land. This by no means meant they had that time off. They still had to work on their own land and do all of the endless chores life back then entailed such as making and repairing cloth, building and repairing buildings, animal care and slaughter, preserving food, etc, etc. It was 24/7. If you got injured you couldn’t just sit and recover for long because the family depended on everyone’s labor. There were constant peasant rebellions too which indicate that life among them wasn’t a casual, happy one.
They made some money on the side, mainly from selling any excess they were able to produce from their own land. Many of the famous national dishes of Europe are peasant dishes from having to make the less desirable meats more palatable while the best cuts were sold to the wealthy for hard currency. The possibility of starvation in years of bad crops was always a possibility.
It varied wildly, but a good portion probably didn’t truly “own” their land, so the workdays they owed to the landowner were most likely their debt for the “privilege” of being able to live and work the land the rest of the time. In some instances though I imagine they were probably paid for harvests, then owed a certain amount of that to the landowner. Everything was pretty much local, so they would’ve had weekly markets where they traded whatever excess stuff they had for coin.
Given all the extra work they had to do for just regular things we don’t even think about, it’s hard to even compare peasant workdays to modern workdays. Yes, we spend more time in our workplaces, but we also don’t spend additional hours of manual labor on hunting, scavenging, collecting, or cutting down wood for having to cook our food or heat our homes. It’s kind of hard to compare the two lifestyles.
Not even, peasants were provided free food several times per shift, and worked for only half of the year. The church only started defending Sundays as a holiday when capitalism blew into town. For us to match medieval peasants, we would need all weekends, all public holidays, and 3.5 months of PTO
And also be literally unable to leave where we’re born, have no rights to self-governance, be poor as fuck and eat mostly vegetable soup, and, oh I’d be dead, because there’s no medicine
We lived in a vastly better world than peasants did, and that world requires a lot of people working in concert to maintain.
While modernity brought many good things, people weren’t all serfs in the middle ages.
I also must remind you that many people in your country are living a miserable life, barely managing to buy food, and most people don’t own their house. Self governance is a thing only the bourgeois talk about because they were wealthy enough to be jealous of the privileges of the nobility. They merely changed the system so that money provides privileges rather than blood, but it’s not much more just than it was before.
It’s absurd to compare even the poorest Americans (or any non-developing nation) with Middle ages peasants.
The standard of living by comparison is immeasurable. The poorest person in a developed nation today enjoys a standard of living higher than most royalty throughout the ME.
The ostentatious palaces and shit were largely a product of the Renaissance era. Most ME lords lived in what is effectively a single room stone building and drank water contaminated with their own feces.
I understand that things can, and should, improve further but this is well beyond a reach.
You’re mistakening were the progress were made. The end of famines started with the industrial revolution. The increase in life expectancy went from taking care of child deaths and antibiotics for the biggest part. Vaccines come right after those. And war is probably next. All of these are why the population was multiplied by 10 between 1940 and now.
But that doesn’t make the life of everyone a paradise. There are homeless people in your country, and those are no better now than before. Depending on where you live, you don’t necessarily get to be cured in a hospital because liberalism thought good to forbid free healthcare. When you’re poor, you only have access to bad food, if you’re not too poor.
I don’t idealize the past. But I don’t demonize it either only to be able to idealize our present.
It’s not idealizing anything to recognize that standard of living for poor people in developed countries (and, by this standard of measurement, developing nations as well) is massively improved over even 40 years ago, much less 400. That’s just accepting reality.
Not even touching the “liberalism means health care is expensive” argument, because that’s just fucking silly. Healthcare is unduly expensive in exactly 1 developed nation. That’s on those people, not liberalism.
It does not, however, require us to work for 40 hours per week. We work way too much.
That very much depends on your job.
There is not a single person that has to work for 2080 hours in a year.
That’s just incorrect
Seems to work fine for practically all of europe where we have mandatory paid time off. And some countries like france with standard work weeks less than 40 hours.
In a perfectly equal system with perfect division of labor efforts, we could most likely keep our standards of living and all work less than 2000 hours per year. As it is that’s not the case and we’re practically reliant on worker exploitation in asia, africa and south america to maintain said standard where I’m assuming a lot of people work more. But that’s not inherently because of their job, it’s because their employer isn’t willing to pay them more and hire more people to lessen individual workload.
I literally work for a global company and our EU teams definitely put in more than 40 hrs per week, exempt.
we’re practically reliant on worker exploitation in asia, africa and south america to maintain said standard where I’m assuming a lot of people work more
It’s not exploitation for comparative advantage to benefit both parties
Might as well share this YouTube video.
Beat me to it. It’s worth watching. Goes into a lot more nuance and context than a meme image
It’s progress: we are still slaves but they found a way to squeeze us more AND make us think we are free
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