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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
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!”
‘I allow them to just exist between whipping and beating them, isn’t that enough?!’
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.
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.
I think the number is a realistic estimate for serfdom, as farming is largely seasonal. However, harvests could mean 2 weeks with 16 hours of work per day for everyone including children.
Where do your figures come from?
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.
Calls bullshit, facilitates worse bullshit. Classic. I guess I imagined all the hard WORK it took to maintain a home. Remember, if you’re not being paid for it, it doesn’t count as labor. Fucking hell
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).
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.
The 8 hour workday is a very modern invention.
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:
- 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.
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?
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.
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
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
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?
about to make comment - checks sub-lemmy
Phew I almost said something serious on a silly sub.
They had to do hard labour in the fields, I make pretty pictures in a comfy chair
Too bad there hasn’t been a massive increase in productivity since then to be able to have both.
With weekends, public holidays and vacation days I work 220 days a year and with 8 hours a day that’s probably not far off the total hours of the 150 work day medieval peasant
Most medieval peasantry worked about 20–25 hours a week, usually with no regulation of any kind on taking your own breaks, chatting with your friends, and drinking on the job. Only very poor serfs with atypically cruel lords dealt with restrictions that were so invasive. People typically rose with the sun and stopped working shortly after midday to work on their own projects and go about their own business, and peasants on the sunny side of the mean had good reason to be satisfied with their quality of life. The work was often very hard work, and the disadvantages included both poverty and lack of civil liberties and both of them to degrees that are unthinkable by modern standards, but we’re just gonna have to take the L when it comes to the amount of time spent working. They really did have it better in that regard.
This basically backs up what I have read on the subject. I feel like the disconnect comes from what we categorize as “work” often not counting stuff like making stuff for yourself and your own home, lessons, tasks you could do keeping your hands busy while you socialized or talked, housework and so on. Depending on time and place (mostly pre-enclosure) the time and production one owed their lord was relatively low in most places and did come with minor kickbacks. The church did keep a lot of proper holidays and Sunday as a sabbath was observed but again in a society that doesn’t really have things like regular sit and watch style entertainments a lot of the things you did on your days off did produce something.
There’s also a lot of times of year where one’s work in regards to food production was relatively easy and others that required a lot of physical push. The lack of regular steady illumination after dark due to scarcity of material for rushlights and candles did mean more technical downtime but the trade off is there being less options of entertainments one could do in the dark.
Also the amount of incredibly litigious peasants in England was some evidence that in places there were some protection and recourse for lordly overreach. Peasants had surprising rates of literacy in some places but they really didn’t use it to read or write for entertainment. They used to to fight for access to stuff.
It’s kind of a difficult task to have discussions about how much work a society in time regularly does because of the unstated assumptions everyone has. We are all primed to veiw our modern lives as more convenient where we live better because of all the things we are not on the hook making ourselves which lends to our current hyper specialization… But with that hyper specialization comes an odd stagnation. The way we work with sharp delinineations between what counts as “work appropriate” behaviour and social ones is fairly mentally taxing and not what our ancestors did. The amount of formal interpersonal communication required by our tasks is higher. The diversity of tasks we do regularly is less. The people we are expected to impress regularly with high outputs and not just meeting a fairly low bar quota are relatively new. The amount of time we work is inflexible to the amount of energy we have during different seasons with expectations being that we operate at a steady efficiency over the course of the year. The idea that the amount of hours per day one works is fixed regardless of what actually needs doing before we have free time is different. The amount of time we can do tasks after dark has altered how we as a society operate. Work has changed to be utterly unrecognizable between the eras. There’s definitely some bonuses like to stability of food supply and efficiency of output but there’s a lot we do now that really works against our own needs as creatures so it’s really difficult to compare what counts as “work” and what doesn’t.
This is such a load of horse shit.
It’s not about the amount of horse shit, it’s about haw fast can you load it on the cart.
Once done, there is no more horse shit to load for the day. And if Timmy out there doesn’t feel like loading his half of the horse shit one day, you were allowed to punch some sense into that thick skull of his.
You don’t know what you’re talking about
Yeah, but I have double their life span.
Not so much for the men who actually worked:
From Wikipedia: While modern life expectancies are much higher than those in the Middle Ages and earlier,[244] adults in the Middle Ages did not die in their 30s or 40s on average. That was the life expectancy at birth, which was skewed by high infant and adolescent mortality. The life expectancy among adults was much higher;[245] a 21-year-old man in medieval England, for example, could expect to live to the age of 64.[246][245]
You don’t know that he wont live to 128.
I already lost all will to live at 30, I can’t imagine living to 100, sorry guys but I’m gonna bring the average down
To all people asking for source and saying bullshit : it takes 1 second to find results on Google showing that it’s in factnot bullshit
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-great-debate-idUKBRE97S0KU20130829
You only worked for a LORD for 150 days of the year.
You still had to provide for yourself from scratch outside of that. Work today may be shit, but it wasn’t that shit.
Also, there was 3-4 months where nothing grew.
So it was normal to work everyday, all-day, for long stretches, and then do little in the winter other than try and stay warm.
Winter was still spent productively. Hunting/trapping/fishing/livestock all need handling. Farm land needs preparing, wood needs to get chopped. It was also a time to create & repair tools and housing or work on side hustles such as processing raw materials in a low level artisanal way ( e.g. weaving / fabric spinning ).
Yes, very true. And let’s not forget that child rearing and elder care also had to be provided by the family, which usually all lived under one roof. Public schools are a relatively recent development too, during the Middle Ages schools only provided education in Latin for people to become clergy (hence the term grammar school.
The notion that we have it worse than Medieval peasants is absolutely ridiculous.
*try TO stay warm.
I really want to blow up the planet because “try AND” got normalized in written form. Try WHAT and?..
Well, I really want to try AND blow up the planet because…
“we regularly demand of people that they suppress or deny the most effective way they have of situating themselves socially in the world”—their language (Lippi-Green 2011, p. 63). Institutional function often depends on a particular set of beliefs about how language, especially the standard language, works. Lippi-Green and others refer to this set of beliefs as the standard language ideology, defined as “a bias toward an abstracted, idealized, homogeneous spoken language which is imposed and maintained by dominant bloc institutions and which names as its model the written language, but which is drawn primarily from the spoken language of the upper middle class” (Lippi-Green 2011, p. 64; see also Agha 2007).
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011718-011659
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Half your labour value being taken by your employer for their own benefit? I wouldn’t rush to say they take less now - that’ll vary by role, but I know that last time I had a billable rate, it was ~7x my salary - the rough equivalent of working 319 days for my lords.
Back then, you worked for the state essentially for free.
You were also not working 8 hour days, you were working basically from sun up to down, you also had to work if you were sick unless you were so sick that you were bedridden.
And remember how I said that you basically had to work outside of that? That means you had to run shops, grow and maintain your own food, etc.
What I’m getting at is that this was not work that provided living for you, you still had to pay taxes after this as well. This applied to basically everyone except for nobles.
That’s very much not true. Workdays would typically last around 6 hours, not including multiple breaks during the day. Also, your employer would usually provide the food for lunch, and it was acceptable to have a nap in the afternoon.
In winter, even shorter days were common to account for the reduction in daylight. If you were ill, you’d simply not show up and not get paid. In fact it was normal for people to only work for what they needed in the immediate future and stop showing up as soon as they had enough for the week
So… u r telling me that I have to defend YOUR argument ?
Wow…
*fewer holidays
Ben Le Man?
More like Stannis Le Mannis
I fucking swear I see this mistake every single day these days. Does no one know the difference between less and fewer anymore?!?
Same bastards who say “try and…”
There’s a growing amount of people (sic) who are unaware of the difference between countable and uncountable nouns. Just watch any YouTube video that happens to involve quantities of any kind. “Amount” has become the standard term. And it’s similar with “less”.
Isn’t less a superset of fewer though?
No, fewer is for countable nouns, while less is for uncountable nouns.
However, like is often the case with the English language, there are various exceptions to the rule.
Sources:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=7pm-YQGFs8E
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
One of the definitions of Less is “Consisting of a smaller number” which feels pretty countable.
Posts some shit on Shitposting forum
People ask for sources
Bro did a statement, of course people gonna ask for sources
Why do people invent random bullshit to support a bad point?
- This is a shitpost community
- See point 1
Like all jokes, shitposts are only funny with a touch of reality
The joke literally breaks suspension of disbelief because it’s so ridiculous.
Can I get a source on that?
Welcome back to c/Lemmy Shitpost, where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.
This video was informative. It links its sources
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
That’s a very entertaining and informative video. It totally adds up to what I read by David Graeber, a very smart anthropologist, which makes it even more legit.
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Fewer**
But I can talk gooder.
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.
Family having like 13 kids, only 5 maybe making it to teen age, daughter dies in childbirth, 4 kids to 50 type beat.
Population graph after penicillin is very telling
In France, they had roughly this many holidays, but in practice it was only the noble class who could afford to take the time off. Tl;dr BS
Depending on where and when you’re talking about, if you were a man, if you weren’t farming, you were at the front lines of the king’s army with a spear and no armor.
That was actually fairly uncommon for most of the middle ages. From the collapse of the western empire until the military reforms c1500, standing armies were few and far between. Peasants could be drafted to fight by their lords, but time in military service was the exception rather than the rule.
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I’d probably have a cozy quilted jacket though.
On the other hand if you had a kilt, your balls would’ve been freezing though.
