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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.
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
There’s no way farming was only done 5 sporadic months of the year, that livestock keeping would allow you to just fuck off and not work that frequently, and they often did things like produce parts of their own cloths etc which I would count that much sewing/darning to be work let along the rest of the homesteading requirements…
I’d think everyone doesn’t stop working at the same time, more of a rotation
about to make comment - checks sub-lemmy
Phew I almost said something serious on a silly sub.
Yeah I’m with you here, but like we have a lot less fewer plagues.
Fewer
Ah thanks, I fixeded. it
I was 45 years old when I finally mastered the difference myself.
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
The peasants yearn for the fields.
Misinformation? In the form of a meme on the internet?
The scandal!
There wasn’t time off. There were things to be done. There’s a reason we have seasonal workers in farms.
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Memes aren’t historically accurate? Blasphemy!!!
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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.
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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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That’s fine. As long as language is living and evolving there will be people sitting on their porches shaking their canes at it and yelling about how it was “better in my day!” Some people are this way because they haven’t yet been made aware that it’s racist, classist and elitist. Some people embrace that.
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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
*fewer holidays
I fucking swear I see this mistake every single day these days. Does no one know the difference between less and fewer anymore?!?
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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”.
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]
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.
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
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.
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On the other hand if you had a kilt, your balls would’ve been freezing though.
That was because the other 200 days they had to do their own work lol, not the lord’s one
Fewer**
But I can talk gooder.
Fewer
Oh, bullshit.
Yea but all the information humanity has collected at my fingertips and a more diverse diet than any king in history is pretty neato.
…diet…king… Burger King?
Diverse???
🤯
