this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 218 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 51 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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!"

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

'I allow them to just exist between whipping and beating them, isn't that enough?!'

[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

Where do your figures come from?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 175 points 9 months ago (18 children)
[–] [email protected] 122 points 9 months ago (5 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 43 points 9 months ago (1 children)

And also: this was before the 8h day. People worked until they were done which was sometimes much more but on average less

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

You guys know a lot about medieval peasants. Which peasantry school did yall go to?

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (8 children)

but that would still be considered leisure today.

do you know how many times i leave for work wishing i had time to do a load of wash, clean my bathroom, do the dishes or any other chore?

yeah they had chores and we could debate that is work but they had more leisure time absolutely

[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Medieval chores weren't putting clothes in the washing machine or giving the bathroom a wipe, they were weaving and sewing clothes by hand and then laboriously washing them in the stream, and hauling buckets of shit. Everything was much harder and much less pleasant, and that was how you spent your 'free time'.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Leave it to modern people to 'wish they'd live in mediveal times'

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 9 months ago

about to make comment - checks sub-lemmy

Phew I almost said something serious on a silly sub.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They had to do hard labour in the fields, I make pretty pictures in a comfy chair

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago

Too bad there hasn't been a massive increase in productivity since then to be able to have both.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 9 months ago (7 children)

Yea but all the information humanity has collected at my fingertips and a more diverse diet than any king in history is pretty neato.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

Yeah I'm with you here, but like we have a lot less fewer plagues.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Were you not here the last 3 years?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Eh, that was only one plague as opposed to smallpox, malaria, diphtheria, measles, tuberculosis, rheumatic fever, etc.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (5 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The peasants yearn for the fields.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (5 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, but I have double their life span.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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]

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 50 points 9 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (8 children)
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[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Why do people invent random bullshit to support a bad point?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (4 children)

That was because the other 200 days they had to do their own work lol, not the lord's one

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Posts some shit on Shitposting forum

People ask for sources

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Can I get a source on that?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago

Welcome back to c/Lemmy Shitpost, where everything's made up and the points don't matter.

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[–] dream_weasel 11 points 9 months ago

Fewer**

But I can talk gooder.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

But we are living longer now. 35 years old is basically dead.

[–] [email protected] 71 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The babies died making average age less. Doesn't mean those who got to adulthood lived to that age only.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

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