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.
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.