# peasants didnt have a short work week **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [August 27, 2019, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329 "2019-08-27T19:43:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2019, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/1 "2019-08-27T19:43:59Z")
Man, they keep spreading this falsehood: > **[Between Plagues, Medieval Peasants Enjoyed Bawdiness and Brawling](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-did-peasants-have-fun)** > > To chill like a peasant, attend a farcical play and wrestle with your friends. “In stark comparison to the stringently capitalist workweek of the so-called modern era, work patterns in medieval Europe—loosely defined as the years 500–1500—were decidedly more relaxed. For one thing, the calendar back then was stuffed full of religious holidays, writes sociologist Juliet B. Schor in The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, including long vacations at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer. Not to mention the many saints’ and rest days sprinkled throughout the year…By one estimate drawn from 14th-century manorial records—documents generated by the administration of manors and estates—most servile laborers in England worked 27.7 hours a week. Compare that to the 47 hours a week that most full-time adult workers in the U.S. toil, according to a 2014 Gallup poll.” [http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours\_workweek.html](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html) I have seen this on several MB, Facebook etc, and it’s dead wrong, and it shows a basic lack of understand what the life of a peasant was back then. Sure, the English peasant only had to work on his \*liege lords \*fields, etc about that many hours, due to all the holidays, saints days and what have you. But, at least in England, many peasants had a little piece of land for their own garden, plus some livestock- pigs, chickens and maybe even a milk cow. When they werent working on their lords crops, they were working on thier own, -plus maintenance on their cottage, gathering firewood, gathering whatever else they could legally, etc. I have worked on a farm, and likely Schor hasnt. There is work to fill all the daylight hours. what does everyone else think? ---
**Author:** ![Emiliana](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f0a364/32.png) [@Emiliana](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Emiliana)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2019, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/2 "2019-08-27T19:53:13Z")
Juliet Schor’s work is a bit different from what you find on message boards and Facebook. She’s a serious and well-respected scholar. Knowing something about agricultural cycles and peasant religious calendars myself, I’m going to take her research over your experience living on a farm. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2019, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/3 "2019-08-27T20:29:22Z")
There are two aspects to the concept of “work” here. Sure, for people in rural preindustrial societies there was really no such thing as a holiday from feeding your own cows or chickens or dogs, not to mention feeding your own family, cleaning up your own baby’s poop, etc. But that’s still true today. Even people in modern industrial societies still have to cope with their own housework and other chores and family requirements in their officially designated “leisure” time. I can take a vacation from work, but I can’t just abandon caring for my own garden or pets or other ongoing projects during my vacation unless I want everything to go to shit while I’m away. Then there’s your official contractual employment work, concerning which AFAICT [Schor’s research on the typical amount of downtime for medieval peasants](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html) is valid: > [@](#): > > Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the year, adherence to regular working hours was not usual. According to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers, the medieval workday was not more than eight hours. […] > > An important piece of evidence on the working day is that it was very unusual for servile laborers to be required to work a whole day for a lord. One day’s work was considered half a day, and if a serf worked an entire day, this was counted as two “days-works.” Detailed accounts of artisans’ workdays are available. Knoop and Jones’ figures for the fourteenth century work out to a yearly average of 9 hours (exclusive of meals and breaktimes). Brown, Colwin and Taylor’s figures for masons suggest an average workday of 8.6 hours. > > The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official – that is, church – holidays included not only long “vacations” at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints’ andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks’ worth of ales – to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year. […] > > The peasant’s free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor – the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. […] A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year – 175 days – for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year. ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2019, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/4 "2019-08-27T20:51:29Z")
There is another possible flaw in this item: the data is not exactly comparable. The medieval set is from study of managerial records, while the modern set is from a survey of what workers say. From working with some polling, I know that what people say is often not the same as what actually happens. People lie, and even when not lying they often don’t know accurately. On the other side, the manorial records might be inaccurate. Managers often don’t know how long it takes for certain jobs; the depend on what the workers tell them. That can be padded.\* Maybe these offset each other, so the research might be valid. I don’t know. \*Even now. How many people are posting/reading the SDMB here while at work? ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2019, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/5 "2019-08-27T21:03:20Z")
> [@Emiliana](#): > > Juliet Schor’s work is a bit different from what you find on message boards and Facebook. She’s a serious and well-respected scholar. > > Knowing something about agricultural cycles and peasant religious calendars myself, I’m going to take her research over your experience living on a farm. Yes, but she even says " _An important piece of evidence on the working day is that it was very unusual for servile laborers to be required to work a whole day for a lord. "_ So, what she and others are talking about is the _number of hours you have to put in working for others._ No mention is made of the time you put in on your own. Certainly on a religious holiday you dont have to work for your lord. But your pigs must be slopped, the eggs collected, the cow milked, the garden weeded. Unless you think the cow , pigs, chickens and weeds observe the \*peasant religious calendars? The issue isnt Shurs work, it what others have read into that that Shur didnt cover. \* ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2019, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/6 "2019-08-27T21:06:49Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > There are two aspects to the concept of “work” here. Sure, for people in rural preindustrial societies there was really no such thing as a holiday from feeding your own cows or chickens or dogs, not to mention feeding your own family, cleaning up your own baby’s poop, etc. But that’s still true today. > > Even people in modern industrial societies still have to cope with their own housework and other chores and family requirements in their officially designated “leisure” time. I can take a vacation from work, but I can’t just abandon caring for my own garden or pets or other ongoing projects during my vacation unless I want everything to go to shit while I’m away. > > Then there’s your official contractual employment work, concerning which AFAICT [Schor’s research on the typical amount of downtime for medieval peasants](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html) is valid: Yes, exactly. But importantly, for a peasant that time wasnt really "leisure’ time. But I agree, as far as contractual work is concerned Shur is correct. The issue is that others have taken her work and extrapolated beyond contractual work to all work. In other words, Shur is correct, others interpretations of her work is the issue. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2019, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/7 "2019-08-27T21:48:04Z")
I think it also depended upon the time of year. Back then you worked basically just when their was sunlight because candles and lanterns were expensive. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/8 "2019-08-28T00:10:06Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > what does everyone else think? My sociology textbox claimed that histoircally subsistance farmers in the Philipines worked _months_ full time, mostly at planting and harvest. And didn’t work for the other 6 months. ---
**Author:** ![Arrendajo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e0b2c6/32.png) [@Arrendajo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arrendajo)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/9 "2019-08-28T00:36:51Z")
I’m reading an interesting book on this topic right now – Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. His claim is that humans worked a lot more after the agricultural revolution than they did as hunter/gatherers. I’m not sure how it compares to modern work – it would be a difficult comparison to make due to the vastly different kinds of work we do now. But it’s clear that being a farmer/rancher involves a shit-load of work, and you can’t really take time off from medieval farming to spend a week vacationing in Bali. It was a tough life. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/10 "2019-08-28T00:41:30Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > Certainly on a religious holiday you dont have to work for your lord. But your pigs must be slopped, the eggs collected, the cow milked, the garden weeded. And now the shopping has to be done, the children driven around to various activities, the dog walked and picked up after, the email dealt with, the broken pipe fixed or the plumber called, the car taken in for repairs, the bills paid . . . As Kimstu pointed out earlier in the thread, most people’s “leisure” time these days includes a good deal of unpaid work, also. Medieval people usually had to do some things few people do now, yes. But they didn’t have to do a lot of things that we do have to do now. ---
**Author:** ![Asuka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@Asuka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Asuka)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/11 "2019-08-28T01:26:49Z")
I forgot which book it was from, but I remember reading that even with all that “leisure” time before mass-printing people were so bored back then they would spend almost all their free time just getting drunk and fighting other people. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/12 "2019-08-28T02:29:51Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > There is work to fill all the daylight hours. And this is true now too. Most people don’t instantaneously show up at home once the office closes. They expend energy and time getting home. Then they expend energy and time cooking dinner, helping their kids with their homework (something their medieval counterparts didn’t have to do), tidying up the house, and getting children clean and ready for bed. Medieval Peasant didn’t have to worry about losing his job if he showed up to the field five minutes late. He didn’t have to clock out every time he had to take a piss or dump. His lord only cared about output, not effort. So as long as he met his quota of whatever at harvest time, then who cared if he could only plow 0.85 acre in a day instead of 1? You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to be a medieval peasant. But not every work hour is equal. ---
**Author:** ![Aspidistra](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aspidistra/32/3894_2.png) [@Aspidistra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aspidistra)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/13 "2019-08-28T02:31:58Z")
It’s quite possible for medieval peasants to have been both working shorter hours and also to have had a harder work life - their jobs were more physically taxing than most modern jobs, although I understand that Amazon warehouse picker is getting close. Also, peasants were often not physically healthy or well-fed. In a bad harvest year those 28 hours a week would be being performed by people who were weak and malnourished - but you still had to keep working or you’d starve. Hard to tell the difference between ‘they only had to work 28 hours’ and ‘they were only capable of that much work, if they were going to also fit in all the gardening and pig-keeping necessary to keep themselves fed’ ---
**Author:** ![Jay\_Z](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Jay\_Z](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jay_Z)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/14 "2019-08-28T05:13:27Z")
I can believe that ag work actually requires more man hours than hunter/gatherer. From most reports most animal hunters sleep a lot and don’t spend the whole time hunting either. Why? Hunting requires a lot of luck, catch as catch can. An inefficient process. A hunter can’t afford to spend max effort on a single day’s hunt, because there’s too much of a chance that the hunter comes up empty. Instead, hunt some, but save lots of reserves in case the next day is luckier. When societies get more efficient is when people can actually afford to max out on the hours they put in. Because the odds of an acceptable return are much higher. ---
**Author:** ![Sangahyando](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f14d63/32.png) [@Sangahyando](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sangahyando)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 8:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/15 "2019-08-28T08:28:25Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > Certainly on a religious holiday you dont have to work for your lord. But your pigs must be slopped, the eggs collected, the cow milked, the garden weeded. > > Unless you think the cow , pigs, chickens and weeds observe the _peasant religious calendars?_ Rather a frivolous aside; but I’m reminded of a nice quote from a novel read long ago – by Ernest Raymond IIRC – about early-twentieth-century country life in England’s Lake District. Grumpy old farmer, somewhat disquieted by his son and one of his key employees “getting religion” (in different flavours) and wanting time off to attend church, observes: “Sheep don’t pay no heed to holy days. Nor do cows, much.” (If I remember rightly, they worked things out somehow; as farmers must always have managed to do re things religious, when appropriate.) ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 9:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/16 "2019-08-28T09:01:12Z")
> [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](#): > > There is another possible flaw in this item: the data is not exactly comparable. The medieval set is from study of managerial records, while the modern set is from a survey of what workers say. IOW: back in the Middle Ages, what company records showed and what actually happened already weren’t the same 😉 > [@Jay\_Z](#): > > From most reports most animal hunters sleep a lot and don’t spend the whole time hunting either. Why? Hunting requires a lot of luck, catch as catch can. An inefficient process. A hunter can’t afford to spend max effort on a single day’s hunt, because there’s too much of a chance that the hunter comes up empty. Instead, hunt some, but save lots of reserves in case the next day is luckier. Part of the popularity of traps is precisely that a trap does your hunting without getting bored, tired or having a leg fall asleep. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 11:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/17 "2019-08-28T11:52:02Z")
> [@Jay\_Z](#): > > I can believe that ag work actually requires more man hours than hunter/gatherer. > > From most reports most animal hunters sleep a lot and don’t spend the whole time hunting either. Why? Hunting requires a lot of luck, catch as catch can. An inefficient process. A hunter can’t afford to spend max effort on a single day’s hunt, because there’s too much of a chance that the hunter comes up empty. Instead, hunt some, but save lots of reserves in case the next day is luckier. Let me help you on that. Lets say you are are going for a deer. You first have to pick out a good spot then hunt down and kill the deer. Lets say you shoot the deer with a bow or a gun. Often the deer wont die immediately so you track it for maybe miles. Then you finally GET the deer, then what do you do? Well immediately the processing starts. You field dress the deer (remove guts so they dont contaminate the meat). Then you drag the carcass home. Or maybe you go back home to get your horse and wagon to do that. So consider taking half your day just walking back and forth to the place where you need to hunt. Then you bring it home and the processing starts. Meat can spoil pretty quickly in warm weather. Skinning first then butchering which takes several hours. You have to cut up the meat into all the various cuts and parts and then somehow preserve the meat for later. The indians would either smoke it or salt it down. Nowadays you wrap it in paper and freeze it. Some meat you grind into sausage. You should get about 50-60 pounds of meat from a deer. Now they were able to get over 400 pounds of meat from a buffalo. But I can only imagine the work after a big hunt where they might get say 20 or so buffalo. Also alot of work for the indians was just getting enough salt to salt down the meat they would take later. Some prey like rabbits or field chickens often they could take right outside the front door. Skinning and dressing those are easier but you get less meat. It takes maybe 2 rabbits to feed a family. A big problem is once humans come into an area they quickly hunt all the wild game there. For the indians that meant moving their camps. Back in medieval times I read the only places with any wild game left was on the feudal lords property and peasants were forbidden to hunt there. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 12:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/18 "2019-08-28T12:34:52Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > IOW: back in the Middle Ages, what company records showed and what actually happened already weren’t the same 😉 What those anticapitalists say about medieval peasants’ allegedly short work week is reminiscent of apologists talking about how good the slaves had it in the pre-Civil War South. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/19 "2019-08-28T14:17:42Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > And now the shopping has to be done, the children driven around to various activities, the dog walked and picked up after, the email dealt with, the broken pipe fixed or the plumber called, the car taken in for repairs, the bills paid . . . > . The chores you list are fundamentally different from the chores DrDeth listed. Slopping the pigs and milking the cow is part of your living requirements. You know, food to live. Walking your dog is a leisure activity. Your kids won’t starve if they miss soccer practice. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 2:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329/20 "2019-08-28T14:30:54Z")
> [@CarnalK](#): > > The chores you list are fundamentally different from the chores DrDeth listed. Slopping the pigs and milking the cow is part of your living requirements. You know, food to live. Walking your dog is a leisure activity. Your kids won’t starve if they miss soccer practice. Well, if we want to talk about differences, it would be the rare peasant who wouldn’t have children to help him pig-slopping and cow-milking. The more able-bodied children a peasant had, the more leisure time he had. That’s not the case today. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peasants-didnt-have-a-short-work-week/839329.md?page=2)