So we can the luxury of child labor to the old timey peasant lifestyle? Sweet. And I guess slopping pigs is no big deal if you’ve been doing it since you were 4 years old.
We haven’t been comparing the leisure time of medieval children with that of contemporary children, though. This conversation has been focused on adult laborers.
I suspect it was very all-or-nothing, as in during plowing, planting and harvest, it was all hands on deck all day, but during the rest of the time, it was much more leisurely.
Thought experiment- what would your average peasant’s day look like on a Tuesday during June? He’d have the usual household chores- milking the cows, feeding the chickens, gathering the eggs, etc… that are there every single day.
But as far as the strips he farmed? Is there 8 hours a day of work on a planted and growing field or set of strips?
Speaking as a farmer: depends on what you’re growing. Also depends on what the weather’s doing, and on just where in the growing season you are. Might be anywhere from ‘nothing needs doing in there right now’ to ‘way more to do than we can possibly catch up with.’
Possibilities include weeding, pruning, tying, assisting pollination, hilling up, preventing pollination, thinning (leaves or fruit or entire plants), watering, attempting to drain excess water, attempting to provide frost protection, harvest (some crops are harvested all at once, others repeatedly through the season), various attempts at preventing or ameliorating disease and/or insect problems, attempting to keep mammals and birds from eating the crop – I’m undoubtedly leaving some things out.
– I don’t know that medieval Europeans would have been dealing with pollination, because I don’t think they understood it, though they might have understood, say, that the presence of bees improved yield of certain crops. But depending on the crop they might well have been dealing with all the others.
I want to point out a lot of household stuff are easier now days thanks to indoor plumbing. If your only water source is a well, a lot of time is taken just to get enough water to get through the day. Not to mention laundry.
Same with cooking, wood fire oven takes time to setup. Or you have to walk back and forth to the a communal baker.
And animals get sick, plows gets broken, leaky roof, general wear and tear on your stuff.
And you need to prepare for the winter, salting the meat, drying the fruits, storing the wheat/hay.
There’s a great BBC series called Tales from the Green Valley (should be on youtube), that shows what people had to do on just a small farm in 1620s.
They might not be working for a lord the entire time, but there’s always work to do. I also want to add, if weather is bad, and you can’t work. That’s not a good thing, when you live a on farm. It means a bad harvest and starvation. Same with not being able to plow a field in time, that means you miss optimum seeding time, leading to bad harvest.
True. But few of our “leisure” time hours involves getting enuf food to eat.
I want to point out medieval people still have to do all that stuff. Only it took a lot longer. You still need to buy cloths, or the cloth to make the cloths. If a pipe broke, or a roof leaked, it still has to be fixed. Animal gets sick, and the Lord has to be paid, but in service rather than money. No emails, just mean you have to talk to people. It might mean a steward coming over and telling you what to do. Or if you need some help, you have to go over and ask them in person.
Even the kids actives they still have to do, it’s feeding the pigs rather than baseball, but depending on the age, you’ll still need some supervising. Of course, kids are more useful back then than now. So it’s less work, that doesn’t mean no work.
It’s probably wrong/misleading to call what the peasants would do for the liege “work”.
When I go to work, I get paid. That pay allows me to live. If I do extra stuff, outside of work time, to make my life better then that’s just bonus.
The labor that you do for your liege (as I understand it) is just time lost from the time you spend doing work to stay alive. You’re not paid, you just have to do it if you want to continue living on that land (and there ain’t no one else going to take you if you lose your land). It’s rent, not work.
Work = I get paid
Rent = I pay you
Peasants labored, probably, from dawn to dusk. Part of that was labor to pay rent. The other part was labor to stay alive.
moojja, you probably didn’t have any pipes to break. Of course, that meant you had to haul water.
We still talk to people; or at least, most of us do. Illiterate people don’t have to do paperwork.
It took more time to produce any given piece of clothing, but most people had a whole lot less of it.
Children of course took some time. But they were expected to contribute to the family from quite a young age, not to be schlepped around to six different sports.
I’m not saying I want to be a medieval peasant, I don’t. And I’m not saying I think they were better off, I don’t. I’m saying that comparing work hours as if modern people had nothing to do once they clock out from a paid job is massively inaccurate; and that comparing what needs to be done outside of paid work hours as if the only difference between 1500 and now were reductions in work is also inaccurate.
Some kinds of work tend to expand to fill whatever time’s available. This seems to be true for travel time; I don’t know whether anyone’s done the comparison for housework, but certainly people who have washing machines available seem to wash clothes a whole lot more often. (Despite which, I think the washing machine is one of the greatest inventions of the last couple of hundred years.)
Sage Rat, most people have to work to earn money to pay the rent, and the utilities, and the taxes. I don’t know that paying them directly in labor is all that different. ETA: having a choice as to who to work for is definitely different.
May I recommend the difficult to find book Down the Common by Anne Baer? It describes a year in the life of a medieval village, all the work, worries, deaths, misfortunes, obligations, and rewards of a peasant’s life. One of the most convincing, best historical tales I’ve ever read.
A lot of the work in the village was of a communal sort. The village in the book lives on the wool trade, so all the women have a quota of spinning to do. The men mostly work the fields, but one of the men is too nearsighted for driving oxen for plowing, so he’s the village carpenter. He can see close for exacting work. He also envies the field laborers who are mostly idle during winter. He also counts his nails, and pulls and straightens nails from broken items because iron is precious. The village has to trade in wool for it, and trade is limited by the village’s isolation.
I could go on about the villagers getting extra food from the local lord on feast days, and the story of a famine that one of the elderly peasants relates. It’s an absolutely fascinating read.
Yes, but in modern day, we call work the period of time that I spend doing all labor to live - which includes not just rent but also buying food, clothes, etc.
I earn my rent 1/3rd of the way through my workday. Does that mean that I only work 13.3 hours per week?
You probably really ought to include your taxes; which I suspect is going to put you well over the half day on less than half the days of the year that Kimstu cited earlier in this thread.
And I also suspect that you do at least some additional “labor to live”. Even if you hire somebody else to do all of your household chores, do you also live where you work and have no travel time involved? There probably are some people who live right next to work and also do hire out all of their chores; but they’re exceptional in modern life, not the rule.
Again, I’m not saying the life they led was fantastic, or preferable to ours. I’m saying that oversimplified comparisons make things look worse than they were.
And I was saying that comparing working for a liege to a modern job is misleading and that a better term would be rent.
Well, it’s also taxes, in the sense that it’s supposed to entitle you to some benefits from your liege in the form of protection from invaders and other lawless folk, administration of justice, emergency relief in bad times, and so on. (Peasants also owed taxes or tithes directly to the Church, which likewise were linked to the services of religious leadership and pastoral care that the clergy owed to the community.)
My mother grew up on a farm that didn’t even have electricity until she was a teenager. She was the oldest daughter, which meant she got up at dawn to help milk the cows and get eggs from the chickens for breakfast, then cleaned and cooked and looked after her younger siblings along with her mother all day until the sun went down, then ate dinner, read or sewed until she went to bed. Then she got up and did it again, seven days a week. She loved going to school - at least she could sit down there.
And that was in the 1920s-30s. I would imagine things were a lot worse a thousand years earlier.
If I earn all of my taxes 20% of the way through my workday, did I only work an 8 hour work week, not a 40 hour work week?
You seem to be trying to reinterpret contractually mandated working hours in terms of how much you need to earn to meet certain obligations. But I’m not sure that works as a comparison with medieval peasants. You earn nowadays far more money than you “need” for the essentials of staying alive, but you need more money because you have lost the vast majority of the skills required to produce your own goods yourself.
I think we’ve established, since at least the third post in this thread, that the concept of “work”, both in medieval times and today, is kind of complicated. There’s also the question of how “work” overlaps with “leisure”. Sure, peasant women spent a lot of time spinning and weaving and sewing, for example, but that was also a valued opportunity for socializing, as were the “commute times” and other pedestrian travel on the part of men. Shepherds and shepherdesses had to spend whole days out in the countryside looking after their flocks, but notoriously relished the opportunities this entailed for intimacy and fun in chance encounters. Trying to shoehorn all those variables into a single financial metric isn’t going to give a very faithful representation of either medieval or modern work.
Well, usually the peasants got grain or flour in return for field work, and of course protection and their little bit of land and cottage. protection was no small thing.
So it’s kinda taxes and rent and some food .
this argument reminds me of the old "farmers dont have real jobs unless there farming for profit … otherwise it’s just “living” argument people used ot have when I was a kid …
I have to ask, could an english peasant improve his life much? Could he send his kids to school so they could have a chance at a better life or a different career than being a farmer? If he worked hard could he buy more land?
I think that would be the worse part is if you saw no chance of improving ones status in life. Where you are on the ladder is where you will stay.