- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@lemmy.world
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Source: your ass
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).
And also: this was before the 8h day. People worked until they were done which was sometimes much more but on average less
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.
Feudal lords, insofar as they worked at all, were fighters—their lives tended to alternate between dramatic feats of arms and near-total idleness and torpor. Peasants and servants obviously were expected to work more steadily. But even so, their work schedule was nothing remotely as regular or disciplined as the current nine-to-five—the typical medieval serf, male or female, probably worked from dawn to dusk for twenty to thirty days out of any year, but just a few hours a day otherwise, and on feast days, not at all. And feast days were not infrequent.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs 2018
261 days is working every single week 5 days a week.
Peasants worked sunup til sundown 250-300 days a year.
Life fucking blew as a peasant.
What is a peasant farmer doing during the winter when nothing is growing?
Idk man, somebody else having made a similar wild claim doesn’t mean that OP or the memes creator had a source at all.
There is quite the difference between 150/365 and 300/365.
One is about 3/7 the other 6/7 and now look at today when most of us work 5/7 on a normal workweek.
“My source is that i made it the fuck up”
It’s from a famous paper. Linked by gnutrinto elsewhere in this thread,
Did someone say ass pennies?
about to make comment - checks sub-lemmy
Phew I almost said something serious on a silly sub.
They had to do hard labour in the fields, I make pretty pictures in a comfy chair
Too bad there hasn’t been a massive increase in productivity since then to be able to have both.
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 is such a load of horse shit.
You don’t know what you’re talking about
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]
You don’t know that he wont live to 128.
I already lost all will to live at 30, I can’t imagine living to 100, sorry guys but I’m gonna bring the average down
Why do people invent random bullshit to support a bad point?
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
So… u r telling me that I have to defend YOUR argument ?
Wow…
Yea but all the information humanity has collected at my fingertips and a more diverse diet than any king in history is pretty neato.
Not to mention the convenience that is idk… A fucking dishwasher or laundry machines, or heatable ovens to the exact degree of temperature you want, microwaves, literally any device created to enhance the average citizens time spent NOT doing the egregiously long work needed to maintain a home that these hypothetical peasants did. People just braindead tbh when they see shit like this and just nod along like it’s so wise.
…diet…king… Burger King?
Diverse???
🤯
But that’s not really a rebuttal either. How about we have both? Why not all the benefits of progress together with less work?
How about it? I’d sign up, but have you looked around? Do you think those hoarding wealth and power will willingly share it?
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
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.
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.
Posts some shit on Shitposting forum
People ask for sources
Bro did a statement, of course people gonna ask for sources
Fewer**
But I can talk gooder.
Can I get a source on that?
The source is I made it the fuck up
This video was informative. It links its sources
Dog everything took longer back then
