The Peasant Life

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

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.
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.
- Calls bullshit, facilitates worse bullshit. Classic. I guess I imagined all the hard WORK it took to maintain a home. Remember, if you're not being paid for it, it doesn't count as labor. Fucking hell

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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Idk man, somebody else having made a similar wild claim doesn't mean that OP or the memes creator had a source at all.
The church wasnt why peasants worked less. They worked less because there wasn't that much work to be done. During the slow season, there just isn't enough work to justify paying a peasant to work.
- paying a peasant to work
  Peasants (serfs) were not paid. They were bound to the land they worked, and were given a fraction of the harvest they produced. The rest was property of the Lord who's title controlled the land.
  There was a (very small) artisan class where the concept of payment existed, though often it was payment-in-kind - smith the plow for my oxen and I'll give you some food after the harvest. Money was rarely encountered for the vast majority of people.
Did someone say ass pennies?

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...

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
- 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'.
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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.

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

- The average life expectancy was low, because so so many people died very young. If you made it through your 20s, you'd be pretty likely to live to what we still consider "old age".
  For people living traditional lives, without modern medicine or markets, the most common age of death is about 70.
  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-04/debunking-myth-people-died-young-before-modern-medicine/9302356
..diet…king… Burger King?
Diverse???
🤯
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.
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?

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

Were you not here the last 3 years?
- Eh, that was only one plague as opposed to smallpox, malaria, diphtheria, measles, tuberculosis, rheumatic fever, etc.
- It didn't kill a third of the population last time I've checked
Fewer
- Okay Stannis.
- Ah thanks, I fixeded. it

Yeah, but I have double their life span.

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.
- Also, there was 3-4 months where nothing grew.
  So it was normal to work everyday, all-day, for long stretches, and then do little in the winter other than try and stay warm.
- Half your labour value being taken by your employer for their own benefit? I wouldn't rush to say they take less now - that'll vary by role, but I know that last time I had a billable rate, it was ~7x my salary - the rough equivalent of working 319 days for my lords.

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

The peasants yearn for the fields.
- As children yearn for the mines.
  See: Minecraft
Misinformation? In the form of a meme on the internet?
The scandal!
Memes aren’t historically accurate? Blasphemy!!!
There wasn't time off. There were things to be done. There's a reason we have seasonal workers in farms.

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

- 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.
- This is such a load of horse shit.

*fewer holidays

I fucking swear I see this mistake every single day these days. Does no one know the difference between less and fewer anymore?!?
- Isn't less a superset of fewer though?
- There's a growing amount of people (sic) who are unaware of the difference between countable and uncountable nouns. Just watch any YouTube video that happens to involve quantities of any kind. "Amount" has become the standard term. And it's similar with "less".
Ben Le Man?
More like Stannis Le Mannis

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.

Posts some shit on Shitposting forum

People ask for sources

Can I get a source on that?

Welcome back to c/Lemmy Shitpost, where everything's made up and the points don't matter.
The source is I made it the fuck up
This video was informative. It links its sources
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  This video was informative
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- That's a very entertaining and informative video. It totally adds up to what I read by David Graeber, a very smart anthropologist, which makes it even more legit.

Depending on where and when you're talking about, if you were a man, if you weren't farming, you were at the front lines of the king's army with a spear and no armor.

That was actually fairly uncommon for most of the middle ages. From the collapse of the western empire until the military reforms c1500, standing armies were few and far between. Peasants could be drafted to fight by their lords, but time in military service was the exception rather than the rule.
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- On the other hand if you had a kilt, your balls would've been freezing though.

Oh, bullshit.

Dog everything took longer back then

People's legs used to routinely fall asleep while taking a dump because it took soo long. This is where the term " loo legs" originated from.

Posts in favour of employee rights.
Must support communist dictatorships!
Completely politically illiterate person detected.
Not everyone is a tankie

Fewer