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Jokes on you, I’m underemployed.
Fewer. Fewer holidays. Mad about it all the same.
What did they do the rest of the time?
Mostly work at home.
Most peasants didn’t own the fields they were working to feed their own household. Instead, they leased them from the local lord, who owned most of the land.
(This seems to be the core difference between “peasants” and " freemen" - the latter owned their own land.)
I’m exchange, they were called in to work the lord’s fields as well as their leased “home plot”.
As far as I know, this statistic only refers to the “holidays” where the lord was not allowed to call in their land-tenants to work. They still had to work to maintain their own household as needed.
This doesn’t mean that people had to work on the lord’s fields all day on all non-holidays, it was just an upper limit. The exact amount was probably codified in local laws / the lease agreement.
It also doesn’t mean that people had to work all the time even on holidays - just enough to get their shit done. Some days were even explicit “no work at all” holidays or half-days, were peeps where expected to show up at church instead.
And the amount of work needed generally varied wildly with the seasons - harvest season was crunch time, winter was slow season. It also varied depending on the exact location (agriculture in the Mediterranean was different than in Scotland) and on the available technology.
Play games. Sing and dance.
Imbibe.
Ogle the strapping lads and buxom maidens.
Take care of gramps, while listening to stories about the good old days, when the soil was so soft the fields virtually plowed themselves, lords properly honored the labor of their surfs, and knights actually helped their ladies mount a horse, and could even buy a whole suit of armor for less than five times their annual earnings.
What would you do?
This made me think of Historia Civilis’ video about work.
This doesn’t account for the work they had to do at home. They had their own food to harvest, animals to tend to, clothes to make and the materials to make those clothes didn’t fall out of the sky. They had to chop firewood, mend the home, cook the food from scratch. Their mandatory holidays weren’t spent pursuing a hobby, traveling, playing games or consuming entertainment. Those days off just meant they could do all the work they needed to do at home instead of doing all the church’s work on top of their own.
Another way to phrase it:
As our personal workloads were reduced, that free time was commandeered by our employers
Our personal workloads reduced because the industrialisation of agriculture meant we didn’t have to grow our own food any more.
Not trying to defend capitalism, but it’s disingenuous of you to imply that you don’t get anything in return for working.
that’s all well and good until the price of necessities is just raised to the point where you need to work as much as a medieval peasant anyways, and don’t even get the fresh air they did.
and uh, in many places that happened quite a while ago, the USA is at a point where elderly people need two jobs to afford to live.
Either I wasn’t clear or you misinterpreted but that’s not what I’m implying. Productivity went way up and instead of reduced working hours, we worked MORE and saw proportionally less of the profit.
You say holidays but I am imagining prayer and activities that keep the church in power :/
Everyone is talking about this like it didn’t vary from century to century, or country to country.
The stat refers specifically to England in the 14th century and only covers work done for the landlord (mostly field work, which was hard labour, sometimes extremely long hours).
