‘I allow them to just exist between whipping and beating them, isn’t that enough?!’

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.

Where do your figures come from?

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

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.

It’s from a famous paper. Linked by gnutrinto elsewhere in this thread,

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.

Yep. Farming is a bunch of “hurry up and wait”. Not that there wasn’t plenty of other work, but it only takes so long to feed the animals.

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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What the fuck is a peasant with literally the clothes on their back and nothing else doing with all this “leisure time” anyway?

Ya fucking deluded.

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

How about it? I’d sign up, but have you looked around? Do you think those hoarding wealth and power will willingly share it?

Eh, that was only one plague as opposed to smallpox, malaria, diphtheria, measles, tuberculosis, rheumatic fever, etc.

Pandemic is not the same as a plague. Not by a long shot.

It didn’t kill a third of the population last time I’ve checked

Okay Stannis.

Ah thanks, I fixeded. it

As children yearn for the mines.

See: Minecraft

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.

You don’t know that he wont live to 128.

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.

Like all jokes, shitposts are only funny with a touch of reality

The joke literally breaks suspension of disbelief because it’s so ridiculous.

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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”.

Isn’t less a superset of fewer though?

No, you throw a load into the washer and push a magic machine that sucks up the floor dirt for a half-hour and then drive your speed carriage to a plethora of stores for two hours to pick up supplies. Then you come home and put your supplies in the magic ice box that is powered 24/7, throw your laundry into the dryer, and check on the dinner in the box that slow-cooks your food without any stirring needed.

Then, instead of going to bed, you turn on all the lights and enjoy 5 hours of free time, where you can see perfectly fine because magic.

I’m sorry, I wish I could fling you back to that time to give you a reality check. Do we work too much? Yes. Do we work more than midevil peasants did? Absolutely not.

Any direct comparison between the labour of medieval peasants or craftsmen and modern workers is largely not possible due to the completely different character of these two types of labour organization. Please note that today, in developed countries, whether capitalist, communist or adopting a different form of economic principles, the most common way of working is a wage labour based on an employment contract and strict division between the performance of labour and ownership of means of production. In other words, most people work by performing specific tasks for the persons (physical or legal) who own the means of production used to generate value and then receive a remuneration for the work done, usually in form of money they can spend freely. Such organization of labour, completely obvious to modern people, was something highly unusual in Middle Ages though.

Modern organization of labour is largely shaped by the industrialization that separated the work from its results, at least from the perspective of the workers involved. In an industrial setting, workers were obliged to work their shift, i.e. an artificially set amount of time, producing goods that were a property of the factory owner. Thus, there was no ‘start’ and ‘end’ of the work that theoretically could have been conducted all year round, without pause, if the shifts were organized so and demand for the product warranted such supply intensity.

Now, this is a far cry from how the labour looked like in the Middle Ages. In opposition to the workers in the industrial and post-industrial settings, most peasants and craftsmen were essentially sole traders, who were utilizing their assets that were either owned (especially in case of urban craftsmen) or loaned (usually in the case of peasants) to generate wealth for themselves and were only obliged to pay taxes determined by the local authority. It should be noted however, that the ‘taxes’ might have not necessarily been the part of produce or a specific sum of money, but also various services, such as forest clearing, transportation of goods or fortification maintenance.

It is sometimes said that in the Middle Ages (and in early Modern period), holidays could have amounted up to a third of the year. This is true, but it does not differ that much from the situation most modern workers from developed or developing countries are in. They usually work a standard 40-45 hours per week, meaning 8-9 hours of work on each of the five days, and the free Saturdays and Sundays alone contribute to 104 free days. In Europe, most countries have roughly 8 national or religious holidays each year with 20-25 days of paid vacation on top of it, bringing the average number of free days to 135 or 37% of all the days in a year. Sure, some countries have e.g. less leave holidays or vacation days, but it still gives us one-third of the year being free from work.

Now, the principal work of the medieval peasants was usually more complex than it is sometimes presented, as it is not uncommon to assume that peasants were only farmers and their fields were unicultural (i.e. only one type of crops were grown there). This is not really correct. Agricultural production almost everywhere in Europe was localized, meaning that all products local people needed and that could have been obtained in a given place, were produced locally, requiring farmers to grow various crops simultaneously. As the medieval farmers were using crop rotation techniques, usually two-field system known in the Early Middle Ages or three-field system introduced in the times of Charlemagne and popularized across Europe only in the High Middle Ages (four-field system was introduced in 18th century), they were sowing and harvesting twice a year at a minimum. In reality there were much more crops with a different vegetation times, with winter cereals, spring cereals, lentils, rape, flax and hemp being the most common. Agricultural work was not limited to field work though, as virtually every homestead had a vegetable garden where every family was growing various plants for their own use (various tubers, herbs, root vegetables, cabbage, cucumbers etc.) that required occasional tending.

Second, in most homesteads peasants were keeping at least some animals. Hens were ubiquitous as they were low-maintenance, relatively cheap, could reproduce rather easily and acted as an important source of protein (eggs and meat). Cows, sheep and sometimes goats were a source of dairy products. Pigs were raised for meat and leather. Horses and oxen were, of course, ubiquitous working animals. All these animals had to be tended to daily and feeding, mucking, brushing, milking, collecting eggs and related activities were an important part of a daily routine for most peasants. Larger herds had to be led to a pasture, guarded and then brought back making this was an all-day job, quite often delegated to younger people in case of smaller animals. Just to put the amount of work in perspective, an average modern cow requires about 60 litres of water per day, so taking into account the projected differences in size of the medieval farm animals might have meant 30-40 litres per animal that had to be provided in the days when the animals were not grazing. Hauling such amount of water from a nearby source (usually river or stream, as wells would have quickly run dry) might have taken a dozen of trips every day.

Third, as I wrote above, the villages were largely self-reliant, especially in the Early Middle Ages, what means that everything had to be produced by peasants themselves and this includes their very literal daily bread. But even such staple food as bread or oatmeal required preparation from scratch and firing up the primitive stove was in itself a long task given the technology available, so preparation of a decent meal for the entire family could have taken a significant part of a day. On a rare occasion, when the animal was slaughtered, meat and leather had to immediately processed to avoid spoiling - cutting, mincing, sausage-making and smoking could have taken days, depending on the number of people involved. Thus, preparation of food for the entire family could have been construed as a full-time job for a single person, what have not really changed until the introduction of refrigerators, gas and electric stoves and various modern kitchen appliances, what in some rural areas could mean times as close as second half of 20th century.

Of course, food was not the only thing that was made by peasants, who also had to create their agricultural tools used for all the work in the fields and around the house, such as rakes, flails, plows, carts or wheelbarrows. The same can be said of simple containers and utensils, from baskets to spoons to troughs. Carving the wooden tools, forming and firing clay bowls and jars, basket weaving, candles casting - all of these also consumed a lot of time. Clothing was often made locally, what required preparation of materials, and fulling, breaking, carding, spinning, weaving and finally cutting and sewing new garments were a tedious activities usually done in the long evenings, as they were primarily indoor work. With the development of the economic networks and increased amount of money in circulation, more and more goods were simply bought for the money received from the sale of the surplus agricultural or consumer goods, but as far the Middle Ages.