Current Events > holy moly Medieval Peasants only worked 3 days a week

(+) Yeah! (+)

They had rights which meant, they could not be made to work more than....3 days a week...
see video but for the lazy a.i. corroborates

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/3be37a44.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTm_zb9k2us

shocking and this only applies to servile
free peasants didn't even have to do that technically

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/ac073bf5.jpg

Do you think that farming your own plot of land is easy? It's seems like you work for free for 3 days and the rest of the week you have to make sure you and your family won't starve when winter hits

I have not watched the video but I can't just assume people were Big Chilling 4 days a week if you also had to work your own land

pretzelcoatl posted...

Do you think that farming your own plot of land is easy? It's seems like you work for free for 3 days and the rest of the week you have to make sure you and your family won't starve when winter hits

I have not watched the video but I can't just assume people were Big Chilling 4 days a week if you also had to work your own land

what is your point?

people seem to always get pissy when it is brought up peasants worked less and instead of think "huh, why is it that peasants worked less than me" try to make up reasons why it must be ok and justified

also they did not work for free they got paid

WingsOfGood posted...

what is your point?

people seem to always get pissy when it is brought up peasants worked less and instead of think "huh, why is it that peasants worked less than me" try to make up reasons why it must be ok and justified

Self-employment is employment.

Paragon21XX posted...

Self-employment is employment.

as seen in the op thanks to a.i, , they may rest on these days

must we make up fiction because it breaks the mold of what we were told? interesting that we weren't told they only worked 3 days a week is it not?

WingsOfGood posted...

what is your point?

people seem to always get pissy when it is brought up peasants worked less and instead of think "huh, why is it that peasants worked less than me" try to make up reasons why it must be ok and justified

It just seems somewhat disingenuous. It's not "medieval peasants had to work less", it's more like "medieval peasants has 3 days a week of unpaid backbreaking labor on top of all the household labor and sustenance farming they likely had to do to not starve to death"

I would be completely jazzed about a 3 day work week, but saying there was only a 3 day work week in the past seems misleading.

I'm also not pissy, but you can believe what you want. I just don't think it really accurately frames what life was probably like.

Pretty much modern people have fewer rights. I think this is in part because ruling people has become more of a science and in part because we have more toys.

Not saying the answer is wrong, but you should just not go by the AI answer, as a rule. You get complacent, and then you end up believing things that are false.

WingsOfGood posted...

what is your point?

people seem to always get pissy when it is brought up peasants worked less and instead of think "huh, why is it that peasants worked less than me" try to make up reasons why it must be ok and justified

also they did not work for free they got paid

From what i read it seemed like the labor was in exchange for being able to farm a small plot of their lord's land as their own, like a sharecropper. But perhaps they got paid.

pretzelcoatl posted...

It just seems somewhat disingenuous

uh bro, no literally they only worked 3 days a week it was law

pretzelcoatl posted...

, it's more like "medieval peasants has 3 days a week of unpaid backbreaking labor on top of all the household labor and sustenance farming they likely had to do to not starve to death"

also LMAO do you not do household labor today?
or you rich and got a robot to do it all? LMAO

Evening_Dragon posted...

Not saying the answer is wrong, but you should just not go by the AI answer, as a rule. You get complacent, and then you end up believing things that are false.

the video and the a.i. agree

people who do not agree are those who don't like the answer

a.i. is just a supplement as it arrives at said answer by quickly gobbling up information out there where the guy in the video is all about the period

try looking for their lifespan too

WingsOfGood posted...

uh bro, no literally they only worked 3 days a week it was law

also LMAO do you not do household labor today?
or you rich and got a robot to do it all? LMAO

Household labor today is not really comparable to household labor back then. One figure i read was that weekly household labor in the 1930s was roughly 65 hours, compared to roughly 5 in the modern day. I assume when you're doing things like making your own clothes or growing food to feed yourself, your livestock, etc that those hours add up to quite a bit more than doing your dishes and mowing the lawn.

WingsOfGood posted...

the video and the a.i. agree

people who do not agree are those who don't like the answer

a.i. is just a supplement as it arrives at said answer by quickly gobbling up information out there where the guy in the video is all about the period

Don't know about the video or this subject but I've seen AI, especially Google's AI, be incorrect way more often than not. And a lot of times it is incorrectly referencing information.

Nukazie posted...

try looking for their lifespan too

irrelevant

lifespan was determined by low science as disease would kill you without proper medicine

this has nothing do with how long you work

pretzelcoatl posted...

Household labor today is not really comparable to household labor back then. One figure i read was that weekly household labor in the 1930s was roughly 65 hours, compared to roughly 5 in the modern day. I assume when you're doing things like making your own clothes or growing food to feed yourself, your livestock, etc that those hours add up to quite a bit more than doing your dishes and mowing the lawn.

and?
you still have to do it

what does it being harder have to do with how much you can be legally made to work?

seems like reaching for an excuse

"oh well since we have modern inventions then we should work more" this your thought?

pretzelcoatl posted...

Do you think that farming your own plot of land is easy? It's seems like you work for free for 3 days and the rest of the week you have to make sure you and your family won't starve when winter hits

I have not watched the video but I can't just assume people were Big Chilling 4 days a week if you also had to work your own land

I mean you're just planting seeds in the dirt. To set up crops large enough to feed your family and cover your taxes, probably didn't take that much time.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/brwtTPaZP7E

008Zulu posted...

I mean you're just planting seeds in the dirt. To set up crops large enough to feed your family and cover your taxes, probably didn't take that much time.

Alright man, quit and grow all your own food then. Don't know what to tell you, but it's not like you're going to make me believe that life was magically so much easier in medieval times.

pretzelcoatl posted...

it's not like you're going to make me believe that life was magically so much easier in medieval times

that isn't what anyone said

a simple fact was put forth:
peasants only worked 3 days a week as it was law

you: no no no I must have it better than them

ok? you probably do due to modern science
like, they couldn't easily heat their home in the winter congratulations

but that doesn't erase that you probably work more than 3 days a week
the fact is still fact
but they did not

Wtf is this thread

BlackScythe0 posted...

Wtf is this thread

wym

this is a cool video about how peasants viewed themselves and their state and in said discussion it is mentioned they only worked 3 days a week

how interesting

WingsOfGood posted...

as seen in the op thanks to a.i, , they may rest on these days

must we make up fiction because it breaks the mold of what we were told? interesting that we weren't told they only worked 3 days a week is it not?

You are being needlessly defensive and making assumptions about responses. You're acting like people are defending some conspiracy. Also, maybe your public education was trash, but this was something they taught in my grade school, at least to an extent.

They also did no "work" during the cold season, living off of what was saved up and stored. That being said, just surviving was a lot more work than what we do now. Whether or not they were paid depends on what service they provided to whom, but most were just sharecroppers. Their "pay" was whatever they grew, minus whatever they owed in taxes.

I get that having less work is appealing, and there are other arguments to be made for that, but the argument that sharecroppers didn't have as many hours as we do just doesn't hold up.

this channel is great!

How to poop in your armor!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEA3lJawFLA

WingsOfGood posted...

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/brwtTPaZP7E

I'm assuming you have a better source than a series of vague statements put to AI generated images in youtube shorts.

Feudalism still existed into the 1900s in places like Russia and China. Peasant life was well documented (including pictures and video).

Evening_Dragon posted...

You're acting like people are defending some conspiracy. Also, maybe your public education was trash, but this was something they taught in my grade school, at least to an extent.

good for you

Evening_Dragon posted...

That being said, just surviving was a lot more work than what we do now.

the work you do for yourself such as say in modern day remodeling your home, is not the same as normal work so this is always disingenuous to bring up

yes it took them longer to dry their clothing as they had no dryer, but what does this have to do with their relationship between them and the lord? nothing

the same, your boss don't care how you dry your clothes today...if you have to go to the Washateria and it takes hours your boss don't care, this doesn't mean you work longer hours...

Evening_Dragon posted...

I get that having less work is appealing, and there are other arguments to be made for that,

why is it an argument? why does the fact that they worked less days feel like an attack on modern man?
no I am not needlessly defensive, I just state a fact and people go "well er they had worse lives so ha!"
umm no, that is stupid way to think as it is irrelevant to their work week

the lords who owned the land had worse life than modern man cause guess what? they also didn't have heaters, dryers and modern medicine or modern transportation

ssjevot posted...

Feudalism still existed into the 1900s in places like Russia and China. Peasant life was well documented (including pictures and video).

it still exists today in places like NK to some extent

but that is irrelevant to the simple idea that Medieval Peasants worked 3 days a week unless you are saying NK farmers only work 3 days a week and have a list of rights and special holidays like Medieval Peasants did

You either die a serf, or you live long enough to become the villein.

Paragon21XX posted...

You either die a serf, or you live long enough to become the villein.

you cannot bring a villein to ruin

guess I'm a medieval peasant.

he says it is a MYTH that Medieval people had bad breathe and bad teeth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcVwcvWePhU

arpioisme
5 years ago
as a dentist, i can say that you are correct and spot on there. clove oil (eugenol) is still used today as local pain reliever for pulpitis, irritation of the pulp tissues (not for rotten pulp though, that need different treatment). in middle east, even today some people still use chewing sticks taken from salvadora persica twigs. and the salt-clove treatment is still being used by people in indonesia as some kind of gargling mouthwash.

ewww they used human poop on the farm and washed clothes in urine after maturing it for 6 weeks but I guess at that point it is just ammonia

susanlangley4294
3 years ago
Excepting the smell, stale urine has myriad uses through history. In addition to the leather working and laundry referenced in the video, there are uses as mordants in dyeing and in medicine (legitimate versus some of the quackery) among others. The joy of being an archaeologist is excavating latrines because the preservation is often so good and also dealing with historic textiles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FQrDMDTVSQ

WingsOfGood posted...

what is your point?

people seem to always get pissy when it is brought up peasants worked less and instead of think "huh, why is it that peasants worked less than me" try to make up reasons why it must be ok and justified

also they did not work for free they got paid

Why are you so fucking weird

Cacciato posted...

Why are you so fucking weird

Pretty sure they're just trolling tbh

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mcgog5/how_much_time_did_premodern_agriculture_workers/gtm6p56/

Cacciato posted...

Why are you so fucking weird

better question is why isn't the first reply "interesting" or "I knew that"

instead it is "do you think this was easy?"

think over that for awhile and you might answer your own question

WingsOfGood posted...

as seen in the op thanks to a.i, , they may rest on these days

Oh yeah, they could rest.
...if they wanted to starve!

Foppe posted...

Oh yeah, they could rest.
...if they wanted to starve!

or what if they got what they needed to done?

Piplup_Sniper posted...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mcgog5/how_much_time_did_premodern_agriculture_workers/gtm6p56/

Who needs a professional historian with sources when you have AI and YouTube vids?

I-is TC okay?

ssjevot posted...

Who needs a professional historian with sources when you have AI and YouTube vids?

false, that quote admits they had control over their own hours
it in no way denies what is stated in my op
instead it only suggests that however despite their FREEDOM note again FREEDOM over their own hours and wages, they would have more things to do for themselves because they don't have modern technology or industrialization

which I already spoke on

also well looky here I got sources of experts

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/i4igt7/comment/g0kh4kt/

Juliet Schor even argues that within the past two or three decades, the relationship between the worker and the workplace, the expectation of work and productivity, has changed even more, and that Americans are working more with less leisure than similar jobs had in the 60s or before.
To give a long, long story a short summation: yeah, it seems like modern folks work longer for less leisure than at many times and places in the past, but the more compelling observation, in my opinion, is the erosion of the ability to wield power in the workplace. Wage conditions and contract work in boilerplate leave little room for what a 16th century journeyman or even a 14th century farmer might expect as their just treatment, and the tools for hitting back today are curtailed, legally and culturally. But we should bear in mind that this is not universal, and work-conditions even just limited to a few centuries in Europe fluctuate widely.

sources
James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages
B. Ann Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order
Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (of which, an excerpt is available, here )
Frances and Joseph Gies, Life in a Medieval Castle and Life in a Medieval Village
Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution
Valerie Allen, On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages
Alessandro Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance
Steven Ozment, Three Behaim Boys

https://youtu.be/hvk_XylEmLo?si=7KhvYSdJ0XBBe6OI
This guy i believe is generally trustworthy
It is 30 minutes long, so be ready for that

Edit: though i just looked up "is Historia Civilis reliable?" And the first thing that came up was a critique on this exact video, which i'm gonna read now
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoriaCivilis/comments/171bsiu/historia_civiliss_work_gets_almost_everything/

this some interesting stuff:

A 16th century curmudgeon, the Bishop of Durham James Pilkington, wrote of the work ethic he observed:
The labouring man will take his rest long in the morning; a good piece of the day is spent afore he come at his work; then he must have his breakfast, though he have not earned it at his accustomed hour, or else there is grudging and murmuring; when the clock smiteth, he will cast down his burden in the midway, and whatsoever he is in hand with, he will leave it as it is, though many times it is marred afore he come again; he may not lose his meat, what danger soever the work is in. At noon he must have his sleeping time, then his bever in the afternoon, which spendeth a great part of the day; and when his hour cometh at night, at the first stroke of the clock he casteth down his tools, leaveth his work, in what need or case soever the work standeth.

further

WOW

Guild journeymen of the Holy Roman Empire in the same century had a tradition they called Guter Montag or Good Monday: their masters would allow, and sometimes even pay for, a bout of monday-afternoon drinking. Every monday. Post-industrial writers cite this as evidence of the poor work ethic and of the inherent laziness of the worker before the industrial economy forced them into stricter discipline, which is an idea of course that has a lot of problematic aspects to our relationship with work today.

this is DAMNING for modern work ethic

Yeah they worked as slaves for the local lord for three days a week to avoid being executed or jailed, and spent all their remaining working hours working on the land they rented from the lord in order to hopefully have enough food to survive.

This kind of quasi-slave labor was always super unproductive because nobody wanted to do it and they were completely exhausted and demoralized all the time.

interesting stuff

To add to what u/PartyMoses has said, the debate among historians of leisure is very similar to parallel debates within cultural and social history about many other concepts or terms: namely, before we had a concept like "leisure", was there something empirically real in the lives of human beings that we could call "leisure"?
There's a well-known debate in the field of leisure history between Peter Burke (no relation) and JL Marfany that illuminates this question--Burke's original essay "The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe" in the journal Past and Present in 1995 and Marfany's rejoinder in the same journal in 1997 (followed by an additional response to the response by Burke).
Burke argues that while late medieval serfs may have not been constantly engaged in labor, they did not conceptualize the time they were not working in terms of what we think of as leisure. Leisure, Burke argues, is specifically defined as time off from work within the regimentation of time that characterized industrial societies between the late 18th and late 20th Century. All the things that we associate with leisure--hobbies, private time with family and friends in domestic settings, organized social occasions like drinking in pubs or watching sports, the consumption of culture (reading, watching TV, going to the opera, etc.)--in Burke's view only really exist as a distinct form of sociocultural experience in modernity and are only defined as the opposite or alternative to work in industrial regimes.
Burke observes that late medieval European peasants did generally engage in distinctive kinds of cultural or social activities during "not-work" and didn't divide or imagine their days in those terms. The only thing, in his view, that seems somewhat like leisure are festivals or fairs and these, he notes, were mostly associated with holy days on the Christian calendar and with religious observation--that they might have contests or spectacles built into them was a sort of sideline. Burke also points out that the origins of leisure were very distinctly associated at first with the aristocracy or "gentlemanly" classes, who in the early modern period increasingly found themselves with less and less to do and yet in some cases with more and more resources available to do as they pleased--and that this is the era in which many new forms of "leisure-like" activities started to emerge. Industrialization allowed the concept to spread to new middle-classes and eventually workers--but leisure was also something they had to fight for.
Marfany replies: come on, late medieval peasants drank with friends, they had boisterous conversations with their families and neighbors, they took breaks from agricultural work and just lazed about, they went swimming or daydreamed--and all of this was "leisure" even if it wasn't conceptualized as such by them and it wasn't as tightly organized or as various in its forms as in the modern period. In essence, Marfany says, "the concept might be new, but it is giving a name to something much more universal".
Since the 1990s, you can find echoes of this debate all up and down the historiography of leisure. Were Roman gladiatorial matches "leisure" of the same kind as our modern football matches? It looks like it at first--but some historians who study gladiatorial matches argue that they were more akin to religious ceremonies or had other purposes in the minds of the participants and spectators than what we would think of as leisure. And yet other historians reply as Marfany does: if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck: people seem to have gone to the matches for fun, they certainly weren't at work, there's nothing that precludes a fun, leisurely activity from having additional political, spiritual or cultural meanings.
You might think the way out of this is simply to ask, as the OP does, how much time people spent working and then figure that the remainder is all leisure. The less time working, the more leisure, certainly? And yet I think we today recognize first that in our current economy (all the more so in covid-19), distinguishing work from not-work can be remarkably difficult. Am I working in answering this? I am an employed historian who believes professors have some form of public responsibility. But I'm not at all required to do it--no one in my workplace knows that I do. I can disappear for months at a time from r/AskHistorians and no one sends an email to my employer. So I must be doing it for fun as a kind of not-work. Which is also true but...not really the same kind of not-work as when I'm out on a walk or working on my photography.
It isn't necessarily easy to separate work and not-work in pre-industrial societies either. In the region of southern Africa that I know best, there's a harvest ritual that involves threshing grain like sorghum or millet--it's 'fun' in the sense that people get to recite amusingly insulting songs and poems about each other, there's some drinking involved--but it's also labor. Marshall Sahlins has famously suggested in his essay on "Stone Age economics" that pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers had the most leisure time and the least work time of any human society, and he certainly has a point--agriculture makes extreme demands on human labor, especially seasonally. But again take a confusing bit of evidence, since we don't have much direct observational knowledge of their lives--were cave paintings "fun" or were they "work"--a practical exercise intended to give spiritual aid and encouragement to hunters?
I think it's reasonable to say that modern life between about 1800 and 1990 was the most regimented in terms of time in human history, and the boundaries between work and not-work were the most formally defined and enforced. And as such, they were also something that employers and rulers could restrict or constrain, and in some ways, human beings both had more to do when they were not working and yet less time to do it in. We may be in an era when the boundaries of work and not-work are breaking down again, but that is seemingly not returning time back to people--thought that is a debate outside the bounds of r/AsHistorians.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corv%C3%A9e

sfcalimari posted...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corv%C3%A9e

Europe

Medieval agricultural corve was not entirely unpaid. By custom the workers could expect small payments, often in the form of food and drink consumed on the spot. Corve sometimes included military conscription, and the term is also occasionally used in a slightly divergent sense to mean forced requisition of military supplies; this most often took the form of cartage, a lord's right to demand wagons for military transport.
Because agricultural corve tended to be demanded by the lord at the same time that the peasants needed to tend their own plots e.g. at planting and harvest it was an object of serious resentment. By the 16th century its use in agricultural settings was on the decline and it became increasingly replaced by paid labour. It nevertheless persisted in many areas of Europe until the French Revolution and beyond.[10]

thanks!

Someone didn't get TC attention for a bit, so I guess he's doing another repeat performance of his greatest hit.