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.
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.
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).
Did the fourteen century mark a great change from the thirteenth, or were conditions largely the same throughout the general era?
Massively different. The 14th century saw the death of over half the population by Plague, and then another 20%. That meant a HUGE labour shortage, higher wages by a large amount and “unhappy” landowners and the immediate end of the 100 year war with France. It also hugely increased mobility for peasants, since the receiving nobility would happily accept them (despite technically being allowed to).
It resulted in the Peasants revolt in the 1380s which saw the tower of London sacked before it was suppressed. So landowners had a lot of reasons to keep the peasants at least moderately happy.
So the late 14th century Britain was basically a worker paradise compared to the rest of the middle ages. But only because a good 75% of the population died from disease and famine in the decades before.
@unfreeradical sorry, I can't cite any sources. I read around this subject the first time I saw this meme, because I was curious as the people who are usually cited as doing less total work than us are hunter-gatherers.
Here are a couple of pages about types of peasant, work, etc.
If you're saying this because you disagree and have sources of your own to recommend, please do as I'm always open to learning more.
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.
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.
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.
They worked for their Lord, and in return could live there and be subsistence farmers. And the late middle ages had taxes on everything.
Want to mill your wheat? Use the lords mill. Bake bread? Lords ovens. Also pay your tithe, and more taxes due to the war of course.
Enjoy your holiday, but you’ll still have to work your own field, milk the goats, gather firewood (no cutting trees from the lords forest though), fetch and boil water, mend the roof, put food away for winter, etc etc. But enjoy only working for rent every other day.
I feel doubtful that the scenario involves taxes as you describe them.
Under a manor, polity and production are fully integrated. Each peasant takes a share the harvest, and may have entitlements for the commons, while the rest falls under control of the lord and his house.
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