Todays rant - Medieval peasants work less days than modern workers or did they ?

 

    As the meme claims,  Medieval peasants, especially in Europe, worked significantly fewer days in a year than modern workers despite the common perception their lives were filled with endless labor. Estimates suggest that peasants worked around 150 to  180 days per year. Here's a break down of why their work year was shorter.

1. Holy Days (Feast Days and Religious Holidays): The medieval calendar was filled with religious holidays and feast days, many of which were considered days of rest.  Depending on the region, there could be up to 80 or more days of rest related to religious observances, including major holidays like Easter, Christmas, and saints’ feast days.

1. Seasonal Nature of Agricultural Work: Peasant labor was largely agricultural, which meant that work was intense during certain seasons (like planting and harvest), but there were also long periods of downtime, especially in northern hemisphere in winter when the fields were not being worked between Nov and Feb.

2. Sundays Off: In most Christian regions, Sundays were considered days of rest, further reducing the number of working days in a year.

The comparison between medieval and modern work schedules remains a subject of ongoing historical research and debate. While medieval life was still hard, especially during busy agricultural seasons, peasants likely enjoyed more days of rest than the typical modern worker, who often works around 250 days a year.

Why is this not necessarily accurate ?

Firstly this amount of days is contested 

Jacques Le Goff suggests  that peasants worked around 150 to 250 days per year, depending on the specific region and agricultural conditions  Le Goff, Jacques. "Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages", University of Chicago Press, 1980).

Gregory Clark, a medievalist and economic historian at UC Davis, initially estimated that medieval English peasants worked about 150 days per year 4. This estimate was cited in Juliet Schor's book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, 1992 download here  [and became widely circulated. However, Clark has since revised his estimate. The search results state: "Clark no longer believes that his estimate of 150 days, made early in his career, is accurate. 'There's a reasonable controversy going on in medieval economic history,' Clark told me. He now thinks that English peasants in the late Middle Ages may have worked closer to 300 days a year." The Atlantic .

Secondly its missing context

This is a narrow scope -what else should you include measuring work

Comparing days work does not reflect amount of work done per year. Assuming medieval peasants may have had more non-working days than modern workers, it's important to note that this didn't necessarily mean less overall work or more leisure time. During summer, workdays were long , longer than modern workers.  workdays could stretch from dawn to dusk, lasting up to 12-18 hours. yeolde  cfi . 

What is work ?

If youre only counting work for the landlord v employee work days ,  then work to keep yourself alive must also be counted in a meaningful way as significant and more time was spent on essential household tasks cooking and cleaning versus today with modern houses with better insulation and sealing , washing machines, stoves , jugs, stoves to which significantly reduce those tasks that took days to mere few hours  , all paid for by your working salary .
The socialist view is women work in the home in capitalist society , raising next generation of workers and keeping current ones alive, its just unpaid work.

Animal care

Animal care whether the landlords or your own is a 24/7 job ie theirs no days off. adamsmith institute. Tis does not apply for the modern 9-5 capitalist workers thou this figure is reducing.

Death
The poor including peasants/workers died at much earlier age in medieval period pre capitalism.- less than half of what it is now so yes their total work days were less but thats not a good thing .

This raises the point of this rant,

But of course this glimpse into the culture of medieval peasantry is far from complete, and it would be foolish to conclude that the olden days were so much better, or that our working days are so much worse. richardrabil

Where in the foreword to her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, the historian Barbara W. Tuchman offered a warning to people with simplistic ideas about what life was like in the medieval world, and what that might say about humanity as a whole: You think you know, but you have no idea.

She goes on to say , the medieval period, which spans roughly 500ad to 1500ad, presents some problems for people trying to craft uncomplicated stories. Historians, she noted, have disagreed  on basic facts of the era: how many people there were in various parts of Europe, what they ate, how much money they had, and whether war deaths meant society was overpopulated with women, or childbirth deaths meant it was overpopulated with men. What’s even more complicated is determining the nature of life—how well different kinds of people lived, the quality of familial bonds, what people did to occupy their time and amuse themselves, how they thought about their lives. Draw broad, confident conclusions at your own peril. The Atlantic .

Conversely it should be noted that while in the post WWII boom period people had secure regular jobs where one man could support a family on regular hours, but since the end of that era and the forced introduction of neo liberalism , introduction of computers , internet, AI and covid19 impact, wealth inequality and job disparity have grown substantially . With many workers now having multiple jobs  or working 6 days a week thanks to low wages with many services or shops open 24/7 thanks to competition and consumer desire. This demand is partially filled by the gig economy, characterised by self employed &  part time work itself a problem, while promoting flexibility brings its own challenges. (Katz and Krueger, "The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995-2015").  Some workers have insecure low paid jobs like fast food industry while others in trade carpenters, plumbers, electricians are overworked. While those IT or other computing job or phone reliant work can be on call 24/7 from home, blurring work life boundaries  and making unpredictable and often long days. Additionally the low wage neo liberal economy has produced more government and personal debt, this is delayed earning which means delayed working hours to repay. 

Agricultural jobs now make up a small proportion of work in developed countries due to modern machinery, making direct comparisons between peasant agriculture and modern capitalist workers challenging. The nature of work has fundamentally changed, with different pressures and demands on workers today.

All of these factors make comparisons between medieval and modern work patterns quite complex and potentially misleading if not carefully contextualized.