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.
Comment on The Peasant Life
gnutrino@programming.dev 7 months agoI mean, the actual source for this statistic is usually “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure” by Juliet Schor who in turn got the number from an unpublished paper written by Gregory Clark in 1986. Clark did eventually publish a paper in 2018 where he increased his estimate to 250-300 days (which may still be less than some modern workers work).
geissi@feddit.de 7 months ago
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.cro_magnon_gilf@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
Idk man, somebody else having made a similar wild claim doesn’t mean that OP or the memes creator had a source at all.
huginn@feddit.it 7 months ago
261 days is working every single week 5 days a week.
Peasants worked sunup til sundown 250-300 days a year.
Life fucking blew as a peasant.
AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yes, but let’s do a breakdown of the average day in the life of a Medieval European peasant. Let’s assume it’s a standard 8hr day for a male serf aged 15-20 years.
Sun comes up, start the day with perhaps a half hour for breakfast, another half hour for prayer, depending on the day, then it’s out to the fields for 3-4 hours work, which was dependent on the particular produce of the farm where he worked and the season. Livestock tended to, fields plowed, that sort of thing. Then an hour for evening prayer and supper, perhaps some beer with the lads at the tavern before sun down.
Another thing you’re forgetting is that we measure time completely differently than they did in Medieval Europe. I’ll let David Graeber, of “Bullshit Jobs” explain:
huginn@feddit.it 7 months ago
The 8 hour workday is a very modern invention.
Farmers have always worked 12+ hour days, starting before dawn to feed animals and ending their days with the sun going down, serfs we’re no different. Once they were done with farm labor at sundown they worked at home on anything that needed mending for the next day, ate boiled veggies and then went to bed.
Farming is a way of life where you dance a razor’s edge. You don’t have the luxury of time not working.
AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I’ll concede that point. And I’d like to add that the modern clocks as we know them are also a very modern invention. Farmers in Medieval Europe certainly did not have a device in their homes which chimed the hour with regular and exact precision. The closest equivalent they would have had were clock towers, starting about the fourteenth century, funded by local merchants guilds. It was these same merchants who were in the habit of keeping a human skull in their offices as a memento mori, reminding them to make good use of their time, as each chime of the clock brought them one hour closer to death. There were no time clocks which a serf could use to punch in or out of work for the day, no payroll and accounting department in the employ of the local lord to keep track of all hours worked, etc. Time was not a grid against work could be measured because the work was the measure itself.
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 7 months ago
What is a peasant farmer doing during the winter when nothing is growing?
huginn@feddit.it 7 months ago
Depends on the area but they were constantly busy. Warm seasons were 7 days a week sunup til sundown.
For the cold seasons:
And of course:
Hoping and praying that they had enough food to not starve to death.