Comment on The Peasant Life

• AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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:

  Human beings have long been acquainted with the notion of absolute, or sidereal, time by observing the heavens, where celestial events happen with exact and predictable regularity. But the skies are typically treated as the domain of perfection. Priests or monks might organize their lives around celestial time, but life on earth was typically assumed to be messier. Below the heavens, there is no absolute yardstick to apply. To give an obvious example: if there are twelve hours from dawn to dusk, there’s little point saying a place is three hours’ walk away when you don’t know the season when someone is traveling, since winter hours will be half the length of summer ones. When I lived in Madagascar, I found that rural people—who had little use for clocks—still often described distance the old-fashioned way and said that to walk to another village would take two cookings of a pot of rice. In medieval Europe, people spoke similarly of something as taking “three paternosters,” or two boilings of an egg. This sort of thing is extremely common. In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.

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  • huginn@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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.

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    • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The 8 hour workday is a very modern invention.

      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.

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• PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  What is a peasant farmer doing during the winter when nothing is growing?

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  • huginn@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Depends on the area but they were constantly busy. Warm seasons were 7 days a week sunup til sundown.

    For the cold seasons:

    • Wheat and barely were sown in the winter so that when spring showed up the crops sprouted and grew quickly
    • Logging/forestry work as well as trapping
    • Mending of tools, spinning of wool/flax into usable fabrics
    • Processing of slaughtered game into foodstuffs
    • Processing & protection of food stores
    • Repairs to your house
    • Ice fishing to augment stores of food
    • Building and fixing fences
    • Distilling and pickling foods

    And of course:

    Hoping and praying that they had enough food to not starve to death.

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