How do we define mediæval? (I low-key hate the words mediæval and Middle Ages, partly because of Eurocentrism). There’s no such thing as a “mediæval peasant” really, there were various people at various times. Let me ask: how many days a year does a proletarian work? How long is a piece of string? Now if you look at the historical debate that spawned this meme, they’re actually talking about England 1200-1600.
Are we talking about necessary labour (subsistence farming), surplus labour (for the lord), or both? There is employment for the lord, but then you’ve got to mend your tools, thatch your roof, gather and chop your firewood, grow your own household’s food, etc.
It seems the 150 day claim comes from Gregory Clark’s 1986 paper ‘Impatience, Poverty, and Open Field Agriculture’. And from Juliet Schor’s book, but I think Clark may be her source.
If you look at Gregory Clark’s 2017 paper with DOI 10.111/ehr.12528 it seems he has changed his mind. So is the “150 days” claim based on an obsolete paper from 1986? Bottom of page 17/top of page 18 he says it’s clear people worked 300 days in 1860 because record keeping is good then, but there was an increase TO 300 in the years 1650-1800. Figure 6 does show some very low numbers in the years 1200-1600 (which is presumably what the meme is talking about) taken from ‘British Economic Growth, 1270-1870’ by Stephen Broadberry et al.
This is the best source: Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf’s paper ‘Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England’ gives similar conclusions to Broadberry, especiall in Figure 4, i.e. around 200 days 1250-1300, very low (around 100) 1300 to 1500, and rising to approach 365 days a year around 1850. The paper says “Overall, the working year agrees reasonably well with the trend in the independent estimates found in the literature” and then cites 5 papers. Note that the calculation is based on wages, so we are talking about the number of wage-paying days; they would have subsistence farmed on top of that.
It’s conceivable that Marx’s era may have been the single least chill time in all human history: worse than hunter-gatherers, peasants, or modern social democracy.
My computer’s overheating, might edit this comment later.
To add to it: Matt Christman has said a lot of times that peasants weren’t motivated to work harder than necessary for their survival and I agree with him. It was in the best interest of the Lord to keep his peasants alive of course, but there was absolutely no incentive for the peasant to provide the lord with more produce than the minimum. Supervision probably also wasn’t very stringent. The Lord himself certainly didn’t look over every peasants shoulder. Sure, there would be some village guards or whatever, but they probably didn’t do that either. The peasants were free people at least nominally and you couldn’t force them to do these things without risking unrest etc.
Knowing how hard I work when I know my boss doesn’t have the time to check my work…I think those people slacked off A LOT once their own community had what it needed. Some of these linked papers mention a workday of 12 hours and to that I saw: sure, for a few weeks in spring and autumn that may have been true. But the rest of the time, those peasants would spend a lot of time around the village water cooler.
There’s complexity to the question:
How do we define mediæval? (I low-key hate the words mediæval and Middle Ages, partly because of Eurocentrism). There’s no such thing as a “mediæval peasant” really, there were various people at various times. Let me ask: how many days a year does a proletarian work? How long is a piece of string? Now if you look at the historical debate that spawned this meme, they’re actually talking about England 1200-1600.
Are we talking about necessary labour (subsistence farming), surplus labour (for the lord), or both? There is employment for the lord, but then you’ve got to mend your tools, thatch your roof, gather and chop your firewood, grow your own household’s food, etc.
It seems the 150 day claim comes from Gregory Clark’s 1986 paper ‘Impatience, Poverty, and Open Field Agriculture’. And from Juliet Schor’s book, but I think Clark may be her source.
If you look at Gregory Clark’s 2017 paper with DOI
10.111/ehr.12528it seems he has changed his mind. So is the “150 days” claim based on an obsolete paper from 1986? Bottom of page 17/top of page 18 he says it’s clear people worked 300 days in 1860 because record keeping is good then, but there was an increase TO 300 in the years 1650-1800. Figure 6 does show some very low numbers in the years 1200-1600 (which is presumably what the meme is talking about) taken from ‘British Economic Growth, 1270-1870’ by Stephen Broadberry et al.This is the best source: Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf’s paper ‘Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England’ gives similar conclusions to Broadberry, especiall in Figure 4, i.e. around 200 days 1250-1300, very low (around 100) 1300 to 1500, and rising to approach 365 days a year around 1850. The paper says “Overall, the working year agrees reasonably well with the trend in the independent estimates found in the literature” and then cites 5 papers. Note that the calculation is based on wages, so we are talking about the number of wage-paying days; they would have subsistence farmed on top of that.
It’s conceivable that Marx’s era may have been the single least chill time in all human history: worse than hunter-gatherers, peasants, or modern social democracy.
My computer’s overheating, might edit this comment later.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2589850
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
Kenyon, Nora. “Labour Conditions in Essex in the Reign of Richard II,” Economic History Review, April 1934. https://doi.org/10.2307/2589850
Generally, across all historical periods, I’ve rarely seen estimates of anyone working less than 1300 or more than 2300 hours a year.
These are good points and sources, thank you!
To add to it: Matt Christman has said a lot of times that peasants weren’t motivated to work harder than necessary for their survival and I agree with him. It was in the best interest of the Lord to keep his peasants alive of course, but there was absolutely no incentive for the peasant to provide the lord with more produce than the minimum. Supervision probably also wasn’t very stringent. The Lord himself certainly didn’t look over every peasants shoulder. Sure, there would be some village guards or whatever, but they probably didn’t do that either. The peasants were free people at least nominally and you couldn’t force them to do these things without risking unrest etc.
Knowing how hard I work when I know my boss doesn’t have the time to check my work…I think those people slacked off A LOT once their own community had what it needed. Some of these linked papers mention a workday of 12 hours and to that I saw: sure, for a few weeks in spring and autumn that may have been true. But the rest of the time, those peasants would spend a lot of time around the village water cooler.