> In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze.
I have serious doubts about this. Maybe someone could provide additional insight. I doubt all time not working the fields was "relaxing during long holidays". It would likely be spent on other chores.
Food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explodes), so quaffing ale for a week is not impossible for a rich wedding, but unlikely in general. In my childhood I lived near rural areas (not US) and in the days when farm hands cannot do anything (rain; off season) they tend to just get drunk which, to me, hardly qualifies as a vacation time.
Bottom line: I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant and I suspect the author would not want to, either.
>Bottom line: I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant and I suspect the author would not want to, either.
But is that the issue here? What does that sentence even mean, or add to the discussion?
The article quotes the historian as finding that peasants in 14th century England put in at most 150 days of work per year. This was, according to them, an abnormal period of especially large wages. That tangent in preen-day America bears little relevance. Also when you say "food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explodes)", you're making a big oversimplification. There are other factors at work: diseases, warfare, etc.
The fact that peasants did not work more hours is tied to the fact that they were agrarian laborers. Once you've brought in the harvest, what is there to do but lie around and wait until the end of winter? Indeed, "lie around" is most of what they did, and remaining inactive to lower their metabolism was actually a survival strategy to deal with the limited amount of food they had: burn fewer calories, eat fewer calories.
As the article notes, peasant life consisted of working only part of the year, with longer workdays during harvest season, and short work days (or no work at all) during the rest of the year. In some climates, like the Pyrenees and the Alps, people essentially "hibernated" during the winter: they stayed indoors, lived off their food stores, and expended as little energy as possible.
Citing Graham Robb's The Discovery of France: 'An official report on the Nièvre in 1844 described Burgundian day-laborers thusly: '“After making the necessary repairs to their tools, these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.” Entering this inactive state was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies.'
The time that they spent not working was not some leisurely edifying "vacation" that they enjoyed as a luxury; for French peasants in the 1700's and 1800's, being inactive was a survival strategy.
The parent article paints the time spent remaining inactive in a romantic light, remarking that "the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze." The reality is probably closer to the fact that he probably risked starvation if he regularly engaged in any sort of vigorous activity (no surplus calories to burn on frivolities like dancing or sports or other active forms of recreation), and it's quite possible that the afternoon naps may have felt more like an obligation than an opportunity to "relax." Lying around all day doing "nothing" sounds less like a vacation and more like a prison sentence (quite literally, in the sense that it probably resembles the life that some people live inside of modern prisons, doing essentially nothing as they wait for the days to pass).
> I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant and I suspect the author would not want to, either.
I'm glad to have anesthesia, antibiotics, and so on, but if they lived as we do today, the Earth, seas, and air would have been choked with plastic, mercury, greenhouse gases, and so on centuries ago.
We're externalizing our costs to future generations, who will have to pay to clean up our messes, or live with them.
Would you prefer living in a way that leaves the Earth as clean as you found it? If so, are you? Why don't you?
If you owned land, and did not experience natural disasters, you could eat very well. Chickens are easy to take care of and growing enough vegetables is not that hard. The biggest worry was catastrophic crop failure of staples like wheat or potatoes due to weather, or disease or pests. The other worry was stored food spoiling over winter in cellars. Beans and pickled fruits/vegetables like cabbage is what got you through. Harvest time was busiest season. Winter you more or less bundled up and stayed indoors as much as you could, venturing out to take care of your animals. I spent my childhood at my grandmas farm. Due to communism, life was very primitive.
Well, if you're not paying for health and dental, and you don't have any corporate training programs, and there aren't OSHA requirements and other costly regulations, you really have to give something up as an employer to retain good help.
"Leisure" might not mean exactly what we think it means today.
I think it'll be obvious to anyone who's worked in a manual labour job e.g. construction, farming, etc, even with today's tools,
you can't physically do these at anything but a "leisurely pace" and a limited amount of hours a day, with breaks for rest, food etc.
Specially in warmer climates. Claiming that this means that life was easy is a little bit dishonest here.
There's a limit to what's humanly possible, digging ditches with shovels for 8 hours a day is not equal to sitting in an office for same 8 hours.
No matter how many breaks you have, and at how "leisurely pace" you're digging.
A lens to look at this through is the struggle for control over the population. The competing factions in the Middle Ages were very different from those now - so the manifestations of authoritarianism naturally differed in the Middle Ages. Large numbers of holy days (holidays) went hand in hand with simony and temporal power emanating from Rome. The church was just as rapacious and self-interested as the lords who claimed ownership over the peasantry.
So then, a fractious feudal nobility, the ruler, and the church, now fractious corporate powers and a more unified state, with the church faded to irrelevance in temporal matters. The only constant is the undiminished desire to order the lives of others in order to farm them for profit, to be the stationary bandit.
Even if matters were the same, however, the march of technology would still make the present a far better place to live than the past. It is technology, not politics, that is the greatest driver of quality of life.
This sounds like it could be explained by the same structural problems that communist nations went through ... in that if you don't own the land, and the proceeds of what you make don't really belong to you and there is no incentive to make more than what your neighbour makes ... why not put in the least amount of work you can.
> As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually.
Is this true? In the UK, 'standard' holiday entitlement for most jobs starts at 20 days annually, and that doesn't include official days off such as Xmas, New Year, Easter etc.
Yes, this is true for the average American white collar worker at the start of employment, sort of earning fractional vacation hours per hour of work. Service worker - not sure about that - is that the same as zero hours contract employee? Low unemployment has forced companies to start offering paid vacation to employees in fast food restaurants in recent years. Many teachers in public schools famously don't have to work for three months a year, but don't get paid for those three months a year.
It's not true. It's tough to find a job that doesn't offer 2 weeks and most white collar jobs offer 3 weeks (15 days). That doesn't include the typical 13 stat holidays.
I have a job in the US that offers 25 paid days of vacation, plus the standard 13.
Good (and apparently unaddressed) point. We get several more hours per day for leisure precisely because "daylight" can be continued indoors indefinitely.
Ugh. The paper reeks of political agenda. The very first sentence is:
> One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil.
What about the Communism? Why would they spread this durable myth? Because I remember hearing the same story in the Soviet school.
The paper does not make a real effort trying to consider different evidence and honestly investigate the subject. Most of the sources are related to the UK (specifically, England) with a couple referring to the US in XIX century. How do we know how much the Dutch, German, French, Russian peasants worked, let alone those in the rice-growing Asia? Finally, how about trying to research 1600s and 1700s in North America to compare apples with apples?
Even in her own paper, the results appear a bit, ahem, uneven:
> 1988 - Manufacturing workers, U.K.: 1856 hours
> 1400-1600 - Farmer-miner, adult male, U.K.: 1980 hours
> Calculated from Ian Blanchard's estimate of 180 days per year. Assumes 11-hour day
Yes, it's 180 days, but 11 hours each. Did she actually try working 11 hours on a backbreaking menial job? Does she actually believe that 11 hours being a miner in 1500s is the same as 11 hours in the office or even a modern assembly line?
"The paper does not make a real effort trying to consider different evidence and honestly investigate the subject."
Here's some food for thought: If you don't work an additional hour, because the economic environment you are in has provided you no meaningful economic task that would be worth doing in that hour, are you better off than someone who does have that opportunity and works for benefit in that time?
It's difficult to compare across such time spans meaningfully. I've often thought if we could bring someone forward in time from, say, a thousand years ago and give them a tour of your local 7-11 that it would re-align a lot of people's perspectives on our modern societies. (I'm not even picking that for the cold drinks or snacks, either; it's things like "here's a tube of cream that you can buy for roughly 10 minutes labor, tops, that when you smear it on a cut makes it so the cut won't kill you anymore". Or, "condoms", that work reliably. I'd expect tears from our visitor and a high likelihood of violent resistence if you try to send them back.)
The argument is not capitalism vs state socialism ("communism"). That you seem to think it is, shows exactly how well propaganda has worked on you, from both of those sources.
The excerpt doesn't come from a paper -- it comes from the book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, by Juliet B. Schor: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w... If you want to be snarky, get the details right.
Peasants' work output were calorie-restricted. 11 hours backbreaking were the norm during harvest, but not in the less busier seasons. In the northern countries, snow and lack of sunlight made working impossible for several months per year. Instead, they ate very little food slept through most days.
The comparison ignores the blistering daily poverty of a medieval peasant. This is not merely a lack of technology - that would be a historical argument.
But even basic amenities that could be easily built in this time period were difficult to come by. Entire villages might have to share a few pieces of furniture, like a stool.
These people may have had a lot of "time off", but they spent it in horrible poverty, many months of the year near starvation, even within the context of what was available to them in their own time.
I would hazard to say that many modern office workers rarely actually accomplish 40 hours of productive work in a given week. They may be physically present, but how often are they chatting, goofing off, or standing around waiting for an interaction. Modern business is built upon availability, not necessarily toil.
And death was omnipresent. Most of your kids would die in young age, folks around you were killed by random infections or flu regularly, and there was not much to look forward to in life.
I'm going to duplicate a comment I made in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16652952), because it applies equally well here and I'm quite disappointed that I seem to be the only one pointing this out (after that thread reached more than 340 comments, a mere two other people made a similar comment to mine):
As I type this comment, there are 55 other comments in this discussion, not one of them using the word "union". That's the only feasible method I can see to enact large scale change. CEOs and other executives aren't going to change out of the kindness of their hearts, as evidenced by the fact that they could start at any point and still choose not to.
They got up to 1/2 the year off, sure. But my guess is they had to work more than 2000 hours the other half. They just compressed the hours worked into the growing season. Modern farmers do the same thing (from a rural farming community).
The problem with so many of the comments here: Of course you would sacrifice your vacation time to avoid the pains of the middle ages and to gain the advantages of today. But those advantages are not the mere consequence of us working more. They are the consequence of centuries of technological advancement. If we started working as little as medieval peasants our standards of living would not just suddenly drop to their levels but they would stay much higher.
We can have our cake and eat it too. And in passing, we would likely save planet earth doing so.
> In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in productivity.
Germany has the whole EEU working menial jobs for them. So in Germany VW workers slack off and even protest to get reduced work week, while in EEU German managers walk over a car plant with watches and time each manipulation in order to fulfill their quotas. Yet the sales are reported in Germany, so productivity metrics goes way up there. It's really naïve to think they aren't benefiting from what is essentially softer colonialism.
People really dont understand the term productivity. Productivity is produced value / hours of work. So usually people that work the hardest will have lower productivity that does not mean less value produced. Something can have very bad productivity but be very profitable and generate a lot more value than something else with bigger productivity.
Isn't labor productivity measured per-time, though? If there are diminishing marginal returns on labor (as there are on everything else) then it would make sense that those who work the least are the most productive. It doesn't mean they produce the most, though.
Conditions in Europe in the 14th century were mostly due to the Black Plague (Black Death), which killed ~50% of the European population. The result was a variety of infrastructure, institutions, and economic systems designed for a much larger population. Used goods and housing were available at very reduced rates. Labor was a scarce commodity. It took a while before Europe regained an economic system that matched its population.
Is this surprising? People in the past had much more time and much less resources. This isn't just medieval workers. It might have applied to the last two generations, before the information age allowed us to check work email first thing in the morning and last thing at night.
Because he didn't have a choice. If he could trade this vacation for more food, medication for his children, or many other resources, he gladly would - but I don't think that as a peasant in the winter you really could make anything out of your time without a capitalist society and other jobs.
All modern people have a choice about how much time they spend at their jobs. I've switched to 3-day workweek sometimes, raking 50% cut in salary; turns out, if you're not in a leading position, it's painfully obvious to negotiate. People in first world countries don't need to work 40 hours a week to avoid starvation. We do it out of our own free will, because we want more stuff.
And, out of this personal experience - because we don't really have anything better to do with our time. Even a regular, a bit boring job beats sitting around the house and watching TV. Driving your own personal projects requires a significant amount of motivation and willpower, and most of us would be too ashamed to admit that we lack it.
Note the significant difference between "leisure time" as in "playing games, socializing and making merry" and just "huddling in a primitive hut waiting for a chance to work more." It's not like he's having much fun (unless you include all the begatting that must have gone on during the winter months...)
I'm really lucky that I don't generally want more things, and the things I do want are cheap. Living in the future is freaking amazing if you enjoy making things.
[+] [-] ptero|8 years ago|reply
I have serious doubts about this. Maybe someone could provide additional insight. I doubt all time not working the fields was "relaxing during long holidays". It would likely be spent on other chores.
Food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explodes), so quaffing ale for a week is not impossible for a rich wedding, but unlikely in general. In my childhood I lived near rural areas (not US) and in the days when farm hands cannot do anything (rain; off season) they tend to just get drunk which, to me, hardly qualifies as a vacation time.
Bottom line: I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant and I suspect the author would not want to, either.
[+] [-] andrepd|8 years ago|reply
But is that the issue here? What does that sentence even mean, or add to the discussion?
The article quotes the historian as finding that peasants in 14th century England put in at most 150 days of work per year. This was, according to them, an abnormal period of especially large wages. That tangent in preen-day America bears little relevance. Also when you say "food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explodes)", you're making a big oversimplification. There are other factors at work: diseases, warfare, etc.
[+] [-] crusso|8 years ago|reply
I'd go further than that. I would not want to swap positions with a 14th century monarch.
[+] [-] Kuiper|8 years ago|reply
As the article notes, peasant life consisted of working only part of the year, with longer workdays during harvest season, and short work days (or no work at all) during the rest of the year. In some climates, like the Pyrenees and the Alps, people essentially "hibernated" during the winter: they stayed indoors, lived off their food stores, and expended as little energy as possible.
Citing Graham Robb's The Discovery of France: 'An official report on the Nièvre in 1844 described Burgundian day-laborers thusly: '“After making the necessary repairs to their tools, these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.” Entering this inactive state was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies.'
The time that they spent not working was not some leisurely edifying "vacation" that they enjoyed as a luxury; for French peasants in the 1700's and 1800's, being inactive was a survival strategy.
The parent article paints the time spent remaining inactive in a romantic light, remarking that "the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze." The reality is probably closer to the fact that he probably risked starvation if he regularly engaged in any sort of vigorous activity (no surplus calories to burn on frivolities like dancing or sports or other active forms of recreation), and it's quite possible that the afternoon naps may have felt more like an obligation than an opportunity to "relax." Lying around all day doing "nothing" sounds less like a vacation and more like a prison sentence (quite literally, in the sense that it probably resembles the life that some people live inside of modern prisons, doing essentially nothing as they wait for the days to pass).
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
The 14th century equivalent of unpaid vacation drinking malt liquor in a trailer isn’t my vision of a life of leisure.
[+] [-] spodek|8 years ago|reply
I'm glad to have anesthesia, antibiotics, and so on, but if they lived as we do today, the Earth, seas, and air would have been choked with plastic, mercury, greenhouse gases, and so on centuries ago.
We're externalizing our costs to future generations, who will have to pay to clean up our messes, or live with them.
Would you prefer living in a way that leaves the Earth as clean as you found it? If so, are you? Why don't you?
[+] [-] jungletime|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nealdt|8 years ago|reply
Wars also took place in winter when the peasants had time off!
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
Medieval peasants, as far as I know, did drink a lot of beer.
[+] [-] Fjolsvith|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwr23qwer|8 years ago|reply
I think it'll be obvious to anyone who's worked in a manual labour job e.g. construction, farming, etc, even with today's tools, you can't physically do these at anything but a "leisurely pace" and a limited amount of hours a day, with breaks for rest, food etc.
Specially in warmer climates. Claiming that this means that life was easy is a little bit dishonest here.
There's a limit to what's humanly possible, digging ditches with shovels for 8 hours a day is not equal to sitting in an office for same 8 hours. No matter how many breaks you have, and at how "leisurely pace" you're digging.
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exratione|8 years ago|reply
So then, a fractious feudal nobility, the ruler, and the church, now fractious corporate powers and a more unified state, with the church faded to irrelevance in temporal matters. The only constant is the undiminished desire to order the lives of others in order to farm them for profit, to be the stationary bandit.
Even if matters were the same, however, the march of technology would still make the present a far better place to live than the past. It is technology, not politics, that is the greatest driver of quality of life.
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macspoofing|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucozade|8 years ago|reply
And I'm sure they were enjoying the extended vacations because of the strong contractual obligations that the landowners had to their serfs.
The US do have an issue with the amount of vacation time that they have but it's close to infantile to compare it so naively to the Middle Ages.
If you're going to compare it to Europe (which this is doing), how about comparing it to Europe in, say, the 21C?
[+] [-] pjmlp|8 years ago|reply
Sure, between 20 and 30 days paid vacation depending on the country, illness isn't considered vacation and usually gets paid up to 6 months.
Oh then there is the paternal and maternity leave, up to two years, depending on the country.
[+] [-] Jaruzel|8 years ago|reply
Is this true? In the UK, 'standard' holiday entitlement for most jobs starts at 20 days annually, and that doesn't include official days off such as Xmas, New Year, Easter etc.
[+] [-] stevenwoo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|8 years ago|reply
I have a job in the US that offers 25 paid days of vacation, plus the standard 13.
[+] [-] NicoJuicy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctdonath|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vadimberman|8 years ago|reply
> One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil.
What about the Communism? Why would they spread this durable myth? Because I remember hearing the same story in the Soviet school.
The paper does not make a real effort trying to consider different evidence and honestly investigate the subject. Most of the sources are related to the UK (specifically, England) with a couple referring to the US in XIX century. How do we know how much the Dutch, German, French, Russian peasants worked, let alone those in the rice-growing Asia? Finally, how about trying to research 1600s and 1700s in North America to compare apples with apples?
Even in her own paper, the results appear a bit, ahem, uneven:
> 1988 - Manufacturing workers, U.K.: 1856 hours
> 1400-1600 - Farmer-miner, adult male, U.K.: 1980 hours > Calculated from Ian Blanchard's estimate of 180 days per year. Assumes 11-hour day
Yes, it's 180 days, but 11 hours each. Did she actually try working 11 hours on a backbreaking menial job? Does she actually believe that 11 hours being a miner in 1500s is the same as 11 hours in the office or even a modern assembly line?
[+] [-] jerf|8 years ago|reply
Here's some food for thought: If you don't work an additional hour, because the economic environment you are in has provided you no meaningful economic task that would be worth doing in that hour, are you better off than someone who does have that opportunity and works for benefit in that time?
It's difficult to compare across such time spans meaningfully. I've often thought if we could bring someone forward in time from, say, a thousand years ago and give them a tour of your local 7-11 that it would re-align a lot of people's perspectives on our modern societies. (I'm not even picking that for the cold drinks or snacks, either; it's things like "here's a tube of cream that you can buy for roughly 10 minutes labor, tops, that when you smear it on a cut makes it so the cut won't kill you anymore". Or, "condoms", that work reliably. I'd expect tears from our visitor and a high likelihood of violent resistence if you try to send them back.)
[+] [-] vertex-four|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjourne|8 years ago|reply
Peasants' work output were calorie-restricted. 11 hours backbreaking were the norm during harvest, but not in the less busier seasons. In the northern countries, snow and lack of sunlight made working impossible for several months per year. Instead, they ate very little food slept through most days.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] _khau|8 years ago|reply
Why not address the point of the article instead of talking about communism, which nobody mentioned?
[+] [-] megiddo|8 years ago|reply
But even basic amenities that could be easily built in this time period were difficult to come by. Entire villages might have to share a few pieces of furniture, like a stool.
These people may have had a lot of "time off", but they spent it in horrible poverty, many months of the year near starvation, even within the context of what was available to them in their own time.
I would hazard to say that many modern office workers rarely actually accomplish 40 hours of productive work in a given week. They may be physically present, but how often are they chatting, goofing off, or standing around waiting for an interaction. Modern business is built upon availability, not necessarily toil.
[+] [-] ekianjo|8 years ago|reply
And death was omnipresent. Most of your kids would die in young age, folks around you were killed by random infections or flu regularly, and there was not much to look forward to in life.
[+] [-] minikites|8 years ago|reply
As I type this comment, there are 55 other comments in this discussion, not one of them using the word "union". That's the only feasible method I can see to enact large scale change. CEOs and other executives aren't going to change out of the kindness of their hearts, as evidenced by the fact that they could start at any point and still choose not to.
[+] [-] sparrish|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aanxiety|8 years ago|reply
We can have our cake and eat it too. And in passing, we would likely save planet earth doing so.
[+] [-] ctdonath|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hendrikto|8 years ago|reply
> In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in productivity.
Work smart, not hard.
[+] [-] bitL|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comment123456|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] losvedir|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NPMaxwell|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muzani|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golergka|8 years ago|reply
All modern people have a choice about how much time they spend at their jobs. I've switched to 3-day workweek sometimes, raking 50% cut in salary; turns out, if you're not in a leading position, it's painfully obvious to negotiate. People in first world countries don't need to work 40 hours a week to avoid starvation. We do it out of our own free will, because we want more stuff.
And, out of this personal experience - because we don't really have anything better to do with our time. Even a regular, a bit boring job beats sitting around the house and watching TV. Driving your own personal projects requires a significant amount of motivation and willpower, and most of us would be too ashamed to admit that we lack it.
[+] [-] socratewasright|8 years ago|reply
The article claims the american worker gets 8 days of vacation annually. 52*2 > 8 last time I checked.
I do believe though that with more automation, workers should be getting more vacation time.
[+] [-] taneq|8 years ago|reply
I'm really lucky that I don't generally want more things, and the things I do want are cheap. Living in the future is freaking amazing if you enjoy making things.
[+] [-] ggg9990|8 years ago|reply