The Money Mustache Community
Around the Internet => Antimustachian Wall of Shame and Comedy => Topic started by: FireLane on July 10, 2018, 02:43:21 PM
-
A sad commentary on our times from Business Insider:
http://www.businessinsider.com/american-worker-less-vacation-medieval-peasant-2016-11
The Church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent mandatory holidays. Weddings, wakes, and births might mean a week off quaffing ale to celebrate, and when wandering jugglers or sporting events came to town, the peasant expected time off for entertainment. There were labor-free Sundays, and when the plowing and harvesting seasons were over, the peasant got time to rest, too.
In fact, economist Juliet Shor found that during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th-century England, peasants might put in no more than 150 days a year. As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually.
...Shor's examination of work patterns reveals that the 19th century was an aberration in the history of human labor. When workers fought for the eight-hour workday, they weren't trying to get something radical and new, but rather to restore what their ancestors had enjoyed before industrial capitalists and the electric light bulb came on the scene.
I always thought the life of a peasant farmer was backbreaking labor, and during the busy seasons, it probably was. But I guess between planting time and harvest time, there just wasn't that much to do, so why not get drunk and throw big parties?
By all rights, we should be able to work even less than they did. We're far more productive, our technology is better, we're more educated. Instead, we've created a mentality of round-the-clock busyness, of work for the sake of work. Stores are open 24/7, just in case someone wants to buy something. Corporate lawyers work hundred-hour weeks to close a merger deal a few hours earlier. When a server crashes on the other side of the planet, engineers get hauled out of bed in the middle of the night to fix it.
Make no mistake, I wouldn't trade my life for a medieval peasant's. I like indoor plumbing and good dentistry. But one thing I'll say for them, they understood the virtue of living slow lives (https://ournextlife.com/2016/09/05/speedup-slowdown/). I like to think we're the people who've rediscovered that.
-
Interesting perspective
-
Since the proliferatonof cheap and effective light sources, and the industrial revolution, people have worked more.
-
Somehow I doubt that this was paid leave. More like "Harvesting season is over, see you next year. Hope you have enough food to survive winter." In the US you can also live as a day laborer, make a hut somewhere and live the great peasant life with lots of free time.
-
Someone asked about this article on subreddit AskHistorians last week and was pointed to an answer from a year ago. I found it interesting:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8w5imc/did_feudal_peasants_in_europe_during_the_middle/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8w5imc/did_feudal_peasants_in_europe_during_the_middle/)
-
Somehow I doubt that this was paid leave. More like "Harvesting season is over, see you next year. Hope you have enough food to survive winter." In the US you can also live as a day laborer, make a hut somewhere and live the great peasant life with lots of free time.
I think this is pretty on point. Americans could easily make enough money working part time to support a peasant standard of living.
The other huge thing missing from the article is....the reason we are all here! The peasants had no concept of FIRE. They worked until they died. So, who had the higher percentage of days off over their entire lifespan?
-
Right... they didn't work the fields, they just went home, grabbed some wheat from the grain ark, and spend hours milling it into flour. Then they could gather firewood/peat/dung to cook their bread. And find some time to make/mend clothes, make/mend furniture and tools, etc.
Life was work then, and just because you weren't working for the man, doesn't mean you weren't working.
-
Right... they didn't work the fields, they just went home, grabbed some wheat from the grain ark, and spend hours milling it into flour. Then they could gather firewood/peat/dung to cook their bread. And find some time to make/mend clothes, make/mend furniture and tools, etc.
Life was work then, and just because you weren't working for the man, doesn't mean you weren't working.
^^^ This. ^^^
Being a peasant was a 24x7x365 job. But only a fraction of time was devoted to any one task. A person might be "primarily" a peasant who worked the owner's land, yet that wasn't his sole occupation.
Depending on the region, after the harvest was in there still wouldn't be enough to feed everyone. In some areas, the men and older boys would leave the region and spend the winter migrating to other parts of Europe in search of enough day-labor to feed themselves. Even if they stayed, there were countless chores related to staying alive. Collecting firewood, feeding and tending the animals, and performing repairs to the thatching in the hut consumed time. So did fetching water, fishing or hunting (possibly poaching) for a meal, setting snares for the rabbits, and other means of getting food. The women would be filling any spare moments with piece-work such as knitting or lace making to bring in a little bit of cash for the items that had to be purchased.
-
Right... they didn't work the fields, they just went home, grabbed some wheat from the grain ark, and spend hours milling it into flour. Then they could gather firewood/peat/dung to cook their bread. And find some time to make/mend clothes, make/mend furniture and tools, etc.
Life was work then, and just because you weren't working for the man, doesn't mean you weren't working.
+1000
Like really? Anything from Business Insider needs to be taken with a metric ton of salt.
I think if you looked at leisure time, it would not even be close. For instance, they did not have time to post on MMM back then!
-
...I think if you looked at leisure time, it would not even be close. For instance, they did not have time to post on MMM back then!
Man, a medieval peasant MMM forum would be great
(Overheard at Work) my co-serf just said that his rye bread was getting moldy so he threw the whole loaf out. Didn't even cut the moldy part off!
-
I was an academic medievalist, once upon a time, and the answer is -- it's complicated, and there's peasants and peasants, and there were flourishing peasant communities and hellholes, and good lords and bad lords, and generalizing is really difficult.
But in general I think moderns tend to overemphasize the drudgery and subservience of peasant life. They partied a lot and played a lot. suffered through the occasional famine, but lived high in the good years. There was always plenty to do and there was no such thing as retirement or being safe from a beating, but there was also no such thing as unemployment or being laid off or evicted from your community. It's difficult to judge without modern measures, but if you immerse yourself in medieval writings you get the distinct impression that mental illness was very rare. You worked like hell at harvest-time, for sure; but you boozed it up and danced a lot on feast-days.
My impression, for what it's worth, is that the average medieval European peasant was considerably happier than the average modern American.
-
I was an academic medievalist, once upon a time, and the answer is -- it's complicated, and there's peasants and peasants, and there were flourishing peasant communities and hellholes, and good lords and bad lords, and generalizing is really difficult.
But in general I think moderns tend to overemphasize the drudgery and subservience of peasant life. They partied a lot and played a lot. suffered through the occasional famine, but lived high in the good years. There was always plenty to do and there was no such thing as retirement or being safe from a beating, but there was also no such thing as unemployment or being laid off or evicted from your community. It's difficult to judge without modern measures, but if you immerse yourself in medieval writings you get the distinct impression that mental illness was very rare. You worked like hell at harvest-time, for sure; but you boozed it up and danced a lot on feast-days.
My impression, for what it's worth, is that the average medieval European peasant was considerably happier than the average modern American.
thumbs up to this excellent, informative post!
-
Pleasant Peasants?
-
I was an academic medievalist, once upon a time, and the answer is -- it's complicated, and there's peasants and peasants, and there were flourishing peasant communities and hellholes, and good lords and bad lords, and generalizing is really difficult.
But in general I think moderns tend to overemphasize the drudgery and subservience of peasant life. They partied a lot and played a lot. suffered through the occasional famine, but lived high in the good years. There was always plenty to do and there was no such thing as retirement or being safe from a beating, but there was also no such thing as unemployment or being laid off or evicted from your community. It's difficult to judge without modern measures, but if you immerse yourself in medieval writings you get the distinct impression that mental illness was very rare. You worked like hell at harvest-time, for sure; but you boozed it up and danced a lot on feast-days.
My impression, for what it's worth, is that the average medieval European peasant was considerably happier than the average modern American.
That's mildly shocking given how harsh some aspects of medieval Europe were. I guess we really misunderstand what makes a person happy.
-
This reminds me of the Little House on the Prairie books...
Pa took a week or two to build a house. Then he owned a house (no debt!). We buy a house, then spend 30 years paying for it. 30 years later, we own it, but then we've also paid interest, and maintenance, and may still be in debt for 'upgrades'.
I think with our scientific advances we have the potential to have the best of both worlds... work enough to earn what we need to cover our basic needs, work some more (if we want) to buy toys and vacations, but be free from the 40 hour work week mindset for hourly and the 60+ hour work week for salaried folks. BUT like the humans we are, we fucked it all up.
I was bummed when I discovered that even if I bought a house/land and paid it off, I would still have to earn money FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE to pay to keep that house/land, even if it didn't need maintenance. There went my plans to homestead, where my only ongoing costs could be what I needed to buy stuff I couldn't make/grow myself. Thanks property tax. So no, you can't be a peasant in America, take unpaid vacation days, and just live in your peasant hovel. You must continue to pay for your hovel, even after it's paid off.
-
This reminds me of the Little House on the Prairie books...
Pa took a week or two to build a house. Then he owned a house (no debt!). We buy a house, then spend 30 years paying for it. 30 years later, we own it, but then we've also paid interest, and maintenance, and may still be in debt for 'upgrades'.
I think with our scientific advances we have the potential to have the best of both worlds... work enough to earn what we need to cover our basic needs, work some more (if we want) to buy toys and vacations, but be free from the 40 hour work week mindset for hourly and the 60+ hour work week for salaried folks. BUT like the humans we are, we fucked it all up.
I was bummed when I discovered that even if I bought a house/land and paid it off, I would still have to earn money FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE to pay to keep that house/land, even if it didn't need maintenance. There went my plans to homestead, where my only ongoing costs could be what I needed to buy stuff I couldn't make/grow myself. Thanks property tax. So no, you can't be a peasant in America, take unpaid vacation days, and just live in your peasant hovel. You must continue to pay for your hovel, even after it's paid off.
Unless it's an RV or a van. Even then, it's work to find a place to park it.
Land, life, space... is not free anymore.
-
Pleasant Peasants?
Pleasant peasants eating pheasant for pleasure?
-
Pleasant Peasants?
Pleasant peasants eating pheasant for pleasure?
I resent pleasant peasants eating pheasant. I want some pheasant.
-
A sad commentary on our times from Business Insider:
http://www.businessinsider.com/american-worker-less-vacation-medieval-peasant-2016-11
The Church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent mandatory holidays. Weddings, wakes, and births might mean a week off quaffing ale to celebrate, and when wandering jugglers or sporting events came to town, the peasant expected time off for entertainment. There were labor-free Sundays, and when the plowing and harvesting seasons were over, the peasant got time to rest, too.
In fact, economist Juliet Shor found that during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th-century England, peasants might put in no more than 150 days a year. As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually.
...Shor's examination of work patterns reveals that the 19th century was an aberration in the history of human labor. When workers fought for the eight-hour workday, they weren't trying to get something radical and new, but rather to restore what their ancestors had enjoyed before industrial capitalists and the electric light bulb came on the scene.
I always thought the life of a peasant farmer was backbreaking labor, and during the busy seasons, it probably was. But I guess between planting time and harvest time, there just wasn't that much to do, so why not get drunk and throw big parties?
By all rights, we should be able to work even less than they did. We're far more productive, our technology is better, we're more educated. Instead, we've created a mentality of round-the-clock busyness, of work for the sake of work. Stores are open 24/7, just in case someone wants to buy something. Corporate lawyers work hundred-hour weeks to close a merger deal a few hours earlier. When a server crashes on the other side of the planet, engineers get hauled out of bed in the middle of the night to fix it.
Make no mistake, I wouldn't trade my life for a medieval peasant's. I like indoor plumbing and good dentistry. But one thing I'll say for them, they understood the virtue of living slow lives (https://ournextlife.com/2016/09/05/speedup-slowdown/). I like to think we're the people who've rediscovered that.
I bet any reader of that article could work as little or even much less than a medieval peasant, if they decided to actually live like one.
Living in a 1 room house you built out of local sticks/straw/mud that you and your family share with your animals, having no electricity, running water, phones, cars, insurance, etc... is probably pretty cheap. Honestly, I could probably afford this lifestyle working less than one day a month to pay taxes on the large amount of land needed to be self sufficient.
I do prefer to have a car, normal house with carpeting, A/C, electricity, plumbing, and not having to sleep with my dogs though. The problem people have today with work/life balance is one of an ever increasing amount of 'necessary' items and luxuries, not one of time. I wonder why the article doesn't discuss that
-
The 14th century was when the black plague went nuts and killed about half of all people. The survivors actually had it pretty good because not only did they inherit a lot of stuff, but their labor became far more valuable. It was the precipitating event that eventually ended serfdom in the West.
A better comparison would have been... any period of the Middle Ages other than that.
-
That's mildly shocking given how harsh some aspects of medieval Europe were. I guess we really misunderstand what makes a person happy.
There's actually a lot of research that a certain degree of hardship in people's lives makes them - well, not necessarily happier, but more fulfilled. As well, they're too damned busy to get depressed.
But happiness is often decided relatively. The person in the household on $50,000 is happy in a street where everyone else is on $20,000, but unhappy in a street where others are on $200,000.
It's said that about 50% of happiness comes from genetic, background and illness sorts of factors, things you can't really control; 10% comes from the financial situation, and 40% from the things the person chooses to do with their life, like what job they do or who they marry, plus all the day-to-day and attitude stuff.
However, this picture of a moment understates the effect of money, because that 10% affects the 40%. Being broke means having few choices, being well-off means many choices. And this is the aim of FIRE - leaving you with a completely free choice of what you do with your day in terms of earning money.
On the other hand, too many choices can make people unhappy, since they can't decide and end up choosing nothing. I see this a lot on another forum where people talk about dating. In a medieval village of 150 people you might get to choose from either Piers the buck-toothed pig farmer and Arthur the handsome wife-beater, after a while Piers started looking pretty good. But now with most of the West living in big cities with access to Tinder, you can swipe "no" on 150 people in about sixty seconds - and 5 years later you're still single. So as you or your country become more prosperous you have more choices, and end up choosing nothing, which leads to a certain ennui.
There is somewhere a sensible middle ground...
-
The problem people have today with work/life balance is one of an ever increasing amount of 'necessary' items and luxuries, not one of time. I wonder why the article doesn't discuss that
If you have a luxury for long enough it becomes a necessity to you.
And of course, you can have necessities presented in a luxurious manner... go to a fancy restaurant, send your kids to a $20k school, and so on.
-
TheHusbandHalf works 180 days a yr, 12 hour shifts. vacations are not figured into that and I think he's up to 3-4 weeks. With modern advances, there are jobs that are all day, all year. - you just can't shut down an oil refinery.
Another way we are different - we hope to never have to live an urban life and have arranged things that we probably won't have to. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
Fun comparison, but happy to not have to live the peasant life.
(THH is now counting his days left to work until retirement - now it's 87 shifts)
-
I was an academic medievalist, once upon a time, and the answer is -- it's complicated, and there's peasants and peasants, and there were flourishing peasant communities and hellholes, and good lords and bad lords, and generalizing is really difficult.
But in general I think moderns tend to overemphasize the drudgery and subservience of peasant life. They partied a lot and played a lot. suffered through the occasional famine, but lived high in the good years. There was always plenty to do and there was no such thing as retirement or being safe from a beating, but there was also no such thing as unemployment or being laid off or evicted from your community. It's difficult to judge without modern measures, but if you immerse yourself in medieval writings you get the distinct impression that mental illness was very rare. You worked like hell at harvest-time, for sure; but you boozed it up and danced a lot on feast-days.
My impression, for what it's worth, is that the average medieval European peasant was considerably happier than the average modern American.
That's mildly shocking given how harsh some aspects of medieval Europe were. I guess we really misunderstand what makes a person happy.
Would have to agree with the theme here that it's hard to define happiness across an entire world, let alone a different time period. To each their own. Personally I am fan of simpler times.
Also was wondering if Koshtra had any insight into the actual "work" done on a daily basis by peasants as proclaimed by others. Understanding they didn't have many modern conveniences, but I have to think all of their houses/clothes/food/animals/everything weren't constantly falling apart and needing mended.
I wanted to throw a question out there to world travelers as I myself, have not had this opportunity. This article seems like it could be similar to a comparison of different countries and cultures in our modern world today? I have always wondered whether the mainstream media that seems to be portraying those not living with modern technologies as suffering has any basis to it or are those populations just as happy if not happier (mainly focusing in on technology here, not war, corruption etc. as I'd say that makes people universally miserable)? Apologies for the rambling thoughts.
-PB
-
Well, it depends on how strictly you're using the word "peasant." Historians tend to use it in the strict sense, which is roughly equivalent to a sharecropper -- someone who owns or rents a piece of land and owes a certain part of the harvest from it to their local feudal overlord. In that case you do whatever tending the crops requires of you (and as those of you MMM-ers who farm will know, that can be a huge range of things!) But often non-historians just mean anybody not noble, which includes -- well, all the things that people with recognizable English surnames would suggest: carpenters, cobblers, smiths, stewards, millers, bakers, brewers, shepherds, drovers, hunters, tanners, chapmen (traders), weavers, tailors. Lots of people who mostly worked the land had side-gigs for the off-season, and lots of them kept a few pigs or goats or cows. If you made your rent the lord mostly left you alone and let you do whatever you wanted. But... medieval life was anything but uniform and homogeneous -- the rules in one village might be completely different from the next village over. Tradition counted for a lot. In general if your great-grandfather got to graze his cattle for free on the village green, you got to as well, and so would your great-grandson. So in some ways social and economic life was less precarious than it is now. But also, really changing your status and your wealth was pretty damn hard. You pretty much expected to have your parents' life, for good or for bad.
-
A few years ago we visited the Alberobello in Puglia, southern Italy. It's one of several villages down there of these cute houses with cone shaped stone roofs. Nowadays they are a major tourist attraction and lots of city folk own them as vacation homes. But standing inside of one of them with a guide explaining how people lived was kind of shocking to modern ears. The entire family lived in one of these stone structures (about 10-12 feet across) along with their animals. In winter, they would light fires inside these structures to keep warm and cook but the smoke gathered inside the room making it pretty unpleasant.
I talked to some elderly people who lived in the area and they told me that they associated these houses with extreme poverty and hunger and were very happy to live in modern apartments these days. One old man who was one of (I think) 12 kids told me that even when he was growing up on a farm (not in a trullo as they had enough money to escape that kind of poverty by the time he was born) his father would mark the (home made) salami at night to make sure that none of the kids sneaked a slice overnight. The kids usually went to bed hungry every night and a lot of his neighbors emigrated to the US, Australia or Northern Europe to escape this poverty.
But of course that was not medieval times and southern Italy was particularly poor at that time despite the amazing climate and long growing season due to bad govenance.
-
I'm going to guess that the average medieval peasant who was a woman had a significantly different experience in terms of seasonal work fluctuations. Still expected to cook 7 days a week x 365, still expected to clean, take care of animals, tend gardens, and oh by the way, you have no control over whether you are perpetually pregnant, nursing, or trying to do your constant work while caring for 5 kids under the age of 6. Also, your husband can booze it up and come home and beat the crap out of you and you have zero legal recourse. Paradise!
-
Yeah. Though medieval times were better than classical times, and also better than early modern times. But we're just talking subtly varying shades of awful.
-
I'm going to guess that the average medieval peasant who was a woman -
That's the thing, it's a guess. It's like all those old magazine articles from the 1950s talking about women as super-glam and with a sparkling house and bringing hubby his pipe and slippers. Yet at that time about a quarter of Australian women had paid work outside the household.
I've no doubt that the workload was uneven, just as it is today in many households (as a stay-at-home father I have some taste of this, though a small taste thanks to modern labour-saving devices), but I doubt it was as uneven as commonly depicted; the very fact that the magazine articles kept telling the women to be like this suggests to me they usually weren't, just as the "just say no" campaigns tell us that people are taking drugs, and the abstinence campaigns tell us that teenagers are having sex, and thinness of models and all the diets spruiked in magazines tells us that, probably, most people nowadays aren't thin.
You don't have to loudly tell someone to do something they're already doing, though I did have a few officers in the army who liked to do that - I suppose it made them feel relevant. Medieval writings very strongly urged women to serve their husbands and be silent and obedient. Which suggests they generally weren't.
I think it was very sexist, but hard work for everyone involved. Most of us don't realise the extent to which machinery powered by fossil fuels subsidises our lifestyle. I just hung out a load of washing, there were at least 30 items, and scrubbing them on boards or rocks beside a river would have taken much, much longer than the 5' to load, the 30' to cycle through (where I could do something else) and 15' to hang out.
Even if the medieval life weren't horribly sexist and were some egalitarian paradise like the telly show Merlin where an African Guinevere befriends Merlin in England in 600CE, it's still not something we should particularly yearn for; otherwise we're like the "paleo diet" guys yearning for the Stone Age... on the internet.
-
I'm going to guess that the average medieval peasant who was a woman -
That's the thing, it's a guess. It's like all those old magazine articles from the 1950s talking about women as super-glam and with a sparkling house and bringing hubby his pipe and slippers. Yet at that time about a quarter of Australian women had paid work outside the household.
I've no doubt that the workload was uneven, just as it is today in many households (as a stay-at-home father I have some taste of this, though a small taste thanks to modern labour-saving devices), but I doubt it was as uneven as commonly depicted; the very fact that the magazine articles kept telling the women to be like this suggests to me they usually weren't, just as the "just say no" campaigns tell us that people are taking drugs, and the abstinence campaigns tell us that teenagers are having sex, and thinness of models and all the diets spruiked in magazines tells us that, probably, most people nowadays aren't thin.
You don't have to loudly tell someone to do something they're already doing, though I did have a few officers in the army who liked to do that - I suppose it made them feel relevant. Medieval writings very strongly urged women to serve their husbands and be silent and obedient. Which suggests they generally weren't.
I think it was very sexist, but hard work for everyone involved. Most of us don't realise the extent to which machinery powered by fossil fuels subsidises our lifestyle. I just hung out a load of washing, there were at least 30 items, and scrubbing them on boards or rocks beside a river would have taken much, much longer than the 5' to load, the 30' to cycle through (where I could do something else) and 15' to hang out.
Even if the medieval life weren't horribly sexist and were some egalitarian paradise like the telly show Merlin where an African Guinevere befriends Merlin in England in 600CE, it's still not something we should particularly yearn for; otherwise we're like the "paleo diet" guys yearning for the Stone Age... on the internet.
There have been some historians that have dug as deeply as possible into what everyday life was like for people-- male and female-- in different eras. Olwen Hufton's "The Prospect Before Her" spends a lot of time discussing peasant life, with emphasis on the female experience, and she draws from primary sources ranging from birth and death records to court records. Various guilds, monasteries, major households, and businesses also left written records especially of financial proceedings.
-
At least you can negotiate your vacation days with an employer now though. If you're unhappy, just go somewhere else.
I don't think medieval serfs had too much leverage when it came to negotiating.
-
I strongly strongly recommend anyone interested in the daily life of your average medieval peasant read "How to be a Tudor" by Ruth Goodman and watch "Tales from the green valley" and "Tudor monastery farm". They're all a bit later in period, but really get at the nitty gritty of what people did all day in a way that most history books don't. And take a balanced approach to the issue of physical hardship.