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The following meme arrived in my inbox.

Medieval Peasants

Peasants in the medieval era worked just 150 days a year on average. The church believed it was crucial to keep them content by making frequent required holidays. Compared to a medieval peasant, you take fewer holidays.

I'm aware that "Medieval" is loosely defined and covers the best part of a thousand years and at the very least an entire continent, but is there any time and place in Medieval Europe where this might have been true? Was it generally true?

I'm also aware of the very large number of saint's days recognized by the church, but my understanding is that they were not all "holidays" in the sense of people not working on them.

Laurel
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DJClayworth
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    It could well depend on what you define as 'work'. Given that almost everything that had to be done, was done manually (growing crops, raising livestock, construction and maintenance of homes/farms/workshops, cutting/chopping/hauling firewood, etc., etc.) I would guess that people were kept busy pretty much the whole year round. – Steve Bird Jan 23 '23 at 20:35
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    First result on Google attributes the 150 hour estimate to economist Gregory Clark, and specifies it's for male peasants in 13th century UK, with further details including citation: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html – Brian Z Jan 23 '23 at 20:51
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    Meme is not accurate? I'm shocked, shocked I say. After as, as Abraham Lincoln once said, 75% of the statistics on the internet are made up..... <NOT poking fun at OP, poking fun at myself and every other internet user> – MCW Jan 24 '23 at 12:34
  • A couple of historians discuss this general idea at 2:02:30 in this podcast I listened to recently (https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7bky/the-history-behind-pentiment-according-to-its-consulting-historians), the short summary is "no no no god no" – llama Jan 24 '23 at 15:28
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    What does it even mean? Medieval peasants were largely doing extensive subsistence agriculture. How can the church grant a holiday to a peasant that isn't on their payroll? Or is this claim limited to serfs who were subject to the church and not working for themselves? – gerrit Jan 24 '23 at 17:18
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    If you have dairy cows, you have to milk them every day, twice a day. No holidays, except if you find someone else to milk your cows for you – Samuel Peter Jan 24 '23 at 17:31
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    I think the "have to look after your animals" issue is because we are thinking like modern Westerners - that there is a clear and absolute division between work and leisure. From a medieval peasant's point of view, if all you do on a day is milk your cows and give them some new straw then that's a pretty light day. – DJClayworth Jan 24 '23 at 17:39
  • @BrianZ 150 hours would be really pushing it. – Eric Duminil Jan 24 '23 at 17:53
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    @DJClayworth The idea that "just milk your cows and give them some new straw" is light work is because you're thinking like a modern westerner. You haven't given your hypothetical cows water at all--and it doesn't come out of a hose. Pitching hay is much more physical than it is these days. Don't forget to bring in some firewood to cook with. Etc. It may have been relatively light work compared to other days, but it's still mostly physical work and time you can't spend doing other stuff. – user3067860 Jan 24 '23 at 19:03
  • But is that work in the sense we think of it? It sounds like our equivalent of cleaning the house, walking the dog, weeding the garden etc. Stuff we have to do that isn't "work" in the sense of employment. – DJClayworth Jan 24 '23 at 19:44
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    @DJClayworth YES it is work. Imagine building your own house--is that work? No one pays you to do it, so it's not employment. But you can't decide to just skip doing it, your choices are either do it yourself or somehow get someone else to do it for you. – user3067860 Jan 24 '23 at 20:29
  • But so is doing my own laundry, or fixing my fence "work". But we don't include it when we talk about "how many hours we work a week". – DJClayworth Jan 24 '23 at 21:07
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    @DJClayworth that's the problem, the modern notion of "work" doesn't apply to medieval peasants. Also, the idea of "holidays" being time to kick back and watch the game while drinking brewskis definitely did not apply back then. They were literally holy days. – barbecue Jan 24 '23 at 21:21
  • Working in their main job in agriculture? Maybe. But don't forget that besides their job which earned them their living, they had to do a lot of work around the house for themselves, because there wasn't any industrialized or readily purchasable solution. Chopping wood for themselves, hauling water from the well, making and repairing their tools, clothes, roofs, fences, etc. – vsz Jan 25 '23 at 09:36
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    In Shakespeare's Henry V, Westmoreland wishes that the King's army could have with them some of the men in England 'who do no work today'. The modern reader would assume that it means the unemployed, but apparently it's a reference to the date - St. Crispin's Day and therefore a holiday. – Kate Bunting Jan 25 '23 at 09:40
  • It's because they were an autonomous collective. An anarcho-syndicalist commune, where they took it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week - but all decisions of that officer had to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting, by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more...I'm not going to fast for you, am I? – Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні Jan 25 '23 at 14:01
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    @BobJarvis-СлаваУкраїні Help, help, I'm being repressed. – DJClayworth Jan 25 '23 at 14:24
  • @DJClayworth Modern notion of "work" is just broken, imo mostly because it was created for taxation/legal purposes. If I'm a barber, then cutting hair is work. But if I cut my own hair, that's "not work"? But if another barber cuts my hair and I cut their hair, now we're both working again? If I milk my own cow for myself, that's "not work"? If I milk my cow and sell the milk, that's work? If I pay someone else to milk the cow for me, that's definitely work (for them)! If I check my work e-mail while I'm on vacation--is that work? – user3067860 Jan 25 '23 at 17:57
  • Did you notice, working 150 days a years would give the lucky beggars rather more than one in two days off… making them prolly the least-hard-worked peeps in all of human history? That's not impossible, but why is it credible to you? – Robbie Goodwin Jan 26 '23 at 23:50

3 Answers3

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Probably not. The one economist this number can be traced to now says its a huge underestimate.

In 1986 economist Gregory Clark wrote a working paper that (according to citers) contained this estimate. It doesn't appear he published it, but it got cited. He actually did for real publish a new paper in 2018 raising that number up to an estimate of 250-300 days. That's quite a revision!

However, in the meantime a popular book was published by a sociologist that used that earlier lower number of 150. "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure". Since then this number went wild on the internet (likely because its a shocking number, or perhaps because people like that number and want it to be true).

Whatever the reason, it seems I see this on Twitter (largely because someone I follow is debunking it) at least once a week, often with a variant of that picture. Its happened enough that since April there's been a Twitter community note for it:

enter image description here

User u/LordEiru on r/badhistory did a deep dive on this. The whole story is worth reading (although a bit aggressive for my tastes). They did include several links to the sources involved.

The Clark citation is by comparison more fair and accurate. That is not to say it is without issues, however. First, the citation is to a working paper that does not appear to have ever been published fully – Clark himself does not list it anywhere on his publications, and other attempts to find it only make reference to it having been cited in Schor’s work. Nonetheless, it would be reasonable to ask if work from 1986 is still an authoritative source on the subject or should be used as evidence. The answer is very hilariously no: Gregory Clark doesn’t believe that Clark 1986 is correct. The Atlantic published an article on the debate over the working hours subject on May 6th, 2022, in which Clark is quoted as rejecting the prior conclusion and noting his current work on the subject instead estimates nearly 300 days of labor per year – quite in line with the 308 days estimate by Keynon.

Here's a link to the Atlantic Article where Clark's work is mentioned. Sadly, being an overworked peasant myself, I'm stuck soundly on the wrong side of its paywall.

T.E.D.
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    Since the article you link to is behind a paywall, could you include some relevant quotes? – DJClayworth Jan 23 '23 at 21:15
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    @DJClayworth - Sadly most scholarly articles are going to be like that. Academic publishing doesn't mesh very well with the internet (no, I can't read it either. This is what I'm told is the actual paper in question though). I'm working on adding some more normie-readable (but alas secondary) sources. – T.E.D. Jan 23 '23 at 21:20
  • It can't have been a whole lot of criticism if it took him 32 years to issue a correction. – DJClayworth Jan 23 '23 at 21:28
  • There's also an Atlantic article with Clark discussing this, but of course its also behind a paywall. If you peeps want to hit my Venmo, I could perhaps arrange some fair use quotes... :-) – T.E.D. Jan 23 '23 at 21:34
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    Full version of the article: https://archive.ph/pR3s7 – Brian Z Jan 23 '23 at 23:36
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    I have access to Clark 2018, but I don't understand his argument. I'm neither a historian nor an economist, and it sounds circular to me. – shoover Jan 24 '23 at 00:21
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    I believe one must also qualify "day" in this context, certainly for the peasantry. During harvest a "day" might have been 16 hours long, though only for a week or three; while in the depths of winter a "day" might have only been 3 or 4 hours. Secondly, there is a longstanding English tradition of "half-days" on Wednesday and Saturday (only the mornings being worked) that has faded only very recently. (In1962-65 that still applied to my local Woolworth's Five and Dime.) It might behoove to verify if this extended back into the Medieval period. – Pieter Geerkens Jan 24 '23 at 01:03
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    @PieterGeerkens - I found no small amount of discussion about half days while researching this question, so I think you are correct that it in fact was in play back then. I didn't include it here because its more relevant to what the "actual" number of days is (or even what "days" means), than it is to the provenance of the 150 figure (which was the question here). – T.E.D. Jan 24 '23 at 02:53
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    Peasants often had obligations to work for their lords, maybe three days per week. But this was without pay. They also had to work for themselves, tending crops on their own piece of land or caring for animals etc., or for money, so time not working for the lord was not free time in the modern sense. – davidlol Jan 24 '23 at 04:28
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    @davidlol Three days per week seems incredibly high. Numbers I have come across in literature range from a low of one day per year, to 12 days per year as kind of average case, to 50 days per year at the high end, this latter level of obligation for manual labor and draft animal service leading to active resistance among the peasantry. As a child I grew up in a village in a European country, and farmers with animals had to put in some amount of work every single day: cows needed to be milked daily and all animals needed to have food supplied at least during the winter (e.g. from the hay loft). – njuffa Jan 24 '23 at 05:51
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    @njuffa This article mentions three days per week http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture23b.html I don't know at all how reliable it is. Good point about animal owners never having a day off. – davidlol Jan 24 '23 at 12:25
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    @BrianZ - I loved the end paragraph: "If you’re looking for a vision of history where people were generally peaceful and contented, though, you might want to check in with societies outside of the Middle Ages. Perhaps look for a group of people not perpetually engaged in siege warfare. “Medieval peasants are a weird one to go to, because, you know, they were rebelling constantly,” Janega noted. “Why are they storming London and burning down the Savoy Palace, if this is a group of happy-go-lucky, simple folk who really love the way things are?”" – T.E.D. Jan 24 '23 at 14:29
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    @shoover - From what I can make out from the archived Atlantic article text BrianZ provided, it looks like he was probably arguing that the level of nutrition in peasant remains from that period would not be achievable in that era from someone working only 150 days a year, and his math on what it takes got him to the higher #. Does it look roughly like that? – T.E.D. Jan 24 '23 at 14:36
  • Isn't this number backed up by the fact that landlords were able to levy their peasants for months before releasing them, without a significant impact on hunger in their countries (except of course if they all got killed)? – totalMongot Jan 24 '23 at 18:35
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    Back in 4th grade my teacher said that when we grew up our biggest problem would be finding things to do to fill all our leisure time. *YOU LIED, MRS. GRUNDY!!!!!* – Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні Jan 25 '23 at 13:54
  • @T.E.D. throughout history most years have been peaceful and uneventful. It's just that chroniclers and historians are more interested in the years that weren't. – Michael Kay Jan 26 '23 at 19:30
  • @BobJarvis-СлаваУкраїні - There was a Superfriends episode back in the '70's where a dude automated all jobs (using era computers with big whirling tape reels and blinking lights), with the result that nobody had to work anymore. This is what people thought was going to happen. It was ironically not dystopian enough, because what actually happened when all jobs got automated is that stockholders and execs hoovered up all the productivity gains as stock value gains and dividends and left workers to work just as hard as before to stay even. – T.E.D. Jan 26 '23 at 19:39
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What does "Work" mean? Quite likely you worked 150days for the land owner, for which you earned the right to work "your" land for your own benefit. Then you still had to spend other many days on your own land to raise your own food etc as well as take part of your own time to fix or build your house, create resources to pay for various other things you need.

So converted to today's economics, the 150 days of work were effectively paying your land rent/mortgage and taxes. You'd have to work another 150 days to get the other things a modern job provides: resources for food, house (other than the land), etc.

Charles Manning
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    Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please [edit] to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center. – Community Jan 25 '23 at 23:51
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The answer is, as usual when a meme is involved, a bit more complicated.

For starters (and as it was pointed out here numerous time in comments) it depend on what "day" is.

Meme says something like "you now work more than medieval peasant". Standard workday is 8 hours. Peasant worked - depending on time of year, and it was mentioned elsewhere in the topic - between 6-8 (in winter) and 16 (in summer, especially in harvest) hours a day, so it is important to define "day".

Even today, with mechanization and automation available, farming is one of the most labor intensive activities, so it's not a surprise that it have been much more so several centuries back - it could be as much as 200-250 days a year.

On the other hand, families back then also have been substantially bigger - not only there were usually three generations living in the same household, everyone worked until one literally couldn't; be it "not yet" or "not anymore". This means that same amount of work, split between 12-15 people instead of 5-6, could be done faster. This is very important, because traditionally farm land was rented from the landlord in exchange for any kind of payment: money, fraction of the harvest, work on landlord's fields, work for landlord directly or all combined. However, the payment due was from household, and not per person, thus more children meant more hands for fixed "amount" of work required by landlord (Serfdom and slavery in the European economy, 11th-18th centuries, ed. S. Cavaciocchi, Firenze University Press 2014.)

In addition, those were the times where religion and faith played far greater role in life than today, so any and all religious holidays were usually free from work - bear in mind though, that there is no such thing as a truly work-free day on medieval farm - which can be a fair number of days in a year.

Best yet, in some part the meme is correct - peasants on average didn't work more than the mentioned 150 days (or even less).

But basically until the end of the 16th century, mostly because later came climate change and yields decreased drastically, forcing farmers to increase the area of ​​cultivation, in effect often doubling their workload just to grow food. But wait, there's more. The duties of a peasant were multitude: from standing night guard in the landlord's manor, to transporting landlord's goods, make repairs to his household or to roads and bridges...

So this meme is a case of one having at least some truth in it - sadly, the rest of it is of the "in the good, old days of the golden age" of grandfathers' tales category, because in 18th century, for example, the number of days was usually more than 150. As usual, the poorest had the worst (yes, even then there were wealthy and poor peasant - difference usually was in having draft animals), who had to work sometimes even 600-700 days in a year... Not a good number, that. (Serfdom. The real history of Polish slavery, Kamil Janicki, 2021)

AcePL
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    This means that same amount of work, split between 12-15 people instead of 5-6, could be done faster. This depends if the amount of work was limited by the workforce or some other factor. If the amount of work a family could do was limited (they could only grow crops in a given terrain) then having more hands meant less work on average. But if there were other profitable work opportunities (expanding the cultivated area, collecting wood/wild fuits, hunting, working for others) then having more people would not necessarily mean less work per people. – SJuan76 Jan 25 '23 at 10:56
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    Remember that if you family had lots of people, you had to feed and provide clothes for them. And with medieval technology, that was not as easy as today. – SJuan76 Jan 25 '23 at 10:57
  • @SJuan76 - we're talking about the medieval farming. There was no possibility that some work was limited by workforce - anything needed to be done on the farm had to be done, period. If it was really too much, then help could be requested from other village dwellers or from landlord, but as far as I know, big tasks like barn raising done with freely given help from neighbors is unique American experience. As for medieval peasant needs - since everything was expensive, including food, they diversified their sources, but in essence there was a reason why there were no fat, well dressed peasants – AcePL Jan 25 '23 at 11:11
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    @MCW - meme says sth like "you now work more than medieval peasant". Standard workday is 8 hours. Peasant worked - depending on time of year, and it was mentioned elsewhere in the topic - between 6-8 (in winter) and 16 (in summer, especially in harvest) hours a day, so it is important to define "day". Family size - joking, right? If there are 8 children in the family, then man can concentrate on heavy-duty tasks, woman can take better care of home and kids do light chores, gather food in forest (for example) and assist with light work... Climate change is huge factor... Really have to explain? – AcePL Jan 25 '23 at 14:10
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    @MCW - Well, added sources, so have at it. As for specific climate change - ever heard of crop reduction due to unusually long winter or late spring freezing weather? Little Ice Age did exactly that, semi-permanently and world-wide (with Europe being well documented). – AcePL Jan 25 '23 at 14:48
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    This answer bears no resemblance to the actual state of affairs for a medieval farming family. Please read https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/ – SPavel Jan 25 '23 at 15:12
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    @AcePL "woman can... assist with light work..." Before most 20th century labour saving devices, my mother cooked, cleaned, laundered, sewed and grew some food for seven. I do not believe anyone would have considered it "light work" – TheHonRose Jan 25 '23 at 21:14
  • @TheHonRose - I agree with you. My comment was strictly with physical work directly related to food production. Maintaining household is not a light task, agreed, and it is daily all day, Tending to fields and livestock requires more muscle, but is not constant. – AcePL Jan 26 '23 at 08:41
  • @SPavel - Either one of us has trouble with understanding of the written text or you didn't read the article you linked. Moreover, the article is incomplete in the description of the status of the medieval farmers - it mentions, for example, manor in the text, but there's no word on their relationship with local nobility, nor their legal/financial/ownership status, which would change the whole narrative. Also, this was based on French example, and you should bear in mind that in Poland, for example, average farm was much bigger and depending on the period - in 1000AD it was 55 acres... – AcePL Jan 26 '23 at 08:54
  • @SPavel 2/2... and in 1460 it was 40. Obviously this number would go down, as more and more people were born and farms were divided between children, and not uncommon was farm of 3-5 acres in 17th century. Families tended to be big, because even if another mouth to feed was expensive, it was cheaper than hired help. Of course, the numbers will vary between region and period, so saying that my answer, since it doesn't resemble an article on somewhat different topic and incomplete , may be wrong is a bit much. – AcePL Jan 26 '23 at 09:00