Worse Off Than a Medieval Peasant?
September 2nd, 2013Via: Reuters:
Life for the medieval peasant was certainly no picnic. His life was shadowed by fear of famine, disease and bursts of warfare. His diet and personal hygiene left much to be desired. But despite his reputation as a miserable wretch, you might envy him one thing: his vacations.
Plowing and harvesting were backbreaking toil, but the peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off. 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.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way: John Maynard Keynes, one of the founders of modern economics, made a famous prediction that by 2030, advanced societies would be wealthy enough that leisure time, rather than work, would characterize national lifestyles. So far, that forecast is not looking good.
“[I]n the Middle Ages, serfs tithed one-third of their income to their lieges, a far cry from the 50 percent that many (even middle class) individuals now pay to their governments (or more). The assumption is that governments can do more with funds than the individual can. One only needs to look at the deteriorating infrastructure in Southern Europe or all over Middle America to see this is not true.” Frank R. Suess, 2011
Whoever this Frank R Seuss guy is, he’s missing the small point that, in return for their ~50% tax rate, European citizens get healthcare, education, housing if they get too poor or too old, highways… Middle Ages serfs got, in return for their protection money, the hope that they wouldn’t be turned out on the road at their liege lord’s whim and as much grain and root vegetables as they could squirrel away for the winter – which, considering the landlord’s expectations on productivity, usually wasn’t much.
Even the Reuters article doesn’t address the fact that Middle Ages peasants were sharecroppers, not paid employees. During their “eight weeks to half the year off” they had no income and only whatever food they had either saved from the previous harvest or managed to cultivate in their own little kitchen garden. Yumm – peas and last year’s turnips, and a little bit of weevily wheat gruel.
I agree with most of the article, regarding our overwork ethic and its effects on productivity and workers’ lives, but comparing it to Medieval Europe is extraneous – kind of the lead-in to a serious subject you’d see on CNN – “After the break: Sports, and Kitty Bimbo on how Medieval serfs had 6 times the vacation days as American workers!!”