• Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Farming peasants worked pretty much from sunrise to sunset, sometimes even longer. If you count the number of hours the average medieval peasant worked in a year, it was probably a lot more than we do now.

    • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You guys know a lot about medieval peasants. Which peasantry school did yall go to?

    • lugal@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Feudal lords, insofar as they worked at all, were fighters—their lives tended to alternate between dramatic feats of arms and near-total idleness and torpor. Peasants and servants obviously were expected to work more steadily. But even so, their work schedule was nothing remotely as regular or disciplined as the current nine-to-five—the typical medieval serf, male or female, probably worked from dawn to dusk for twenty to thirty days out of any year, but just a few hours a day otherwise, and on feast days, not at all. And feast days were not infrequent.

      David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs 2018

      • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I worked on a farm down in the Central valley in California about 15 years ago, and all the Hispanic people worked from 5:00 a.m. to noon and that was it. They were done for the day. And this is modern society!

        • lugal@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          5 to 12 is still 7h, which is almost the usual 8h day but still a good thing