Yay! A chance for me to link to my favorite blog: acoup.blog/…/collections-life-work-death-and-the-… (may require reading part IV.a and IV.b first).
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry is right now doing a series on how peasants lived. Arable land is limited, people really don’t want to watch their family members starve, and the entire economic system is maybe kind of reliant on squeezing peasants to do the things necessary for society to function, so there’s strong incentives of all kinds to work a lot
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
There’s a lot of evidence of what life was like for peasants back in the Medieval period. But, it’s hard to be exact because there were a lot of things that were taken for granted so nobody bothered to write them down and clarify.
Here’s an article about it:
yeoldetymenews.com/…/do-you-work-more-than-a-medi…
What’s well known, for example, is how many sundays and feast days there were. What’s less known is what actually happened on those days. For example, the Monday and Tuesday after easter were ale-drinking feasts. What was a feast though? In some cases it was a “party” where attendance was mandatory and you had to pay a fee. Yes, there was drinking, but was it a party, or was it one of those “work parties” where you had to go, had to be on your best behaviour, etc.?
Because it varied a lot century-to-century and also varied location-to-location, it’s hard to pin down what it was like unless you’re looking at a specific location at a specific time, and it’s a location and time where there’s good data. What is pretty well known is that nights were really dark. Even candles were expensive for a peasant. So, when the sun set, work more or less stopped
ourworldindata.org/…/the-price-of-lighting-has-dr…
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Beautiful, thank you so much! Will read momentarily
piranhaconda@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Solid review of the source, now I need to make a note to check it out later…
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Yeah, that particular article is a serious more historical one and then most of the others on the site are satire written in a cheesy old English style and medieval setting and it’s killing me