
Medieval peasants got more vacation time than modern workers (2013) - fredrikaurdal
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medieval-peasant-got-more-vacation-time-than-you/
======
ptero
> In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his
> sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon
> snooze.

I have serious doubts about this. Maybe someone could provide additional
insight. I doubt all time not working the fields was "relaxing during long
holidays". It would likely be spent on other chores.

Food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explodes), so quaffing
ale for a week is not impossible for a rich wedding, but unlikely in general.
In my childhood I lived near rural areas (not US) and in the days when farm
hands cannot do anything (rain; off season) they tend to just get drunk which,
to me, hardly qualifies as a vacation time.

Bottom line: I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant
and I suspect the author would not want to, either.

~~~
emodendroket
I don't know that I see the relevancy of the chores, though. Do they go away
if you work longer hours?

Medieval peasants, as far as I know, did drink a lot of beer.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _I don 't know that I see the relevancy of the chores, though. Do they go
> away if you work longer hours?_

Yes, because you exchange work for money, and exchange that money for machines
that do the chores for you. That's what the last 300 years have given us.

~~~
emodendroket
When the Industrial Revolution was starting that can't have been the trade-off
anyone had in mind, because none of those things had been invented.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It wasn't. But the article is comparing points in time (14th century vs. 21st
century), so the path from one to the other doesn't matter for this
discussion.

------
qwr23qwer
"Leisure" might not mean exactly what we think it means today.

I think it'll be obvious to anyone who's worked in a manual labour job e.g.
construction, farming, etc, even with today's tools, you can't physically do
these at anything but a "leisurely pace" and a limited amount of hours a day,
with breaks for rest, food etc.

Specially in warmer climates. Claiming that this means that life was easy is a
little bit dishonest here.

There's a limit to what's humanly possible, digging ditches with shovels for 8
hours a day is not equal to sitting in an office for same 8 hours. No matter
how many breaks you have, and at how "leisurely pace" you're digging.

~~~
emodendroket
Yeah, sure, but how many construction workers work only 150 days a year and
have mid-day naps?

~~~
qwr23qwer
Work on oil rigs, fishing (Deadliest Catch guys?), underwater welding etc. are
usually done for a couple months a year and taking the rest off, (at least
from anecdotal data from folks I know).

Construction work can be similar in places where harsh winters make it
impossible to build anything during winter (frozen ground and all that).

Farming can be similar.

~~~
emodendroket
I work in Boston and I see people working in the winter in buildings. What
region is this?

~~~
ghaff
Depends on the type of construction specialty. I have a neighbor who is in
heavy construction (i.e. drives backhoes, etc.) and he's typically off for the
winter--though he sometimes does various other things.

------
exratione
A lens to look at this through is the struggle for control over the
population. The competing factions in the Middle Ages were very different from
those now - so the manifestations of authoritarianism naturally differed in
the Middle Ages. Large numbers of holy days (holidays) went hand in hand with
simony and temporal power emanating from Rome. The church was just as
rapacious and self-interested as the lords who claimed ownership over the
peasantry.

So then, a fractious feudal nobility, the ruler, and the church, now fractious
corporate powers and a more unified state, with the church faded to
irrelevance in temporal matters. The only constant is the undiminished desire
to order the lives of others in order to farm them for profit, to be the
stationary bandit.

Even if matters were the same, however, the march of technology would still
make the present a far better place to live than the past. It is technology,
not politics, that is the greatest driver of quality of life.

~~~
emodendroket
I mean, it's a lens, but I don't know that I'd view merrymaking during
holidays as a sinister form of control.

------
macspoofing
This sounds like it could be explained by the same structural problems that
communist nations went through ... in that if you don't own the land, and the
proceeds of what you make don't really belong to you and there is no incentive
to make more than what your neighbour makes ... why not put in the least
amount of work you can.

~~~
emodendroket
I feel like the same lack of "incentive" applies to many people with menial
jobs in a capitalist economy.

~~~
macspoofing
Not quite. There is still a direct correlation between work and benefit, as in
if you work more, you make more, but you keep more. In Communist economies,
that isn't true. If you work more, you make more, but you don't get to keep
more.

~~~
emodendroket
And working your field doesn't provide for your life? The relationship between
a peasant's effectiveness at his work and the rewards he reaps is actually
more, rather than less, direct than that relationship for someone stocking
shelves, because if he produced more food he'd be able to keep more of it --
what was being rewarded was the result rather than the number of hours he
spent in the fields.

~~~
macspoofing
>And working your field doesn't provide for your life?

Under communism, all surplus (or even the full total) is appropriated by the
state. So working more and harder nets no extra benefit on the peasant. The
incentive then is to exert as little effort as you can. NPR's Planet Money had
a really good podcast on this recently [1]

I speculated that feudal peasant may have been subject to the same kinds of
incentives as everything they produced belonged to the local Lord.

>because if he produced more food he'd be able to keep more of it

Under certain communist regimes (Soviet Union and Mao's China), that wasn't
necessarily true. The state appropriated everything.

[1][https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/07/583999476/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/07/583999476/episode-337-the-
secret-document-that-transformed-china)

~~~
emodendroket
The subject of this discussion is feudalism, so I'm not sure why you've
launched into a rebuttal talking about China and the USSR in the 1960s. It
isn't true that "everything that [peasants] produced belonged to the local
lord."

~~~
macspoofing
I literally just wrote: "I speculated that feudal peasant may have been
subject to the same kinds of incentives as everything they produced belonged
to the local Lord."

You're the one who launched into some weird capitalist whataboutism.

~~~
emodendroket
Right, but that speculation is based on a misconception of the nature of
feudal production. The capitalist comparison is relevant since it's the system
we live under today and your original post strongly implied, although it did
not outright state it, that the problem you were describing is unique to
societies which aren't capitalist (in fact I can remember hearing in middle
school the exact same argument as an explanation of the eventual triumph of
the First World over the Second, which I think is at best a wild
oversimplification).

------
lucozade
Right. So that'll be the vast amounts of _unpaid_ vacation that they were all
enjoying.

And I'm sure they were _enjoying_ the extended vacations because of the strong
contractual obligations that the landowners had to their serfs.

The US do have an issue with the amount of vacation time that they have but
it's close to infantile to compare it so naively to the Middle Ages.

If you're going to compare it to Europe (which this is doing), how about
comparing it to Europe in, say, the 21C?

~~~
pjmlp
> If you're going to compare it to Europe (which this is doing), how about
> comparing it to Europe in, say, the 21C?

Sure, between 20 and 30 days paid vacation depending on the country, illness
isn't considered vacation and usually gets paid up to 6 months.

Oh then there is the paternal and maternity leave, up to two years, depending
on the country.

~~~
lucozade
Precisely. There are countries, working under very similar constraints to
modern day US, that are trying, and succeeding, with other arrangements.

This should be the focus of the compare and contrast because it's a valuable
comparison.

I've seen a few of these, Monty Python-esque, comparisons recently. There was
one in the Guardian that asserted (wildly incorrectly) that female life
expectancy had decreased since the 19C.

If I was prone to paranoia, I'd be concerned that they are planted by folk
that want the status quo and are making these cartoonish comparisons to make
it easy to lampoon.

------
Jaruzel
> _As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an
> average of eight vacation days annually._

Is this true? In the UK, 'standard' holiday entitlement for most jobs starts
at 20 days annually, and that doesn't include official days off such as Xmas,
New Year, Easter etc.

~~~
refurb
It's not true. It's tough to find a job that doesn't offer 2 weeks and most
white collar jobs offer 3 weeks (15 days). That doesn't include the typical 13
stat holidays.

I have a job in the US that offers 25 paid days of vacation, plus the standard
13.

~~~
notfromhere
counting PTO as vacation is disingenuous. That's _all your time off for the
year_ rather than exclusively vacation

------
NicoJuicy
If this is true, i wonder how much is attributed to the shortage of light when
it's dark.

~~~
ctdonath
Good (and apparently unaddressed) point. We get several more hours per day for
leisure precisely because "daylight" can be continued indoors indefinitely.

------
vadimberman
Ugh. The paper reeks of political agenda. The very first sentence is:

> One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil.

What about the Communism? Why would _they_ spread this durable myth? Because I
remember hearing the same story in the Soviet school.

The paper does not make a real effort trying to consider different evidence
and honestly investigate the subject. Most of the sources are related to the
UK (specifically, England) with a couple referring to the US in XIX century.
How do we know how much the Dutch, German, French, Russian peasants worked,
let alone those in the rice-growing Asia? Finally, how about trying to
research 1600s and 1700s in North America to compare apples with apples?

Even in her own paper, the results appear a bit, ahem, uneven:

> 1988 - Manufacturing workers, U.K.: 1856 hours

> 1400-1600 - Farmer-miner, adult male, U.K.: 1980 hours > Calculated from Ian
> Blanchard's estimate of 180 days per year. Assumes 11-hour day

Yes, it's 180 days, but 11 hours each. Did she actually try working 11 hours
on a backbreaking menial job? Does she actually believe that 11 hours being a
miner in 1500s is the same as 11 hours in the office or even a modern assembly
line?

~~~
jerf
"The paper does not make a real effort trying to consider different evidence
and honestly investigate the subject."

Here's some food for thought: If you don't work an additional hour, because
the economic environment you are in has provided you no meaningful economic
task that would be worth doing in that hour, are you better off than someone
who does have that opportunity and works for benefit in that time?

It's difficult to compare across such time spans meaningfully. I've often
thought if we could bring someone forward in time from, say, a thousand years
ago and give them a tour of your local 7-11 that it would re-align a lot of
people's perspectives on our modern societies. (I'm not even picking that for
the cold drinks or snacks, either; it's things like "here's a tube of cream
that you can buy for roughly 10 minutes labor, tops, that when you smear it on
a cut makes it so the cut won't kill you anymore". Or, "condoms", that work
reliably. I'd expect tears from our visitor and a high likelihood of violent
resistence if you try to send them back.)

~~~
GuiA
Heh, your food for thought is a cherry picked, fairly detached piece of
speculation.

Here's another equally meaningless "food for thought": we bring a native
American from a thousand years ago to today. They go from a life of being very
connected to their community, the environment, fairly plentiful sources of
food, and so on, to a society where, statistically speaking, they have a high
chance of living in poverty, being systematically discriminated against in
ways that prevent them from pursuing education/employment/etc., facing
substance abuse, being confined in meaningful ways to an arbitrarily defined
"reservation", etc. etc.

Do you still expect tears and violent resistance if you try to send them back?

You can basically expand this thought experiment to most populations who are
not upper middle class white people. Would you rather be born as a random
Incan citizen, or a modern day coal miner in Peru?

------
megiddo
The comparison ignores the blistering daily poverty of a medieval peasant.
This is not merely a lack of technology - that would be a historical argument.

But even basic amenities that could be easily built in this time period were
difficult to come by. Entire villages might have to share a few pieces of
furniture, like a stool.

These people may have had a lot of "time off", but they spent it in horrible
poverty, many months of the year near starvation, even within the context of
what was available to them in their own time.

I would hazard to say that many modern office workers rarely actually
accomplish 40 hours of productive work in a given week. They may be physically
present, but how often are they chatting, goofing off, or standing around
waiting for an interaction. Modern business is built upon availability, not
necessarily toil.

~~~
ekianjo
> daily poverty of a medieval peasant

And death was omnipresent. Most of your kids would die in young age, folks
around you were killed by random infections or flu regularly, and there was
not much to look forward to in life.

------
minikites
I'm going to duplicate a comment I made in another thread
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16652952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16652952)),
because it applies equally well here and I'm quite disappointed that I seem to
be the only one pointing this out (after that thread reached more than 340
comments, a mere two other people made a similar comment to mine):

As I type this comment, there are 55 other comments in this discussion, not
one of them using the word "union". That's the only feasible method I can see
to enact large scale change. CEOs and other executives aren't going to change
out of the kindness of their hearts, as evidenced by the fact that they could
start at any point and still choose not to.

~~~
evanwise
While I am sympathetic to the idea of unionizing development and IT work, I
have a hard time imagining a practical path. Vaguely libertarian ideologies
seem to be the norm in these professions.

------
sparrish
They got up to 1/2 the year off, sure. But my guess is they had to work more
than 2000 hours the other half. They just compressed the hours worked into the
growing season. Modern farmers do the same thing (from a rural farming
community).

~~~
watwut
In winter you still need to care about animals, repair stuff, sew, chop wood,
cook, etc. Peasants had to create a lot of things that we buy nowdays. They
did not slacked whole winter.

~~~
sparrish
I agree, they worked in the winter, as modern farmer do as well, but not
nearly as hard as the spring, summer, fall.

I was just going with the "up to 1/2 the year vacation" from the article.

~~~
watwut
From what I read, it really was no slacking. For instance, all sewing was done
by hand - that includes stuff to put on bed and cover your self with. That is
huge amount of time consuming work. If you had daughter you had to prepare
things she will need after marriage - so even if you are fixed, you are
preparing things for that. Anything from wood is done by hand too.

And insulation is not nearly as good as today, so you need to sleep more for
the cold.

------
aanxiety
The problem with so many of the comments here: Of course you would sacrifice
your vacation time to avoid the pains of the middle ages and to gain the
advantages of today. But those advantages are not the mere consequence of us
working more. They are the consequence of centuries of technological
advancement. If we started working as little as medieval peasants our
standards of living would not just suddenly drop to their levels but they
would stay much higher.

We can have our cake and eat it too. And in passing, we would likely save
planet earth doing so.

------
ctdonath
Methinks medieval peasants would consider most modern work a vacation.

------
Hendrikto
The USA are abolishing themselves...

> In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of
> hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most
> productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in
> productivity.

Work smart, not hard.

~~~
adventured
I happen to agree with you broadly. However, two data points to bring to the
discussion.

Germany's _median_ net wealth per adult is below that of the US ($47,000 vs
$56,000 for 2017). Given the US isn't renowned for how well its middle does
these days, that implies something has gone wrong in Germany.

Per the OECD figures, the US is the third most productive in terms of GDP per
hour worked, at around $73 for 2017.

Excluding Norway, the best off country in terms of a combination of GDP per
hour worked, least hours worked per week, and highest median net wealth is...
Belgium.

They have $161,000 median wealth per adult, about 30 hours worked per week and
a GDP per hour worked just a notch below the US.

Here's how the OECD ranks hours worked per week:

Mexico 41.2, South Korea 40.7, Greece 39.1, Chile 38.2, Russia 38, Latvia
36.7, Israel 36.3, Iceland 36.1, Portugal 35.9, Lithuania 35.8, Estonia 35.6,
New Zealand 33.8, Czech 33.8, Slovakia 33.7, US 33.6, Hungary 33.6, Ireland
33.5, Italy 33.1, Japan 33.1, Canada 32.8, Australia 32.7, Spain 32.5,
Slovenia 32.5, UK 31.9, Finland 31.6, Sweden 31, Austria 30.9, Switzerland
30.6, Belgium 29.8, France 28.2, Netherlands 27.4, Norway 27.3, Denmark 27.2,
Germany 26.3

~~~
jeanmichelx
> $47,000 vs $56,000 for 2017

Ever tried to buy a (non fast-food) meal in Germany and in the US? Your
purchasing power is way higher in Europe.

~~~
adventured
I disagree, the US famously has a low cost of living compared to developed
nations in Europe. That includes everything from energy prices to housing
prices to food prices. When adjusted for the higher US wages, that imbalance
is even more dramatic.

Take energy costs as one example. US natural gas prices are half that of
Western Europe. Electricity costs are half or less that of Western Europe. In
Germany, electricity is about $0.35 kilowatt hour. In the US, it's $0.12.

[https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-
living/rankings_by_country.js...](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-
living/rankings_by_country.jsp)

~~~
throwawayjava
The US also has famously high costs for education and healthcare.

The US is a great place to be if you are in prime working age with in-demand
skills, no health problems, and no kids.

------
NPMaxwell
Conditions in Europe in the 14th century were mostly due to the Black Plague
(Black Death), which killed ~50% of the European population. The result was a
variety of infrastructure, institutions, and economic systems designed for a
much larger population. Used goods and housing were available at very reduced
rates. Labor was a scarce commodity. It took a while before Europe regained an
economic system that matched its population.

------
muzani
Is this surprising? People in the past had much more time and much less
resources. This isn't just medieval workers. It might have applied to the last
two generations, before the information age allowed us to check work email
first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

------
golergka
Because he didn't have a choice. If he could trade this vacation for more
food, medication for his children, or many other resources, he gladly would -
but I don't think that as a peasant in the winter you really could make
anything out of your time without a capitalist society and other jobs.

All modern people have a choice about how much time they spend at their jobs.
I've switched to 3-day workweek sometimes, raking 50% cut in salary; turns
out, if you're not in a leading position, it's painfully obvious to negotiate.
People in first world countries don't need to work 40 hours a week to avoid
starvation. We do it out of our own free will, because we want more stuff.

And, out of this personal experience - because we don't really have anything
better to do with our time. Even a regular, a bit boring job beats sitting
around the house and watching TV. Driving your own personal projects requires
a significant amount of motivation and willpower, and most of us would be too
ashamed to admit that we lack it.

~~~
stupidcar
By "all modern people", you apparently mean the relatively small group of
middle-class professionals who can earn a decent salary on a shorter working
week, and are in a position to negotiate it.

There is a far larger group of people working in low-skilled jobs whose entire
salary is not enough to cover their outgoings, and must also rely on consumer
debt and government assistance to support themselves and their families (think
Walmart workers on foodstamps). What's more, the balance of power with their
employer is such that they have absolutely no leverage to negotiate shorter
working hours, even if they wanted to. A low-skilled worker is expected to be
at the beck and call of their employer up to, and often beyond, the legal
limit of work. When you can be fired from a job you've held for years for
being 30 seconds late, you're not going to get far asking to work two less
days a week.

It's nice that you were able to arrange an easier lifestyle for yourself, but
don't mistake your privileged situation for the norm.

~~~
maxerickson
Most people working at Walmart would like to negotiate longer working hours.

~~~
maxxxxx
They probably would prefer higher wages.

~~~
maxerickson
Both. Wages first of course. But plenty of people don't want to be limited to
part time hours.

~~~
emodendroket
Right, but if you could have health insurance and a decent standard of living
while working part-time, who's to say that would still be the case? That's so
far from the world we live in that it is hard to imagine it.

------
socratewasright
They also died younger and led miserable lives by today's standards.

The article claims the american worker gets 8 days of vacation annually. 52*2
> 8 last time I checked.

I do believe though that with more automation, workers should be getting more
vacation time.

------
taneq
Note the significant difference between "leisure time" as in "playing games,
socializing and making merry" and just "huddling in a primitive hut waiting
for a chance to work more." It's not like he's having much fun (unless you
include all the begatting that must have gone on during the winter months...)

I'm really lucky that I don't generally want more things, and the things I do
want are cheap. Living in the future is freaking amazing if you enjoy making
things.

------
ggg9990
I’d rather sit at a desk for 280 days than do backbreaking work in plague-
ridden medieval Europe for 150 days.

------
cbayram
There was no concept of vacation. Notion of a vacation is very nascent in many
cultures.

------
commandlinefan
They paid less tax, too.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Until the 1200's, there was pretty much just the Geld in Europe (a land tax).

Because the geld was assessed on landowners, it only applied to free men who
owned land, and thus serfs and slaves were exempt.

Later on the income tax got invented, and was generally 1/10 to the king. I
wish I only paid 1/10 to the feds.

~~~
notahacker
Serfs and slaves weren't so much exempt from paying taxes as exempt from
earning income, whilst still being obliged to provide labour for other people
alongside trying to meet their own subsistence needs.

------
booleandilemma
And they got to work from home every day, too.

------
zeth___
What if it isn't a bug but a feature?

Tired citizens are not engaged citizens, they don't have the energy to
organize and push for their interests.

Workers being less productive is a small price to pay for employers when all
your productivity gains go to them anyway.

~~~
hn0
Oh, the joy of the marginalist supply and demand theorem!

Here's an excerpt of Alan Greenspan’s Feb. 26, 1997, testimony before the
Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee:

"The performance of the U.S. economy over the past year has been quite
favorable. … Continued low levels of inflation and inflation expectations have
been a key support for healthy economic performance. … Atypical restraint on
compensation increases has been evident for a few years now, and appears to be
mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity. The willingness of
workers in recent years to trade off smaller increases in wages for greater
job security seems to be reasonably well documented. The unanswered question
is why this insecurity persisted even as the labor market, by all objective
measures, tightened considerably."

------
fiatjaf
I would prefer just the facts. Is it true that medieval peasants got so much
vacation? When, where and how exactly? The article mentions many things, but
they're left quite unsubstantiated. I know I could do the research on my own,
but probably the article would be more valuable with more of the what and less
of the why.

~~~
emodendroket
Maybe this is more your speed.
[http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html)

