Modern Americans Work Harder And For Longer Than Medieval Peasants Did

However, as Boston College sociologist Juliet Schor wrote in her book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure, it's important to note that while their work might stretch across those 16 hours, much fewer of those hours were spent working than you might expect.

For one thing, it was more about a dawn-to-dusk period of work, so it would actually shrink back down to eight hours during the winter.

Specifically, work came to a dead stop for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and an afternoon nap. Depending on when and where a peasant worked, it also wasn't unusual to have additional breaks in mid-morning and mid-afternoon.

It's also important to keep in mind that this describes what work was like in peak harvest seasons. During slack periods of the year, it was commonly agreed that there wasn't much of a point to working regular hours.

All told, the amount of time spent working averaged out to about eight hours per day.

As she wrote, it's hard to get many average figures for work at the time, as such data wasn't necessarily recorded at that time. With that in mind, she based her findings on estimates for individual roles peasants in England could conceivably fill. England was chosen because peasants there were apparently worked harder than in France or Spain at the time.

Schor also noted that the workloads between men and women at the time were very different and there's no direct data on how much women had to do, either.

Still, the evidence she could find suggests that the domestic work a woman was expected to do would have been more regular and therefore harder than the men's work out in the fields.

Schor references French historian Jacques LeGoff, who described the pace of work as leisurely and unconcerned with the precision, productivity and speed requirements that characterize a lot of modern working conditions.

This was partially because the concept of measuring time by the hour or minute essentially didn't exist yet and so it was unclear how much time could be "wasted" if they thought of it that way.

The lower the energy requirements for working back then, the more possible it was to actually sustain that work over the periods of time required.

As Schor wrote, holidays set by the church such as Christmas, Easter, and another period in the middle of summer ran for days at a time. A peasant could also expect not to have to work during the various rest days and saint's days peppered throughout the year.

While it's true that they were expected to spend some of that time in church, they were also times of feasting and drinking. That merriment also kicked into high gear for wakes and weddings, as ale supplies for these events were expected to last for weeks.

All told, this let English peasants take about a third of the year off, and Spanish peasants had it even better with a cumulative five months off.

In terms of hours, Schor estimates that English peasants in Medieval times would have had to work about 1,440 hours a year.

By comparison, the most recent statistics from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development put the average annual hours Americans spent working in 2018 at 1,786 hours a year and it hasn't dipped below 1,780 since 2010.

So while the peasants may not have had as much money or food as we do, they also didn't have to work nearly as hard as often as we do. It's an interesting trade-off.

h/t: The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure