As I noted in a 2011 rant
against some of Jared Diamond's work, the life of a medieval peasant
was not so completely filled with drudgery as some popular histories
might lead one to believe:
...Painting
the image of hunter-gatherer superiority he makes no mention of the
agricultural peasants of the middle ages who worked between 180 and 260
days per year, the rest of the time being taken up with Sundays, feast
days, holidays, fair days etc.
On top of that, in a world where light was either by sun or by fire, the
winter workday north of, say, the 45th parallel, was reasonably short.
Of course it wasn't all Holiday partaaay--famine, pestilence and war
made their periodic visits--but the actual time spent working was most
likely less than at present, at least for those folks who are currently
attached to the workforce....
And from the Economic History Society's The Long Run blog, September 19:
By Judy Stephenson (University College London) The full paper that inspired this blog post will be published on The Economic History Review and is currently available on early view here
St Paul’s Cathedral – the construction of the Dome. Available at <https://www.explore-stpauls.net/oct03/textMM/DomeConstructionN.htm>
How many days a year did people work in England before the Industrial
Revolution? For those who don’t spend their waking hours desperate for
sources to inform wages and GDP per capita over seven centuries, this
question provokes an agreeable discussion about artisans, agriculture
and tradition.
Someone will mention EP Thompson and clocks or Saint
Mondays. ‘Really that few?’ It’s quaint.
But, for those of us who do spend our waking hours desperate
for sources to inform wages and GDP per capita over seven centuries the
question has evolved in the last few years into a debate about
productivity and when modern economic growth began in an ‘industrious
revolution’. A serious body of research in economic history has recently
estimated increasing numbers of days that people worked from the late
seventeenth century. Current estimates are that people worked about 270 days a year by 1700, rising to about 300 after 1750.
The uninitiated might think that estimates of such important things
like the working year would be based on some substantive evidence, but
in fact, most estimates of the working year that economic historians
have been using for the last two decades don’t come from working records
at all. They come from court depositions
where witnesses told the courts when they went to and left work, or
they come from working out how many days a worker had to toil to afford a
basket of consumption goods.
This approach, pioneered by Jacob Weisdorf and Bob Allen in 2011,
essentially holds welfare as a constant throughout history, and it’s
the key assumption made in a new paper on wages forthcoming from Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf.
Unsurprisingly for historians familiar with material showing the
miserable conditions under which the poor toiled in eighteenth century
Britain, this calculation frequently leads to a high number of days
worked. It also implies that Londoners, due to higher day wages, may
have had slightly more leisure than rural workers. Both implications
might appear counterintuitive....MUCH MORE
