Vampire [any]

  • 29 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 23rd, 2021

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  • Vampire [any]@hexbear.nettoCommunism@lemmy.mlProtestation
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    7 days ago

    There’s complexity to the question:

    How do we define mediæval? (I low-key hate the words mediæval and Middle Ages, partly because of Eurocentrism). There’s no such thing as a “mediæval peasant” really, there were various people at various times. Let me ask: how many days a year does a proletarian work? How long is a piece of string? Now if you look at the historical debate that spawned this meme, they’re actually talking about England 1200-1600.

    Are we talking about necessary labour (subsistence farming), surplus labour (for the lord), or both? I kinda suspect the “150 days” claim is surplus labour done for the lord. But then you’ve got to fix and clean your tools, thatch your roof, gather and chop your firewood, row your own household’s food, etc.

    It seems the 150 day claim comes from Gregory Clark’s 1986 paper ‘Impatience, Poverty, and Open Field Agriculture’. And from Juliet Schor’s book, but I think Clark may be her source.

    If you look at Gregory Clark’s 2007 paper with DOI 10.111/ehr.12528 it seems he has changed his mind. So is the “150 days” claim based on an obsolete paper from 1986? Bottom of page 17/top of page 18 he says it’s clear people worked 300 days in 1860 because record keeping is good then, but there was an increase TO 300 in the years 1650-1800. Figure 6 does show some very low numbers in the years 1200-1600 (which is presumably what the meme is talking about) taken from ‘British Economic Growth, 1270-1870’ by Stephen Broadberry et al.

    My computer’s overheating, might edit this comment later.

    Generally, across all historical periods, I’ve rarely seen estimates of anyone working less than 1300 or more than 2300 hours a year.


  • Vampire [any]@hexbear.nettoCommunism@lemmy.mlProtestation
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    7 days ago

    There’s considerable academic debate back-and-forth over how much they worked.

    They didn’t get Saturday off: the week was Monday to Saturday. But to make up with that they had all the St. Swithin’s Day and St. Brice’s Day and all that stuff stereotypical mediæval peasants talk about.