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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   41964 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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In the world before modernization you got up before the sun, worked your ass off until it set, and hoped nothing bad happened that meant you didn't survive anyway.

I thought that the hard working life of peasants was a bit overblown, that they would take long breaks, day drink, and get about half the year off. Based of vague half remembered scholarship, maybe Juliet Schor?

This is based on a never-published paper which was wrong. If you want a deep dive, see https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/

'Medieval peasants got half the year off' is a misconception based on the religious calendar of the medieval church, which allowed agricultural labor monday-saturday, less major feasts(impossible to estimate exactly how many but 36 is a normal median estimate from religious scholars- you could probably add a few more for feasts of local importance, and of course statistically 1/7 would happen on a Sunday anyways). This adds up to slightly more working days per year than the modern M-F minus a half dozen holidays workweek. Those days were, of course, much longer.

As for winter, in climates where you can't do agriculture in the winter you have 'not freezing to death' work tasks to do instead like chopping wood.

As for winter, in climates where you can't do agriculture in the winter you have 'not freezing to death' work tasks to do instead like chopping wood.

And repairing your plough, your harrow, your cart and so on.

Tolstoy had the following to say about the peak of the peasant work year.

The day on which Sergey Ivanovitch came to Pokrovskoe was one of Levin’s most painful days. It was the very busiest working time, when all the peasantry show an extraordinary intensity of self-sacrifice in labor, such as is never shown in any other conditions of life, and would be highly esteemed if the men who showed these qualities themselves thought highly of them, and if it were not repeated every year, and if the results of this intense labor were not so simple.

To reap and bind the rye and oats and to carry it, to mow the meadows, turn over the fallows, thrash the seed and sow the winter corn—all this seems so simple and ordinary; but to succeed in getting through it all everyone in the village, from the old man to the young child, must toil incessantly for three or four weeks, three times as hard as usual, living on rye-beer, onions, and black bread, thrashing and carrying the sheaves at night, and not giving more than two or three hours in the twenty-four to sleep. And every year this is done all over Russia.

yeschad.jpg

Although I have no idea what they are doing at night that would so disrupt their sleep, light is expensive.

Edit - I guess threshing, shouldn't skim so much.

Sounds like most of what people complain about in the modern western world today.

If you mean people didn’t have modern concepts of leisure and recreation that’s true. The world they also had to concern themselves with was a lot smaller.

Sounds like most of what people complain about in the modern western world today.

Inaccurately.

And debt collectors would beg to differ.

Based.

Also, you did approximately nothing all winter.

Also, you did approximately nothing all winter.

Still had to take care of the animals. Keep the fires going. Make any necessary repairs. Do all the household tasks.

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