I don't think the concept of "unemployment" is meaningful when we're talking about pre-modern people living off the land.

When the land isn't producing (winter), and you're just living mostly off reserves, and you're not enjoying being pretty much trapped in a hut covered with snow, that counts as "unemployment". Sure isn't a "vacation".

You where not limited to your own hut. Further you where often staying with a large extended family so playing with children and telling stories etc. It was very different than staying home at a modern single apartment.

Making the best of a bad situation (the essence of unemployment) does not equate to choosing the manner & location of frolicking (the essence of vacation).

> The peasant's free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor -- the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...

Does not sound like the actions of a group desperate for more work.

In winter you could still hunt, fish, log wood, build and repair buildings and boats and farm tools and clothes, take care of your farm animals etc.

You could also cross bodies of water over the ice much easier with cattle or heavy loads (like wood, big game meat etc).

It's certainly more relevant than "vacation", since it's time spent doing little because nobody would pay them for work (and even if they would, there was nothing they could feasibly buy to improve their meagre living standards), not a paid leisure break to spend ones salary on personal enjoyment.

Nobody "paid them for work" in the first place. They weren't wage laborers.

The exact mode of payment is irrelevant. The point is they had to work for sustenance - whether it was trading skills for money, or producing goods and bartering them, or just producing direct necessities.

The core topic is "vacation", the concept of pleasurably not working while using reserves for sustenance. This in contrast primarily with "work" (the process of labor to create sustenance & reserves thereof), and raising the side contrast of "unemployment" (unable to produce sustenance, eating into reserves - or facing the prospect of none - in a decidedly UN-pleasurable situation).

Today we conflate "work" with "payment", as our society has become advanced enough that few indeed need produce the actual essentials of sustenance (ex.: by sitting here thinking for 8 hours, I can produce enough value to trade for a week's essentials - much more productive than simple gardening). The money (now mostly mere etherial bits, tacit agreements of trade) we earn should not obscure the fact that we're working for essential sustenance, plus surplus.

I grew up in a family which engaged in significant (though not complete) self-sufficiency. Heat? cut down trees, split logs, used wood stove. Food? grew half a year's vegetables & fruit. Clothing? made some of it, repaired much. That all wasn't "not working" just because a wage wasn't involved; it was hard work, not a vacation (and not unemployment).

The division between work-time and pleasure-time was not as rigid as "I'm in the office/vacation," but I don't see that that invalidates the argument. Hanging around drinking and dancing around a maypole is clearly not working.

Yes, I said as much in the previous post. They weren't wage labourers because local landlords and churches could call upon their labour for free, besides which when they were actually permitted to to sell their labour (and early Middle Ages European peasants often weren't) they had few skills to sell and little to buy with the proceeds. Thus those periods of downtime between agricultural seasons are a lot closer to the modern concept of periods of "unemployment" than they are to "vacation"

The salient fact about unemployment is that anyone who stays in that state faces destitution and is likely seeking some other work (we rarely talk about wealthy heirs being "unemployed"). For someone in a premodern agricultural lifestyle there wasn't really anything calamitous about this regular period of not-working.

Nothing calamitous other than the inability to compensate for crop failures which periodically left families starving. They didn't have to worry about repossessions of course, on the basis they were closer to being property than owning property. The salient fact about modern unemployment in developed countries is that unemployed people (and especially seasonally un[der]employed people) generally receive more through even the meanest form of state assistance or unemployment insurance than peasants ever did, they just have much higher expectations of a bare minimum standard of living to fail to meet.

Crop failures can just as easily happen under a capitalist mode of production; this seems somewhat orthogonal to the question of whether people not working in the off-season are "unemployed." Yes, I agree that the government is more effective at providing social welfare programs than it was in the past, although probably some of that was compensated for by the greater connection to neighbors and kin that someone would have had, as compared to today. I'm not trying to cast the Middle Ages as an idyll we've fallen from.

> Crop failures can just as easily happen under a capitalist mode of production; this seems somewhat orthogonal to the question of whether people not working in the off-season are "unemployed."

The point was that if the people had employment opportunities, they'd be less likely to die from their own crops failing, either through acquiring savings during downtime to pay for food or being able to move out of farming when the crops failed. I mean, the seasonal pattern of agricultural labour still exists for millions in many developing countries, but none of them have any shortage of people who used to work on the land seeking work in their sweatshops.

I don't think it's very likely in a medieval context that, if you are experiencing crop failure, there is an abundance of food to purchase from someone else.

Systemwide crop failures weren't exactly rare in the medieval era, but the chances of something going wrong with family-sized farms were higher still.