They had some kind of holiday or celebration every month, often a few in one month. These were often similar to sports (for example Śmigus Dyngus where young boys run around the villages pouring water on girls they like as a pagan fertility custom). Or Noc Świętojańska where girls throw flowers into river and boys compete to get them and jumping over the campfires. Or Andrzejki where they danced whole night and played many kinds of "predict-the-future" games. Every wedding lasted a few days and after the midnight all guests played "wedding games" which were a combination of trivia, folk-song battles, guess what your partner thinks, and dexterity contests.
Each church had a saint patron or several of them, and on their days they had church market with traders from all around and various games and dances. Each person had a saint patron as well and their families celebrated on these "namedays". Every trade had their saint patron too, and they celebrated that. To this day it survived for farmers, miners, hunters and firefighters, but back then every possible job had its own holiday.
Basically the only time of year where there really was no entertainment was the 40-day fast (and even then there were exceptions - for example some villages to this day celebrate "half-fast-day" with various customs like painting walls of houses with water and calcium and dancing of course).
Also family back then was 20 people of all ages living near each other, not 4 like now. When a kid was born you had one party, another when it got baptized, another when it got first communion, then when it got confirmation, then when it married, built a house, bought some big animals and died. Add namedays each year and multiply by 20 people in extended family and you get every week busy.
That's just the stuff that survived to modern day in some form or another, there has been a lot more of this back then. Additionally every Sunday mass served partially as entertainment for peasants.
Lupercalia always sounded like a good time to me. Who doesn’t want to strip naked and run through the streets whipping willing young women hoping to have their fertility increased?
This is clearly not true. They didn't have modern leisure activities, but they had a vast array of activities to keep them from getting bored when they weren't working or doing the arduous, nearly continuous preparation of meals.
> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!
No literature, sure, because they were illiterate (and it took the invention of the printing press to create a market for leisure books).
But no games/sports? How about boules, bowling, prisoners' bars, blind man's bluff, table games (chess, checkers, backgammon, alquerque, three-in-a-row, mill, the fox and geese, tablut), dice, card games, variations on golf, hand-ball, kick the can, cockfighting, cow-tipping, bull-baiting, a form of rugby, wrestling, fencing, racing, and an innumerable array of local games often surrounding festivals with cultural/spiritual significance? They also did activities like swimming, fishing, hunting, playing music, singing, story telling, dancing, even ice skating.
I'm tired from just listing them all!
The most common leisure activity for men was probably drinking in the tavern. This shouldn't be understated; this took up a lot of time. And it wasn't because they had nothing else to do, it's because drinking and socializing is often preferable to the above activities, even today. A lot of people today don't play any games at all, but spend hours every day sitting around shooting the shit over cans of Bud.
I'm not as familiar with womens' lives, but I imagine they had more responsibilities and less leisure time. Cooking, cleaning (such as it was), sewing/needlepoint, and raising children all takes considerable time, so they mightn't have had as much time for leisure. A lot of the above activities were also intended for men.
>No literature, sure, because they were illiterate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_literature
(I know you mentioned storytelling in passing, but that rather downplays it. Oral literature was a big deal.)
These were finally recorded in written form around the 6th century or so in much of Europe and Asia. Subsequent scholars (Idries Shaw who's 1970's World Tales is a collection of such stories being an exemplar) has found that the same stories occur again and again across cultures.
The etymologies of Zeus and Jupiter (*dyeu-peter- "Zeus Pater", literally Sky Father) are from Sanskrit, and similar / related names are shared and found across Eurasia.
My understanding is that women would do most if not all of these activities in groups with other women and use it as an opportunity for talking.
Also once the sun goes down, the work stops -- nobody aint cookin once they cant see the food, not even washing up
But many of the listed activities were either only available for royals in the medieval period (fencing, racquet games, table games, a deck of cards in the 1300s was reportedly worth a small herd of sheep), or simply weren't recorded until that flurry of leisure innovations in the 1700s.
Perhaps this is all due to that pronounced rise in literacy that came at the same time. But I suspect literacy is one of the things that coincided with the huge material gains of normal people, and not unrelated.
I think we might consider them dull because we're not living their lives but maybe these were denser and fuller times than what we do today.
It's also possible that having harsher conditions half a year, made simple games and gatherings deeply satisfying.
They were bored most of the day waiting for the bocce-precursor or cock fight to begin, while we've got something to play with constantly that appears to give us anxiety and insomnia.
Boredom isn't usually fatal and may even protect against other problems.
The activities of the historical poor and working class are rarely recorded except in fiction written by the wealthy that contains poor or working class characters. Also, your best evidence is a lack of evidence.
they are, in some ways. Efficiency gains can mean you work less, but they more often mean you have less people doing the same work. Back then one peasant had much less land to cultivate, a third of all fields were fallowed each year, and 90% of the population worked in farming. Now it's more like 10% and in some countries even less than that.
The problem with being a peasant wasn't the hard work - it was the constant risk of starvation or sickness killing you and your family. So they optimized for lowering the risks instead of optimizing for better profits or more free time.
> even by the people who left the village for jobs in sweatshops
Sweatshops are harder work but less risks than farming.
Well even amish people have modern lives compared to middle ages but you get the idea.
I think our modern lifestyle is astoundingly isolated compared to pre industrial people, even hunter gatherer cultures have hunting parties rather than a lone wolf hunter.
Some war veteran said they preferred the battlefield because even with the threat of death, the life in those times were closer, more intense. Now that's an extreme case but it's telling.
And even about art/leisure.. you don't need much to go deep. Singing, playing drums, dancing doesn't require anything modern. People had pigments or crude material to craft but still it's something.
To me it seems to miss the point. Modern life is not something that was intentionally designed. We're talking about the emergent output of different complicated systems, with wonderful things and horrific things enabled by both.
Undoubtedly we've sacrificed some of the best aspects of the past for dubious gains. Undoubtedly we're better off in deep, fundamental ways. Meaningful self-actualization is harder than ever, because finding meaning is hard and we've studied the problem enough that fooling ourselves has gotten harder.
One of the problems with an increasingly global culture and economic system is the erosion of diversity. If we had drastically different systems and experiences, we could try and marry the best aspects from each. Instead, we get some semi-stable equilibrium that emerged by happenchance and the only path out towards something different seems to be by some kind of central planning or massive movement-- both of which have tended to make things worse in practice because of unintended consequences and institutional inertia.
> One of the problems with an increasingly global culture and economic system is the erosion of diversity. If we had drastically different systems and experiences, we could try and marry the best aspects from each. Instead, we get some semi-stable equilibrium that emerged by happenchance and the only path out towards something different seems to be by some kind of central planning or massive movement-- both of which have tended to make things worse in practice because of unintended consequences and institutional inertia.
I'm not sure I fully get your paragraph (you write conceptually dense ideas) but I kinda see a globalized homogenization of cultures which seems impoverished.
Yes--- . The problem is that there are massive economies of scale and interconnection driven by trade and global markets. In turn, the large scale of the marketplace doesn't leave much room for labor or capital to not be allocated "optimally". In turn, the amount of ability any given entity (individual people, businesses, or even nation-states) have to experiment with significantly different systems is very limited.
For experiments on the smaller scale, there's a big chance they are not applicable to broader groups. And experiments on the larger scale (revolutions, massive policy changes, etc) tend to have unintended consequences and a massive body count.
We're in a stable-ish equilibrium, but it's completely unlikely we're near any kind of global optimum on material wealth, or quality of life, or any other given chosen axis.
> of cultures which seems impoverished.
This is an interesting one, too. There was a certain threshold of wealth reached just before industrialization which allowed a massive growth in cultural expression and we have wonderful things from many cultures that emerged then... that then, with global media and global trade we've been able to enrich further-- we've played off of and learned and enjoyed the riches (culinary, musical, artistic, literary, ....) thereof. But in so doing we've strip-mined this heritage and permanently weakened the nation-scale incubators of new ideas.
Wouldn't this result in exactly the global culture? A compromise by taking the “best” aspects from everyone minimizing everyone's unhappiness from that?
Yes-- that's exactly what we've done: mostly selecting for efficiency. And now we're so locked into a local optimum of efficiency, diversity in business culture and mainline economic practices is difficult.
> minimizing everyone's unhappiness from that?
While capital markets try to optimize return on investment, and happiness is one component of economic preference that drives ROI... they hardly try and optimize happiness, per se. They are also relatively short-sighted, don't foresee all consequences and externalities, and tend to fall into local rather than global optima.
In the tropics it was midday when activities ceased because it was too hot.
That said, I disagree that people had little in terms of leisure. They had many more days long festivities where people got together and enjoyed some down time typically they coincided with planting, harvesting (more pagan related) and then religious dates.
When the French revolutionary government created a secular approximation of the church calendar, they only gave off 1 out of every 10 days.
Slacking on any of the above could result in starvation the coming Winter as well as possibly losing your animals as well. There was lots of interdependencies which were quite unforgiving.
So it seems that outside of religious holidays, people could have been expected to work every day.
Feeding animals didn't counted as work, just like nowadays people don't think cooking for your family or brushing your teeth is work.
I've always thought it would be an interesting reality TV show concept to create a historically accurate medieval village populated with well-researched, role-playing actors and then to drop a small group of modern people into that context to see how they do. I suspect the reactions of those who over-estimated the idyllic-ness of the past would make for compelling reality TV fodder.
There have been a number of historical reenactment shows over the years. Continual this-is-hard reax would be a bit tiresome, so usually they include lots of success.
If you want struggle, and will accept some industrialization there was "Frontier House" from PBS.
Otherwise, I recommend the "Tales of Green Valley" historical farm series and sequels for a well-informed English version. Here is the sequel "Tudor Monastery Farm" on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjgZr0v9DXyK9Cc8PG0Zh...
I grew up on a farm. It was run pretty much by manual labour up until even the 30's and beyond. Even while tractors and various forms of farm automation became pretty commonplace by the 50's and 60's, they still used age old techniques for preserving hay by drying it on metal threads well into the 80's and sometimes even until the 90's.
My grandfather still used the scythe on his fields as long as he was healthy enough to work in 80's. He much preferred the ways of old, and never even bothered installing hot water, much less a water toilet or a shower, in his house. Yet they had time for a lot more holidays back then than we do today.
Sure, there was lighter kinds of work you could do while socializing, such as knitting or even baking bread. But then a large amount of people actually thoroughly enjoy doing those things, including woodworking or even hunting or fishing. Is it leisure or work? Well, it's hard to say when you're also dependent on it for survival.
These days the fantastic progress of "social media" is making sure I have to answer messages from my boss even on weekends. I don't really think of that as "progress"...
I mean, I'm sure almost everyone including farmers had a list of things they'd rather do than work - but are the majority of people today really working jobs that just make them absolutely miserable?
One of my best friends is a cashier at Trader Joe's and - for the most part - she genuinely enjoys it. Only two of my friends HATE their jobs, and their desperately trying to find a new job. Almost all of my friends have lots of complaints about their jobs - but they also have a lot of things they like about it, too.
Why isn't there a grey area for modern work and leisure but there is one for old work?
>Music and dance Music and dance is as old as humanity itself.
The peasantry could not afford to pay professional musicians but plenty of people knew how to dance and sing and enough people knew how to play instruments to have a jolly good time.
Occasionally, actors might come to town and put on plays and dramas.
>Decorative Arts Decorative arts were applied to clothing, housing, religiously symbolic objects, etc.
Embroidery, pottery, basket weaving, carpentry, leatherwork and woodcarving were common skills, often with division of labor by sex.
>Sports Sports, including martial arts were also practiced commonly.
There were many medieval tournaments allowing people to compete and demonstrate their physical skill in sports like running, log-tossing, or stick-fighting.
There were also team events such as kicking a stuffed leather ball.
Sounds more like work tbh. Basket weaving may be a hobby now, but unlikely it was in 16th century.
Compare it to say a modern profession like software engineering. Despite it being work, there's plenty of programmers who also enjoy programming and do it for fun on their own time as well as work.
Why would it have been any different back then?
Basket weaving done in your home, with performance left to your own scruples, and a personalized schedule is leagues different than slaving away for someone else.
Subsistence farming is not leisure.
I think we are seeing proof of what you are saying with the childcare cost crisis in most developed nations. A good proportion of early years childcare (and often later) was "free". Now that it is being transferred into wage labour in many countries with growing labour force participation amongst women, we are learning that this stuff was very costly. Similarly, all the household tasks then would take a full working day.
Also, they did have sports and games. Many of the games we play today have their origins in that period, but they weren't of the formal nature that we have today (and there were far more bloodsports). They had culture of a sort: theatre, singing, music. And they had more mass social events like festivals and market days (life today is far more atomized, back then this was a way for everyone to gather in a place and get business done). The rich didn't do organized sports either (as we conceive)...hunting of course was a huge pasttime.
The "innovations" of that period passed into irrelevance when the world changed. Our "innovations" will also pass into irrelevance too.
EDIT: btw, someone else has said that only the activities of the rich are recorded...this isn't right, there are lots of social history books which cover the leisure activities of workers in this period (if you Google social history or leisure history, you will find the period you are interested in).
Not even close.
Try visiting a rural place that still lives in pre-20th century standards (not as hard as it sounds in Central Asia, Africa, etc. Heck, even in most of Europe it was the norm up around the 1950s in almost all rural areas, and in many places in Southern Europe it was quite the same up to the 1970s -- electricity and cars didn't come to lots of rural areas until that decade).
In any case, household tasks were an insignificant amount of the day.
(Also, contrary to the modern myth, both men and women worked. "Women not working" was a thing for richer families, in poor and rural households women worked just fine, in the same fields and tasks as men - and of course this continued in the industrial era, poor women working in factories was standard. Women "not allowed to work" was a rich-household's problem).
As for the kids, aside from school (where that was compulsory, since I include here the 20th century European rural experience), after quite a small age, like 3-4 they mostly roamed around playing and were taken care for by the whole community - not many struggling "parents without nunnies" or helicopter parenting there. And after getting around 10 or so they'd start helping with some chores too.
Kids in industrialized nations had it worse. In the 19th century to about 1930, from Paris and London to New York, there were 8-10-12 year old kids working in the chimneys, the factories, even the mines:
The hosts spent two hours preparing a hearth to cook bread for us. And they ended the meal with a plead for us to help them get visas to the West.
And you are vastly underestimating the child death rates where small children roam freely. Children in factories might have arguably been safer than on a farm.
We need to stop romanticizing other people's poverty.
Well, this is beside the point, this was about whether "household chores took the best part of the day". Not whether you would trade to rural living or not.
>The hosts spent two hours preparing a hearth to cook bread for us
So? I've roasted, cooked, etc. for decades, and it was never a big deal, nor you have to be over the wood-stove or grill for the whole time (when you do, the cooking is very fast, like with some meats). And if there are 3-4 persons in the household (as there always were, families lived with several children and grandparents where never far away), it's dead easy to have rounds keeping an eye on it and still be free to do whatever else.
>And you are vastly underestimating the child death rates where small children roam freely. Children in factories might have arguably been safer than on a farm.
You're vastly overestimating.
Kids restrained is modern helicopter parent hysteria. Kids generally roamed free up until the 70s in most places in Europe, and well into the 60s in most neighborhoods, even in cities like New York. It's not some medieval phenomenon, or something associated with "high child death rates". The ocassional kid could stil e.g. drown in a lake, like the ocassional kid today can be hit by a car. But that was not where "high child death rates" came from. Increased child death rates were indeed a thing, but were in birth or small age due to the lack of modern medicine (and most of it basic stuff, like cleaning hands, penicilin, etc, not high test medicine). In any case, not something particular to "kids roaming free".
And if you think kids in factories were safer, you probably don't know much about how child work in factories functioned.
One, the number of children then was far higher, and there was no school.
Two, I don't think you understand that incomes were so low back then that they could not afford even basic machinery. The furniture that most people had was a few chairs, tables, and things to eat with. Even basic household machinery (for example, a mangle) that was common in pre-20th century rural society, didn't exist (these machines also weren't produced in large volume).
Three, no most women didn't work...I am not sure why and how you came to this conclusion. But women didn't commonly start working until proto-industrialisation. I think what may be confusing you is that women did work in agriculture during harvest times, this was not the case for most of the year.
Four, the definition of household tasks isn't even comparable. Household tasks included things like gardening which would only make sense in the context of a society with a non-existent market economy. Again, the comparison is...non-sensical, it makes no sense.
Five, you can just Google this. There are ample historical estimates of this kind of thing. It is not like this information is totally unknown.
I would suggest reading a book about social history rather than attempting to compare with some other period of history that you think you know better (your views of pre-20th century life are also not correct but that is a whole other story).
I don't need to "understand". I come from such a place, which was mostly like that until I was 10 or so well into the late 20th century. That's where my parents grew up too.
Being poor in monetary terms in such rural places means little (it's not the same as an equivalent poor in New York, which would be not having anything to it, no house, no shelter, and so on). Most of the living wasn't about paying for things with money.
>Three, no most women didn't work...I am not sure why and how you came to this conclusion. But women didn't commonly start working until proto-industrialisation. I think what may be confusing you is that women did work in agriculture during harvest times
Women worked fine, not just in rural places, but also in the cities, in all kinds of jobs, all the way to antiquity. The conceptions you have are all about richer families, not the average person. Of course in argiculture it was absolutely the norm that women worked. Women also worked in all kinds of jobs, from selling and serving in the agora in ancient Greece ("women at home" was for the richer families) to keeping shops and tarverns in the medieval times.
>this was not the case for most of the year.*
It wasn't "most of the year" for men, either. That's part of TFA's point to begin with.
>Four, the definition of household tasks isn't even comparable. Household tasks included things like gardening which would only make sense in the context of a society with a non-existent market economy. Again, the comparison is...non-sensical, it makes no sense.
Comparable to what? To the tasks you might know in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Phoenix, or wherever you grew up?
All these tasks (like gardening) and the for the most part "non-existent market economy" extended all the way into my childhood, and all earlier generation, in the parts I'm from, and many similar parts. They're still a big majority of what people do, though for the last 30-40 years they also have electricity.
Yes, people in my village (not any extraordinary example, most of Europe was alike) didn't have electricity (including fridges, microwaves, washing machines), money was small part of their life, and had gardens they ate from a lot of stuff (from olives and grapes, to potatoes and watermelon), including having farm animals. Well into the second half of the 20th century.
And they still had ample free time. Due to lack of modern entertainment, in a sense, boredom, and associated e.g. drinking, gossip, petty squables, etc. to pass the time, was more of an issue than lack of free time was.
>Five, you can just Google this. There are ample historical estimates of this kind of thing. It is not like this information is totally unknown.
Seriously, do some research yourself. Start from TFA, there are plenty of other sources on antiquity, middle ages, and the pre-industrial society.
Keith Wrightson is the basic textbook used on this subject (Omrod has written one about an earlier period). Pls, even for HN...this is wild, wild, wild levels of delusion.
A, that settles it then. "your only evidence is that you think it was like the place you grew up...seriously?" -- no, my evidence is having lived that life and knowing people who did well until 30 years ago (and even after then, slowly changing).
But sure, an English academic of the peasant classes on that island would know more. He read books about the matter (but probably not Sahlins or ethnology on the leisure times of even primitive tribes. Not much for other political environments and warmer climates, e.g. southern europe either. And probably has never cooked on a wood stove, grew plants and fed chicken animals).
They had tons of fan of several forms, including fabulous festival seasons, and public holidays, complete with dancing, drunkdness, singing and music, and several other things besides...
The idea of those "pour people" comes from lorded over overworked peasants in feudal societies, a small part of global history.
Even so, the same poor people post industrialization had it worse -- for one, they were forced in many ways (including laws destroying their lands and livelihood) to work in factories, didn't chose it as a lifestyle improvement. And many put up a great fight in the process too
In any case, before industrialisation, wage labour employment was a lot rarer. Peasants were mostly self employed, self sufficient and most work was defined differently. In a lot of cases, medieval people "owed" work as a tax or rent... They were expected to feed themselves.
My grandparents were born in mid 20th century Ireland. They grew most of their food, made most of their furniture, harvested fuel. Etc. They also had cash jobs, cash crops and such. But, a lot of the economy was non monetary subsistence even then. Hard to quantify the workweek, in a meaningfully comparable way to our lifestyles.
>>comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century
Those seventy hour industrial workweeks of the 19th century probably was" normative for domestic servants and other low class workers. They weren't expected* or sometimes even allowed to have families, homes or domestic duties.
IMO, instead of taking medieval "data" and defining it in our terms, we should understand their ways in their terms. Renaissance europe ran were "rights and privileges." Those related to being a maid, miner, landlord or artisan. There were guilds that had ranks. These things were referred to as your "station," "position," possibly even a class. Those things dictated a lot about your lifestyle, how much and what kind of work you did.
But do you or your partner have to spend ~1200-2000 working hours/year spinning clothes for you and your household?
This was absolutely the norm in pre-industrial times. You couldn't just go down to the thrift store and buy a pair of jeans for $8.
When you clean, fix, wash and butcher, you have a dishwasher. You have a washing machine. You have a dryer. You have running water. You don't need to go down to the well, or to the river, to bring water up in buckets. You have electric heating - and you don't have to spend hundreds of hours a year chopping, seasoning, and splitting firewood, and then hauling it to your home. (And even if you do, you have far better tools to do it than were available back in the day.)
We can wash our clothes so much easier but we insist on washing them after every wear. The net result is the same amount of time spent washing clothes (but they are always nicer).
And setting on laundry is largely a fixed effort, whether you do one item or thirty. Most people don't do one at a time.
People visited the same people (small village) and talked about the same things day after day. Days consisted of talking, doing chores around the house, eating and sleeping.
My father had a 40 hr work week and did not do sports, neither did my mother.
You don't think that cleaning, cooking, fixing and doing dishes is a bit less work today than in pre industrial era?
I fix and change secondhand clothes, but I do have a sewing machine. Other things I fix were unfanthomable then, some fixes take weeks. My Selectric III for example.
Maybe they were not that relaxed, but slow paced work came from the necessary energy conservation?
"I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked twenty-five miles that day."
I think the opposite is the interesting factor here: late-stage capitalism has demonized the ‘grinding poverty’ and ‘unremitting hardship’ of these earlier ages, to keep our present-day noses to the life-destroying grindstone.
Yet, no one chooses life of subsistence farmer if they are able to choose.
You can also join Amish communities, if you are religious.
You won't have access to pre-modern supply chain, but you are probably eligible for social security and foodstamps, so you can exchange them for new scythe or something like that.
Dude, what? This is quite possibly the dumbest most ignorant ill-informed take I've seen today.
Although, I think it goes without saying that before affordable lighting and heating, we all underestimate how lazy winters were for the average peasant, whether idyllic or not (accounts I have read make it sound incredibly, incessantly dull).
And I think the best evidence we have that we are overrating the quality of pre-industrial leisure time is that people developed almost no leisure activities! Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! They supposedly had half a year of doing nothing, and perhaps singing and drinking was sufficient to fill the time, but you'd think they would show lots of other innovations. Or even steal the activities of the rich (organized sports)!
Instead you don't see leisure activities develop until the rise of the 40 hour workweek and the availability of consumer appliances.
Edit: I hope people understand that the argument the article presents is largely a romanticization of poverty.