Note that “medieval peasant” is a meaningless term because the European Middle Ages span 1000 years and countless countries and cultures with varying conditions for “peasants”.
It was true, but having a holiday didn’t mean you can relax and chill.
It meant your landlord can’t force you to work for them on those days, so you had time to work on your own crops, care for your livestock, make firewood, fix stuff, do the laundry by hand, sell your crops at the market, etc.
You’d still work almost every day from sunrise to sunset, just to survive.
That honestly sounds pretty relatable for a lot of working people. In their “off time,” they’re doing housework, caring for their children, shopping for food, driving for uber, or making crafts to sell on etsy. Hell, my sister’s a teacher and she’s still got very little time to actually relax with two elementary aged children, teaching night and summer classes at a college as well as high school, and preserving food to sell it at local farmers markets. She’s most of the way to owning her modest house, and she doesn’t live an insane lifestyle, but she and her husband are both teachers and the cost of living is simply too high for them to cover their mortgage, gas, groceries, clothes for their kids, and utilities, while putting away for retirement and their kids’ college funds without them having to pick up extra work. The rest of their time is spent mostly on lesson preparation/corrections, housework, food preparation, and childcare.
It’s possible for some people to bypass a lot of that inconvenience with money, and some people can reduce their lifestyles to make ends meet with little money while keeping free time but a lot of people are performing some kind of labor most of the time.
It may have been true in one particular place at one particular time? I wouldn’t know. In any case, whoever came up with this (and it’s been making the rounds for quite a while) seems to be trying to obfuscate something with their phrasing (or doesn’t know what they’re talking about).
Note that “medieval peasant” is a meaningless term because the European Middle Ages span 1000 years and countless countries and cultures with varying conditions for “peasants”.
i don’t think the holiday thing is universally true either, but it makes for an impactful bit.
The church did have a lot of holidays back then but that didn’t mean people didn’t have to work on all of those.
Even if they didn’t work, the alternative was probably 11 hours of church for any holidays that aren’t still huge today like Christmas or Mardi Gras.
It was true, but having a holiday didn’t mean you can relax and chill.
It meant your landlord can’t force you to work for them on those days, so you had time to work on your own crops, care for your livestock, make firewood, fix stuff, do the laundry by hand, sell your crops at the market, etc.
You’d still work almost every day from sunrise to sunset, just to survive.
I think a big part of the reason this gets romanticized is just how utterly alienated people are from their own labor now.
Yes, it says a lot about current labor conditions when people yearn for the working life of a medieval peasant.
That honestly sounds pretty relatable for a lot of working people. In their “off time,” they’re doing housework, caring for their children, shopping for food, driving for uber, or making crafts to sell on etsy. Hell, my sister’s a teacher and she’s still got very little time to actually relax with two elementary aged children, teaching night and summer classes at a college as well as high school, and preserving food to sell it at local farmers markets. She’s most of the way to owning her modest house, and she doesn’t live an insane lifestyle, but she and her husband are both teachers and the cost of living is simply too high for them to cover their mortgage, gas, groceries, clothes for their kids, and utilities, while putting away for retirement and their kids’ college funds without them having to pick up extra work. The rest of their time is spent mostly on lesson preparation/corrections, housework, food preparation, and childcare.
It’s possible for some people to bypass a lot of that inconvenience with money, and some people can reduce their lifestyles to make ends meet with little money while keeping free time but a lot of people are performing some kind of labor most of the time.
It may have been true in one particular place at one particular time? I wouldn’t know. In any case, whoever came up with this (and it’s been making the rounds for quite a while) seems to be trying to obfuscate something with their phrasing (or doesn’t know what they’re talking about).