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Anon is exploited
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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I think people are confused by seeing influencers and/or rich people and thinking what they have is normal.
In the 1500s it was sun-up to sun-down, 6 days a week for the work outdoors. Once the sun set, nothing could really be done. If you were a typical peasant you couldn't even afford to keep a candle lit. So, people went back to their one-room huts with their livestock in the same room and slept and/or waited for morning. They didn't have to work Sundays, but they were absolutely required to attend church on Sundays, so it wasn't a free day. There were other days off, but many of them were days where you had to do a certain prescribed activity.
In the early 1800s it was 12 hours of work, 6 days a week. Industrial era lighting technology meant that work could continue after the sun had set, so there were no winter days where you only worked 8 hours. Also, because this was the era of the factory, people had to commute to the factory and back, so if you were lucky you had a full 10 or 11 hours when you weren't working or commuting. If you wanted to sleep for 8 hours, you'd have 2-3 hours to do your cooking, eating, cleaning, bathing, mending, socializing, etc.
Thanks to tireless and bloody protesting by labour unions, 6 days of 12 hours each was shortened to 5 days of 8 hours each. It started in Chicago. The "Haymarket Affair" was a protest that led to a riot which led to public hangings. But, eventually, as a result of that, the work day was shortened to only 8 hours. Then, in the years that followed, a 2 day weekend became standard.
It might not feel like it, but your ancestors would be jealous about how much free time you have these days. Your distant, peasant ancestors might actually have had fewer work hours. But, they only stopped working when it was too dark to do anything, and then they basically sat or slept in a tiny, drafty, stuffy, one-room hut along with their livestock until the sun came up.
If we kill and eat the rich and use their bones as decorations, it would be possible to keep a bit more of the value of our labour. But, we're nowhere near a situation where we can all live like the rich. Someone does still need to plant the food, harvest the food, pump the oil, cast the iron, smelt the aluminum, keep track of the shipping, etc. Life is hard, and has always been hard.
Do we actually archaeologically/anthropologically know that this is the amount of time that people spent working in those different periods?? Would love to see sources because I always think this is one of the most valuable things those fields can bring to us, but I've had trouble finding clear answers.
There's a lot of evidence of what life was like for peasants back in the Medieval period. But, it's hard to be exact because there were a lot of things that were taken for granted so nobody bothered to write them down and clarify.
Here's an article about it:
https://www.yeoldetymenews.com/p/do-you-work-more-than-a-medieval
What's well known, for example, is how many sundays and feast days there were. What's less known is what actually happened on those days. For example, the Monday and Tuesday after easter were ale-drinking feasts. What was a feast though? In some cases it was a "party" where attendance was mandatory and you had to pay a fee. Yes, there was drinking, but was it a party, or was it one of those "work parties" where you had to go, had to be on your best behaviour, etc.?
Because it varied a lot century-to-century and also varied location-to-location, it's hard to pin down what it was like unless you're looking at a specific location at a specific time, and it's a location and time where there's good data. What is pretty well known is that nights were really dark. Even candles were expensive for a peasant. So, when the sun set, work more or less stopped
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-price-of-lighting-has-dropped-over-999-since-1700
Beautiful, thank you so much! Will read momentarily.
Update: Good and pretty compelling source. May not be primary, but I appreciate the easier reading and I enjoy that they basically put confidence intervals on their answers.
But also, wow the rest of this site is hilarious. Bookmarked!
Solid review of the source, now I need to make a note to check it out later...
Yeah, that particular article is a serious more historical one and then most of the others on the site are satire written in a cheesy old English style and medieval setting and it's killing me
Yay! A chance for me to link to my favorite blog: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivc-rent-and-extraction/ (may require reading part IV.a and IV.b first).
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry is right now doing a series on how peasants lived. Arable land is limited, people really don't want to watch their family members starve, and the entire economic system is maybe kind of reliant on squeezing peasants to do the things necessary for society to function, so there's strong incentives of all kinds to work a lot