Thanks for this analysis! I've long been skeptical of the "you work more than a medieval peasant" meme, if only because I grew up in a rural farming area, and can definitively say that farm work never really stops. It doesn't matter if it's Sunday or a feast day, if you keep animals you'll have to tend them every single day. You could definitely take a day off from planting, or postpone harvesting for a bit, but so many farm tasks are unrelenting. You'll milk every day, or you'll hurt the cows. You'll have to put the chickens in their coop every night or risk losing your chickens. I love that the stone masons kept such good records, though. It feels so on brand for stone masonry.
The average America works many hours a week to have those chores done for them, or have machines that do them, so those need to be included. They ground flour every day by hand for cooking. They didn’t have a wood pile, so most every day they had to gather branches, dung, and twigs, commonly from some place over a mile away for cooking. With few clothes, laundry was done in a bucking by hand nearly every other day. Cooking from scratch also took hours every single day. The tools were soft iron, so every day after working in the field, you spend an hour that night sharpening them for the next day. Then there was the almost daily mending, changing the thrush light, sweeping out the place out of the stuff blown in by the wind and your dinner crumbs. A medieval peasants day did not stop when work was over, far from it. And no order of the church relieved him from taking care of those chores. He would commonly spend more of his time doing those chores than “working.”
Thanks for this analysis! I've long been skeptical of the "you work more than a medieval peasant" meme, if only because I grew up in a rural farming area, and can definitively say that farm work never really stops. It doesn't matter if it's Sunday or a feast day, if you keep animals you'll have to tend them every single day. You could definitely take a day off from planting, or postpone harvesting for a bit, but so many farm tasks are unrelenting. You'll milk every day, or you'll hurt the cows. You'll have to put the chickens in their coop every night or risk losing your chickens. I love that the stone masons kept such good records, though. It feels so on brand for stone masonry.
Thy toils for The King shan’t go unnoticed.
Chores
The average America works many hours a week to have those chores done for them, or have machines that do them, so those need to be included. They ground flour every day by hand for cooking. They didn’t have a wood pile, so most every day they had to gather branches, dung, and twigs, commonly from some place over a mile away for cooking. With few clothes, laundry was done in a bucking by hand nearly every other day. Cooking from scratch also took hours every single day. The tools were soft iron, so every day after working in the field, you spend an hour that night sharpening them for the next day. Then there was the almost daily mending, changing the thrush light, sweeping out the place out of the stuff blown in by the wind and your dinner crumbs. A medieval peasants day did not stop when work was over, far from it. And no order of the church relieved him from taking care of those chores. He would commonly spend more of his time doing those chores than “working.”
I have my manservants do my chores for me, thank ye very much.