The thing that I don't get when studying history is when you see things like 'king ____ was deposed and exiled by the new ruler. Five years later, he returned with an army to retake his throne.'
Like I just functionally cannot imagine screwing something up and getting sent away into a life that is, all things considered, still probably more comfortable than most people?? and a hell of a lot less stressful. And entirely believing. 'Ah, yes. I should amass an army of people willing to die for me so I can kill a bunch more people and be king again.'
This is admittedly a personality mismatch as much as anything. But every time I've left a workplace I have taken psychic damage afterwards merely from having to pass vaguely into the surrounding area.
I saw a post by @monsterblogging stating that an important step in decolonizing Fantasy is to recognize how "wildly anti-environmental" Europeans became, with the near extinction of wolves through hunting in england used as an example. The post linked to this article: https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/wolves-in-britain which says that the mass-hunting and demonization of wolves was started by the normans to protect sheep flock which produced valuable wool.
and this mentality was carried by white people everywhere they colonized—seeing any animals thats mildly challenging to humans as something thats degraded, unpersoned and killed off or contained in the deep wilds.
This post made me ponder when this type of mentality was developed in pre-modern Europe, and what where the factors behind its development. Can i ask for your opinion as a medievalist and historian in this subject?
...Well. For starters, the linked post is just, uh. Wrong. On several levels. In several ways. Before I get to its facts, falsehoods, and assumptions, let's start with one of the problems involved in citing it as a source on history: it's written by a retired veterinary nurse. I'm sure that Debbie Graham (retired veterinary nurse) has done many wonderful things in her career. I'm reasonably sure that we'd be in sympathy politically, and would get along if we found ourselves on the same protest line or weekend hike. But uh. As a set of historical claims, this is egregious.
For one thing, it is either disingenuous or breathtakingly stupid to take the wolf as a stand-in for "the environment," full stop. The wolf is the most culturally iconic predator of the western world. At the risk of seeming flippant: the wolf, which lives in a cave and eats 10,000 sheep per year, is an outlier adn should not have been counted. There are good essays about what is going on with the wolf in literature and culture, both in the Middle Ages and beyond, in this book, via @jstor.
Was there hostility toward wolves in the European Middle Ages? Sure. Arnaud, a fourteenth-century French peasant, is famously on record as a heretic because he concluded that wolves were not created by God. (But... everything is created by God, said a presumably very frazzled member of the clergy. That's kind of a big deal.) Arnaud, however, was a shepherd, and he stuck to his story: God was good, wolves did nothing but eat sheep and lie. Evil. Therefore of the devil. QED. Arnaud eventually conceded that the devil could not create things and that even wolves were created by the Almighty.
Anyway. There are just a shocking number of fallacies and errors in that article. It wants to claim that wolves were hunted to near-extinction by the Normans, while also pointing out the ways in which the Normans placed limits on hunting. The article also conflates the rhetorical/literary wolf (enemy of sheep, humans, Good Things Generally) with the actual wolf, and claims that "This twaddle, when babbled from every pulpit, ensured that people believed that stabbing, beating, flaying, burning and poisoning wolves was good." From the bottom of my heart: what the fuck. I know what was "babbled from every pulpit" in medieval England. Greatest hits include:
the Virgin Mary has your back
pray regularly
do not play dice in the cemetery / in church / with money you don't have
be nice to your neighbor
consider that you are, in fact, sinful
do not be too anxious about your soul, though
yay, saints
do not have sex during Lent
...no seriously, we mean it, no sex during Lent
Anyway: there's not some weird pulpit-thumping anti-wolf brigade. The article claims that church and civic law permitted and rewarded killing of wolves. Common law in England? yes. Church law... I have never heard of such a thing, nor can I imagine any document saying "40 days off purgatory if you -- with the right spirit in your heart -- come hear a sermon, donate to the roof repair fund, or kill a wolf." In the immortal words of Benoit Blanc, it makes no damn sense.
The linked article writes of "things called fields, impounded [sic; not actually what that word means] by structures such as fences or hedges." I think the enclosure movement of the 14th-17th centuries (late medieval/early modern) can certainly be viewed as bad for the ecosystem of England. But that's about pasturage, not arable fields. Not coincidentally, it helped to fuel Robin Hood legends. Moreover, one can also find fenced-in fields in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, etc. Fields are not inherently colonialist.
You say you are pondering "when this type of mentality was developed in pre-modern Europe." My answer would be: it wasn't. A recent overview of environmental history in medieval Europe is this, examining sustainable practices and norms:
In this fascinating meld of history and ecological economics, the author uncovers the medieval precedents for modern concepts of sustainable
Also via @jstor, there's the open-access book The Green Middle Ages, which argues that "the green earth was a generally treasured,
indispensable and integrated component of life." It makes its argument, in my view, cogently and well. Full book here.
I just saw a video title on YouTube that said something like “Why is glass transparent?” And that’s an interesting question and I’m sure it’s great that the video exists but my first thought was like “Because glass is terrible, obviously.” Because it’s unwieldy and let’s out warmth and needs to be heated to hundreds of degrees to be shaped and turns into hundreds of tiny daggers if you drop it. Why the hell would we bother with that if it didn’t have some magical quality like being totally transparent despite being solid? Glass is transparent because if it weren’t, we’d use something else.
If you’re still curious we did not start working glass for its transparency. It was most likely started as a sanitary concern. Glass is easy to clean with soap and water, once it’s cleaned out you can use it again for anything and no germs or flavor from the previous meal or drink will remain.
Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it. That would leak out seemingly at random no less. Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.
Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness. Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation. Also beads. Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.
The fact that it could become see through was a side benefit.
im just so happy i live in a time period where actual meaningful biological transition is possible. even if we lose rights or the ability to exist in public, nothing can turn back the clock on that, and just by having any sort of access to that our lives are made immensely better. millions of our sisters throughout history would never have dreamed of a day where they could have what HRT does for us.
please don't lose the plot of this. if you're a trans person on HRT you're a living miracle, the dream of hundreds of millions of your ancestors. your lives are all deeply meaningful no matter what anyone says.
Cursed be the one who announced to my father:
“It’s a boy!"...
...How could he twist the course of the stars so much?
How could he have erred so in his astrology?
A lying tongue, a fool’s mouth it had given him
For he foolishly transformed justice to poison
He altered the law and transposed the lines
Oh, but had the artisan who made me created me instead – a worthy woman...
...I would say "how lucky am I"
Father in heaven
who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water...
...Who would then transform me from a man to woman?
Were I only to have merited this being so graced by goodness...
What shall I say?
why cry or be bitter?
If my father in heaven has decreed upon me
and has maimed me with an immutable deformity
then I do not wish to remove it.
the sorrow of the impossible is a human pain that nothing will cure
and for which no comfort can be found.
So, I will bear and suffer until I die and wither in the ground.
Since I have learned from our tradition
that we bless both, the good and the bitter
I will bless in a voice hushed and weak:
blessed are you [HaShem] who has not made me a woman.
Some small additional context - the final line is part of a longer set of prayers that are variations on 'blessed are you who has ___" and men use that line when praying, I forget what women use in substitition. But it would have been a line this rabbi would have recited over and over again, possibly daily....and had a lot to think about from it.
Nothing reminds me what a goddamn miracle modern medicine is more so than hearing stories about people who contracted the black plague in the 21st century and were prescribed antibiotics for it.
Like yeah man you got the disease that wiped out half of Europe, like, a couple separate times within written history, and we have no clue how many times before that. To cure it you have to take 14 pills and drink lots of juice. You’re gonna feel kind of crummy for a while. It’s vitally important you take all 14 pills.
the thing that blows my mind is blood transfusions. for literally all of human history up until about 100 years ago if you lost enough blood that was it, you were dead, and then people just figured out how to take blood from other people and successfully give it to you and now you can come in to the hospital with a blood pressure of ohfuck/nope, the same color as the linens and they just pop a tube in your arm and casually give you some stuff that another person donated on their lunch break, and you live long enough for the doctors to find and treat your gastric bleed. Insanely cool.
The fact that we can put fluids into people via IV saves more lives than I can actually communicate. There are so, so many more ways to die when we can't do that. You can go from literally at death's door from an illness you have no other cure for, to Basically Fine, You'll Feel Icky A Bit Longer But You're Otherwise Fine and Your Own Immune System Will Work Now, from sterile saline into a vein.
Or even fucking subcutaneous, under your skin. It still gets into your system faster and bypasses any fuckery going on in your gi-tract.
But you want the other end?
I recently got the answer to a crapload of symptoms of mine and it turned out to be Crohn's. Ileal crohn's.
For most of human history there was literally nothing to do about this but hope and pray that your immune system didn't decide to rip ulcers and lesions in your digestive tract to the point where you bled out, or the point where parts of it died and killed you with sepsis, or enough to build up stricture bands of scar tissue sufficiently to cause impactions or any other really gnarly and unpleasant ways you can die because for some reason your body decides the walls of your digestive tract are the enemy and need to be dismantled cell by cell. (Including a fuckload of cancers caused by the constant damage to the cell wall.)
Even as recently as when most of the younger people reading this were small children, mostly all you could do about it was take corticosteroids when you were in a flare. And that was better than Nothing. But at the same time, corticosteroids have a potential laundry list of side effects and you want to take them as little as possible and for as brief a period as possible. And there wasn't a lot else.
I am on a medication with the proprietary name "Skyrizi" and the generic name risankizumab. It's made from taking antibodies from a non-human source and then modifying their protein sequences to be more similar to human antibodies, after which they modify them further in order to make it so that the literal only thing they do is go into my body and bind to something called "tumour necrosis factor" so that this will stop flagging my own goddamn digestive system walls for destruction by the rest of the immune system.
Please feel free to read that paragraph over again.
Modern medicine isn't perfect; there are many things we're just as helpless against as we were in the Days of Eld, and there are many ways its practitioners fail us. But also we can make a thing that goes into my body and says "hey stop self destructing you MORON!" and I have a much better chance than at any other time of not dying young of bowel cancer or bowl impaction! This is fucking insane.
There used to be a common, horrific illness that sailors would get, which was mysteriously cured by limes. People know about this one, it's scurvy. But there are other horrible ways to be sick from vitamin deficiency that weren't considered curable at all, and people had no idea what caused them.
Rickets is a disease caused by vitamin D deficiency where your bones get bendy and grow in the wrong shape (it is most apparent in children). It causes permanent deformity and very easy fractures, along with debilitating pain and persistent dental issues. Historically, it was known that milk, and later, cod liver oil, would improve or prevent it, but the reason was not understood until the vitamin was discovered.
Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome is a complication of alcoholism that leads to psychosis, dementia, and death if left untreated. Severe alcoholics used to just go completely mad before dying, basically. It ultimately results in permanent memory loss (retrograde amnesia), as well as the inability to form new memories (anterograde amnesia). It is caused by the fact that alcohol prevents the absorption of vitamin B1 (thiamine). It is treatable and preventable by giving the patient thiamine shots - if caught early, before permanent brain damage has occurred, it is fully reversible, although the underlying substance abuse issue still needs to be addressed to prevent recurrence.
Pernicious anemia is caused by vitamin B12 deficiency (in turn ultimately caused by an autoimmune issue causing poor absorption). It causes blood cells to be the wrong size and too few in number, resulting in dizziness and fatigue. It also causes neurological symptoms like tingling in the extremities, poor coordination, confusion, and, in late stages, dementia. There was no cure for pernicious anemia in the past. People would simply become anemic and die from it. That's why it's called "pernicious" - that's an old-fashioned way to say "insidious and deadly," named for its slow onset and then-incurable course. Now it is curable with vitamin tablets or periodic injections.
Cretinism, or, less stigmatizingly, congenital hypothyroidism due to iodine deficiency, is a developmental disorder caused by the inability of the thyroid gland to function properly without sufficient iodine. it causes short stature, intellectual disability, infertility, hair loss, and a large lump in the neck known as a goiter (i.e. a hypertrophic thyroid gland). It was historically associated with poor inland populations living far from the ocean (due to the protective effect of consuming seafood, which is naturally high in iodine). We now simply put iodine in table salt, and this disorder is virtually unheard of in regions where this is the case.
Neural tube defects are a leading cause of birth defects, infant mortality, and stillbirth. The most common nonlethal forms of neural tube defects include spina bifida, hydranencephaly, and encephalocele. These defects are caused by a failure of the embryonic structure that becomes the spinal canal to close properly during development, leading the central nervous system to have a distorted shape that may impair cerebrospinal fluid drainage and put pressure on the brain. In severe cases, e.g. anencephaly, the brain/spine essentially develop outside of the body, which is not compatible with life (anencephalic and iniencephalic babies typically die within hours or days; fetuses with more severe forms are usually stillborn if they are not terminated). The risk of these defects is drastically reduced by taking supplemental folic acid (vitamin B9).
Vitamin K is perhaps the most amazing one on this list. Newborns often have very low vitamin K levels due to the fact that it does not cross the placental barrier easily and is not found in high levels in breast milk. It is only produced by gut bacteria, which babies do not have when they are born, and it takes time for them to acquire the right flora from their environment. Deficiency impairs blood clotting, and in infants, can lead to brain bleeds and sudden, unexplained death. Tiny babies would simply die of brain hemorrhaging for no good reason at all. But if they're given a quick shot of vitamin K at birth, that doesn't happen.
We have cured or prevented so many diseases just with vitamins/minerals.
We wiped Smallpox out. One of the worst diseases in human history and we wiped it out completly.
Also, the key to blood transfusion was blood typing - without that, blood transfusion will just hurt or kill you. People kept inventing transfusion, then a third or more of the recipients would die.
the army really should force their soldiers to grow their hair long instead of forcing them to cut it short but they know that if every country did that then the soliders would simply lay down their weapons and make out with each other rather than fight, so they all agreed to give their soldiers ugly-ass haircuts and to only deploy the cute ones if the enemy does so first, kind of like MAD doctrine
The really funny part is that many modern sources that want to gas up Sparta will bring up this specific anecdote, but stop at the "if" and just not mention what happened immediately afterwards.
If the system ain't broke, don't fix it, I guess! Accounting may not be the oldest profession, but someone had to keep the books for them.
I mean, in theory I know that Excel is based on the structure of earlier accounting technology that's been around for hundreds of years -- what do we think we did to track commerce before computers? -- but it still kind of blows my mind to, for example, look at my ancestor's journal from a whaling voyage in 1770 and see spreadsheets in the back.
@caesarsaladinn I had a whole discussion with a history major who was extremely confident that smallpox is a “common childhood illness” with a very low death rate. Therefore, she believed that historical smallpox outbreaks were either massively exaggerated or used as a cover-up for something else (since “smallpox isn’t that bad.”) I eventually asked if she was possibly confusing smallpox with chickenpox, at which point she said, “aren’t they the same thing?”
One of the less deadly variants of smallpox was called cowpox, and the fact that dairy maids who contracted it tended to avoid the worst affects of smallpox is part of the development of vaccination
Cowpox is actually a separate (but very similar!) virus!
There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):
Smallpox:
Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from ≈1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humans—it has no animal hosts—which is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)
There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)
There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.
Other relevant viruses:
Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variola—Edward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.
Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.
Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirus—chickenpox is from a totally different family.
So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?
There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.
Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashes—thus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)
Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.
Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).
Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.
Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practices—people identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going on—which viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to another—but historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.
TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirus—it just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).
(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)
Sources & further reading under the cut!
Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination
The History of Smallpox (CDC)
The Triumph of Science: The Incredible Story of Smallpox Eradication
Scientific Background on Smallpox and Smallpox Vaccination (from Scientific and Policy Considerations in Developing Smallpox Vaccination Options: A Workshop Report) <- this article is like 20 years old, but it has some interesting information about the clinical forms of smallpox and how difficult they would be to diagnose accurately
Phasing out monkeypox: mpox is the new name for an old disease <- discusses the renaming of monkeypox to mpox, also mentions issues with other poxvirus names and virus names in general
Poxes great and small: The stories behind their names
Dr Katherine Hall, a Senior Lecturer at the Dunedin School of Medicine and practising clinician, believes the ancient ruler did not die from infection, alcoholism or murder, as others have claimed. Instead, she argues he met his demise thanks to the neurological disorder Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS).
Dr Hall has had a long standing interest in ancient history and ancient medical history, and over the past five years has been studying part-time for a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Classics (and with a smattering of Ancient Greek).
In CLAS241 lecture on Alexander the Great Associate Professor Pat Wheatley outlined what was known about Alexander’s death; drawing on her clinical knowledge and experience of Intensive Care Medicine she was immediately struck with the idea that this could be a case of the neurological disorder Guillain-Barre Syndrome.
Six months' research followed, culminating in an article published in The Ancient History Bulletin. In the article she says previous theories around his death in 323BC have not been satisfactory because they have not explained the entire event.
The article appears to be behind a paywall (click to expand volume 32), but it's an extraordinarily rare case of a paywall low enough that it is plausible I might pay it: $2.00 for the article!
Anyways, very cool case of transdisciplinary research.
Article is accessed here for free if anyone is interested. Not sure if this is a mistake that it's Google-able or not, I was trying to get access through my Uni library and this popped up without me having to log in, so I assume it'll work for others.
The origin point for nearly all of those “you work harder than a medieval peasant” memes and articles is Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American (1993). The argument has been debunked quite a few times, so I won’t belabor the point here. Schor bases her estimates of medieval working hours on a 1935 article by Nora Kenyon, and an unpublished article by Gregory Clark, and in both cases ignores the authors’ careful efforts to distinguish between total days worked and instead just cherry-picks the lowest number, even as the authors caution that those numbers likely don’t represent someone’s total employment.
Kenyon notes a set of day-laborers working 120 days per year which makes it into Schor’s work, but Kenyon’s final suggestion that the normal annual working year was 308 days does not, for instance. I can’t get at an unpublished article, but Clark has continued to write on the topic and in his 2018 “Growth or stagnation?” presents a detailed argument for a 250-300-day work-year with no sense that this is a revision of his previous positions, leading me to suspect similar cherry-picking as with Kenyon.
In short, Schor’s works is quite shoddy and we shan’t rely on it.
Now part of the complication there is that for the European Middle Ages, across so much area, what we see is a lot of confusing evidence – statutory minimums, required labor on a lord’s land and so on – which may or may not represent a full working year. What we don’t typically get is someone just telling us how many work days were in the agricultural calendar.
But as you may recall, we’re anchoring this discussion in the Roman world and in a rare instance where the ancient evidence is better, Roman agricultural writers just straight up tell us how many working days there were in a year on the Roman agricultural calendar: 290 (Columella 2.12.8-9). He allows 45 days for holidays as well as inclement weather and another 30 days for rest immediately after the crop is sown, to recover from the difficult labor of the final plowing.
The medieval work calendar is not meaningfully different. As noted above, Both Clark and Kenyon end up with similar working-day estimates from the medieval evidence as Columella’s figure. The medieval number is probably slightly lower: the medieval religious calendar might have around 45 feast days but workers might also be expected to spend Sundays in religious observance, which might pull the work-year down to around 270 total working days, plus or minus.
By all evidence, those working days were both less rigid but also longer than modern working hours. On the one hand, peasant farmers are essentially self-employed entrepreneurs, making their own hours. They can arrive in the field a bit late, sometimes leave a bit early. It was certainly common in warmer climates for workers to take a midday break (a siesta) to avoid exhausting themselves in the hottest part of the day. I will say, anyone who has done functionally any outside work in a warm climate will recognize that a midday break can allow you to work more than just pushing straight through the heat of the day because you tire more slowly.
So on the one hand the work hours are somewhat flexible. On the other hand as functionally anyone who has ever worked on a farm or spoken with someone who has will tell you, the working day in absolute terms is long, essentially starting at sunrise and running to sunset. And this is certainly the implication we get from our sources. Because of atmospheric refraction, there are actually slightly more than 12 sunlight hours per day on average (it’s around ~12.3 or so, depending on latitude), though this of course varies seasonally. The bad news for our farmers, of course, is that the shortest days are in the winter when the labor demands are lower.
While festival calendars feature events throughout the year, it is not an accident that major festivals in a lot of pre-modern agrarian cultures are concentrated in late Fall, winter and early Spring. For the Christian calendar, that includes things like All Saints Day (Nov 1), Martinmas (Nov 11), the regular slew of December holidays as as the holidays of the Eastertide in early spring. For the Romans, you have major festivals like the Parentalia and Lupercalia in February, the Liberalia in March, the Cerialia in April and the Saturnalia in December.
So in practice the average maximum working day might actually be a bit longer than 12 hours, but we should account for breaks and general schedule flexibility. We might assume, for comparison, something like a ten hour work day. By that measure, our peasants probably put in somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 working hours per year. By contrast, your average ‘overworked American’ has 260 working days a year, at eight hours a day for just 2,080 hours.
So to answer the question: no, you do not work more than a medieval (or ancient) peasant (despite your labor buying a much higher standard of living).
Bret Devereaux, "Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVb: Working Days"
#I also wonder where the sewing; mending; cooking; cleaning; childminding; butter churning; tool-fixing; etc. comes in #Are these being counted as work (tags via @specialagentartemis)
They are not addressed in the quoted post, but yes they are counted as work! This post is part of a series on peasant farming households. Elsewhere in the series there are posts detailing family structures (including deliberate spacing of pregnancies), setting up some example families to see how different gender and age groupings struggle to reach enough labour in different ways, and the impact of exploitative landlords, then later in the series there are two posts (IVd, IVe) about women's labour and labour hours specifically. It is broken down into a lot more tasks than just "agriculture" (although it also includes hundreds of hours of agricultural work - at certain times of year everyone was needed in the fields), some extracts from IVd below:
Compared to agriculture we almost immediately run into significant source difficulties when discussing the labor of women in peasant households or really any households. Our sources for the pre-modern period are mostly written by men; our sources for antiquity are nearly all written by men and that is reflected by their concerns. [...] As a result, whereas we can model farming from historical data contained in ancient or medieval texts, the evidence to do this for the tasks generally done by women in peasant households simply doesn’t exist. Instead, we will have to estimate from modern practitioners, often with quite a bit of required inference.
[...]
But the upshot of all of that is that while a peasant mother is nursing, she can never be very far from her children and “while she is nursing” – as we noted before – probably represents upwards of 40% of the reproductive period of her life (the c. 25-30 years from her mid-to-late teens to her late-30s/early-40s), which of course also coincides with the period where she would be most physically able to do heavier labor (like agriculture) in any case. Of course children do not become ‘labor-free’ just because they’re eating solids – ask the parent of any toddler – but the realities of nursing have effectively already determined who is going to be in a position to be primary caregiver, since the wife of the house (who is still having more children) must already be in situations where she can watch, feed and care for young children while the husband, almost by process of elimination, has to be in the field (keeping in mind that ‘the field’ may be quite distant from ‘the house’ because, remember, these peasants tend to own lots of little strips of land spread all over).
[...]
All of that said the ‘modular’ nature of these tasks – able to fit in the spaces that peasant women could afford to give them while managing such a heavy workload (and as we’ll see, it is a heavy workload) – makes it even harder to model out the labor demands fully, because we’re not dealing with one big task (agriculture) with a rigid schedule but a host of small tasks with variable schedules, which are no less essential.
[bigger snip about textile production hours and economic stuff - the below is offtopic for this tumblr post but i thought it was still worth sharing]
Yet even then, wool-working commands even worse wages than unspecialized male labor and it is hard not to see the structures of gender and power at work here. It certainly isn’t that fabric was cheap in these societies, but that it was easier to press down the wages of women, who had less power and fewer opportunities to acquire capital or engage in more remunerative wage labor. This is sometimes quite vividly portrayed, particular in the context of medieval male commercial weavers, who command higher wages than the female spinners providing all of their thread (on this, see J.S. Lee, op. cit.).
From IVe, after a lot of granular maths on different tasks and different households:
We should also note that these women work an enormous amount. We estimated, you will recall, working hours for our male peasants on the order of 2,500 to 3,500 working hours per year, massively more than modern full-time employment (40 hours per week is ~2000, typically around 1,750 hours after sick time, vacation, holidays and such). By contrast our peasant women are working in this model 3,760 hours per year, significantly more than their fathers, husbands and brothers and wildly more than modern workers. Now of course that figure is in theory something of a maximum, but that’s what our model is for: it demonstrates that they can’t really be working much less, since their margin over minimum subsistence is so narrow even working those many hours. Indeed, we might instead imagine many peasant women might be working more, eating a little into the dark hours cooking or spinning (as Lucretia famously does in Livy, 1.57.9-10, leading the women of her (aristocratic) household in wool-working by lamp-light) or into the time we’ve given her ‘off’ on those festival days, just to keep up with all of the tasks that need doing.
[...]
It is thus perhaps not surprising that those silly ‘you work harder than a peasant’ memes always focus on male peasants. To be clear, you don’t work as hard as a male peasant farmer, but you really don’t work as hard as the wife of that male peasant farmer. The labor demands on both halves of the peasant household are very high, but it is a striking if unsurprising comment on the way we understand labor that we often spend most of our time talking about the half of the gender ledger which is probably working less.
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