Thread by @BretDevereaux

So apparently we're doing 'do modern people work more than pre-modern farmers' discourse again on Twitter, so it seems like a good time to point out I have a series on pre-modern farming which discusses the considerable labor demands: 1/acoup.blog/2020/07/24/col…

The statistic that gets passed around - 150 working days a year for a medieval farmer - is badly incomplete; the 150 days is the required labor of a peasant on the lord's estate; farming any other land and literally any other task is extra. 2/

How much extra? A lot depends and I am better here with the Roman evidence. Columella (2.12), a Roman agricultural writer, figures that there were 290 working days in a year, accounting for festivals, market days, rain and the general seasonal cycle. 3/

How many of those days would you need to survive? Probably nearly all of them. It depends very heavily on the size of your household and the land you have to work. One can run a lot of simulations, assuming different yields, taxes or rent owed, etc. 4/

In a number of cases, we see that peasant labor was 'inefficiently allotted' in the countryside - too many farmers in a household for the land - so you might have 'excess labor' but pre-modern societies had all sorts of ways to soak up that excess labor. 5/

For instance, the 150 working days you are required to work your lord's estate where you only get a fraction of the food produced. Or systems of corvee labor. In the Roman Republic, an average of 7-10 years of military service per citizen male.

Gotta factor that in too! 6/

Of course you'd also need to err on the side of working more, because error in the other direction means you starve in the long gap between one harvest and the next. Generally, you'd be pretty close to Columella's 290 days, once all those demands were accounted for. 7/

Of course we should also note that farming labor wasn't the only labor going on in the peasant household. Household textile production, generally done by women, was also a huge full-time job time skink (acoup.blog/2021/03/05/col…). 8/

And we also want to note that the 'work day' in the high labor demand seasons (planting, harvest) was a lot longer than an 8-hour workday too - harvest especially was all-hands-on-deck dawn-to-dusk schedule, for weeks at a time. The pre-modern version of 'crunch.' 9/

And it also seems worth noting that we have a lot more non-work *years* too - peasants started working (boys in the field, girls spinning) at very young ages and effectively never 'retired,' so when you account for all of this, factor that in too. 10/

The end result is that your intuition is likely to be correct: the average pre-modern peasant worked more days than the c. 260 work days that you see somewhat typically (with exceptions) in the United States. Probably around 20-30 more days, w/ longer hours.

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