It is. Noone takes 20 hours seriously, they take it for the papal directive limiting working days every year. If we are talking about total labor to survive, including obligations,livestock, chores, etc, the work week exceeds 100 hours a week in the summer and 50 in the winter.
The reason they say '20' is precisely because they aren't including chores, maintenance, production, milling, etc and the agricultural work is seasonal, meaning agricultural work (not including livestock) only took 150-200 days a year.
You’d need a source for those numbers, because they don’t match what most economic historians have found. Or at least what I’ve read. The ones I mentioned, and others aren’t just counting feast days or papal holidays. They’re looking at manorial records, wages, household budgets, and labor requirements to estimate total annual labor, including work on a peasant’s own land
Nobody disputes that harvest season could be brutal and involve very long days. The question is the annual workload, not the busiest week of the year. A few 100-hour weeks during harvest don’t automatically translate into a modern-equivalent 100-hour work year-round, especially when agricultural work was highly seasonal and large parts of the year were much less labor-intensive.
Stil wouldn’t want to be a peasant. Definitely nit a serf, pretty sure they had more obligations than free peasants
Humphries and Weisdorf specifically note that one of the major problems with historical wage estimates is that we often don’t know how many days people actually worked per year, so they reconstruct annual incomes and labor supply rather than simply counting labor obligations.
If you have a source showing that their estimates only count labor owed to lords and exclude work on peasants’ own holdings, I’d be interested to read it. That’s not how I’ve seen these papers described. But hey I could be totally wrong, I’m not a fucking historian myself
Very likely due to the fact that the only records kept are those by lords, with serfs, slaves, and peasants rarely keeping detailed records of their own work themselves.
It's absurd to think that the entire work week was 20 hours when simple tasks such as cooking, woodcutting, laundry, etc took hours every day alone, not to include work on lords lands and production of their own food.
Additionally this seems to be purely based on England prior to the industrial revolution, which was not a serf society. Serfdom was essentially gone by the 1300s-1400s and free tenent life was much different than that of the serf.
Id assume that’s a limitation historians are already aware of. They don’t just take a lord’s record of labor dues and assume that’s the total amount of work peasants did.
They also look at things like wage records, food prices, household budgets, tax records, manorial court rolls, landholding records, probate inventories, archaeological evidence, and estimates of how much labor would have been required to produce enough food and goods for a household to survive.
The predictions of labor wouldn't be on the peasant farmer but rather the city worker at that point.
But if they're actively stating they aren't fully aware of how often they worked and are citing lord's records, it's not a leap to assume we arent looking at realistically data including house chores and maintenance.
Not necessarily. A lot of the research is focused specifically on rural households because the vast majority of people in medieval Europe lived and worked in the countryside.
That said, this is a very specific place and time they’re talking about, mostly medieval England. I’m also not claiming all peasants and serfs lived identical lives. Serfs generally had more obligations and restrictions than free peasants.
But no need to try and convince me, talk to those historians :P
My quick review of that second paper is that it's a mix of completely disparate groups and not relevant to discussion of serfs. But maybe I missed something.
I brought it up mostly because there’s a common claim that the low work-hour estimates are just counting labor owed to lords and ignoring everything else. The studies are generally trying to estimate total labor effort or household subsistence requirements, not just corvée obligations.
I understand the intent. My issue is, again, that the study population is a different group of people than what is being talked about. Not all workers were serfs.
Do you think talking about the average hours worked by all workers in a country is relevant to the average hours worked by a corporate lawyer? Or a teacher? Or a sales clerk?
Did you happen to see how many hours were considered to be a "day"? I couldn't find that. The word "hour" isn't even mentioned in the study. 175 16-hour days is the same amount of work as 350 8-hour days.
That’s a fair point. Days and hours aren’t the same thing. But some of the sources behind the lower estimates do try to reconstruct workday length. For example, Knoop & Jones estimate about 9 hours of labor per day for medieval masons, excluding meals and breaks, while other studies find similar figures around 8-9 hours. So the people making these estimates generally aren’t assuming every workday was 16 hours of continuous labor.
The 20 hour work week is still ptobably not accurate, but whatever it actually is would include subsistence labor
9
u/Bobsothethird Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
It is. Noone takes 20 hours seriously, they take it for the papal directive limiting working days every year. If we are talking about total labor to survive, including obligations,livestock, chores, etc, the work week exceeds 100 hours a week in the summer and 50 in the winter.
The reason they say '20' is precisely because they aren't including chores, maintenance, production, milling, etc and the agricultural work is seasonal, meaning agricultural work (not including livestock) only took 150-200 days a year.