Historia Civilis takes a look at how the concept of work change from pre-industrial times to what we know today.
Comment by u/Shalmanese on reddit post (r/videos)
As someone who has held this channel in formerly high regard, it’s especially depressing to watch them engage in a form of serf trutherism where they portray medieval serfdom as some place of idyll when that goes against all of our historical consensus.
Historians have covered extensively the misconception that any non-work time was time for leisure. The video correctly points out that medieval peasants didn’t have much of a use for money… because they had to produce almost everything required for their survival themselves in a non-market economy. The reason for fast days and slow days is because peasants needed enough time to tend to their own crops or they would literally starve and there was a maximum that an extractive feudal economy could extract from them without widespread depopulation. The 40 or 50 or 60% of the time peasants spent “working” was to earn them the “right” to rent enough land that they could grow non-market crops to barely feed themselves a high carb, low nutrient diet and hang on (and not even then most of the time as the numerous famines indicate).
In addition, until relatively recently, women’s work has been a blind spot in much of the accounting of how work was performed. Just clothing alone was estimated to take a family 3000 hours a year of labor to produce a bare minimum quantity which is over 8 hours of work each day, every day for a single person.
Highly recommend checking out the collections of essays Bread, How Did They Make It? and Clothing, How Did They Make It? on Historian Bret Deveraux’s blog for a far more realistic depiction of the political conditions of serfdom.
Not in any way arguing that our current system is humane or justified but arguments against the status quo shouldn’t be founded on fallacious history that the rich in the past were some wise and benign influence and only under capitalism have they been evil. The wealthy throughout time have been bastards running extractive economies to primarily benefit themselves at the hands of the oppressed and that is important to recognize.
While I didn’t take this video as glorifying serfdom (I realize it was a trash system and focused more on the rhythm part) I can totally see how it could be received as that so thanks for additional context! It’s always good to have more voices on a topic.