Yeah “only worked 150 days” glosses over how much work daily life was. If you were lucky you lived with pigs and cows and their shit in your thatch hut and it didn’t cave in during the winter leaving you for dead, maybe you survived through your thirties without dying of lung disease, because you’d constantly have fires going in the hut. You’d have to wash clothes in the river even during the winters and hang them up to dry in the smoke of your hut.
On the plus size in good times, and ironically, you could have a healthier diet than the lord. It wasn’t like being a lord was a worry-free place to be either, despite all the luxuries they could afford. Christmas was basically 2 months in the winter and festival season could be full of pleasure if you were well situated. “Peasant” encompasses a wide variety of economic arrangements and many of them could live comfortably, relatively speaking. There was no one single “feudalism” and it’s debatable whether the term is useful to sum up the period.
Yeah “only worked 150 days” glosses over how much work daily life was. If you were lucky you lived with pigs and cows and their shit in your thatch hut and it didn’t cave in during the winter leaving you for dead, maybe you survived through your thirties without dying of lung disease, because you’d constantly have fires going in the hut. You’d have to wash clothes in the river even during the winters and hang them up to dry in the smoke of your hut.
On the plus size in good times, and ironically, you could have a healthier diet than the lord. It wasn’t like being a lord was a worry-free place to be either, despite all the luxuries they could afford. Christmas was basically 2 months in the winter and festival season could be full of pleasure if you were well situated. “Peasant” encompasses a wide variety of economic arrangements and many of them could live comfortably, relatively speaking. There was no one single “feudalism” and it’s debatable whether the term is useful to sum up the period.