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Also don’t forget:
Medieval peasants worked on average (depending on the area and era you are looking at) 30-60% less hours per year than present-day wage-workers
Medieval peasants who worked on someone else’s land could elect not to go to work on any particular day and just not get paid for it (that’s how weekends were created)
Medieval bosses (i.e. land-owners) were responsible for feeding their workers for the day with breakfast and lunch.
Usually lunch during field work was followed by a customary 2-3 hours nap.
While its true that thru time peasant worked for their landlord quite a bit less than people work today, they also had to maintain themselves u know grow their own food, repair their homes, make or repair tools, make food, make clothes, make furniture all that kinda stuff; most historians would say peasants in europe generally worked more than we do today. They did have a lot of holidays tho.
Winter was dedicated to all the maintenance stuff mostly, and there was mostly no other field work during that time. They had way more holidays as you say, and they also had a lot more breaks during the day. Historians have done studies on this. An average 8-hour labourer today works about 1800 hours per year, accounting for breaks and holidays. An average medieval peasant would work significantly less so. English peasants had it worse at 1600 hours. French and Germans would fluctuate at 1300-1400 hours. Italian and French would also fluctuate at 1200-1300. Byzantine peasants (whose majority were not serfs and worked on their own land) would work much less at 1000-1200 hours per year!
there was mostly no other field work during that time
Field not, but there was there was absolute shitton of field-related work in winter too, threshing alone was so labour intensive that it could took months.
Meanwhile, taking the UK as an example, productivity has grown exponentially. Goes to show how exploited the working class is. If production was more evenly distributed, and part of the growth in productivity was allowed to be returned as free time, imagine how much better quality of life would be.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-hour
Things were so much better when the average life expectancy was in the 30s and every third child died in infancy and nobody knew how to read or write and there was no separation of church and state and society was constantly plagued by an endless cycle of famine and disease
Among peer countries, the U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth for both women and men
A life expectancy at birth of 78.4 years for the whole population compared to 31.3 years JUST for English males who were lucky enough to be born to land-owning families
According to your data, the United States has an infant mortality rate of 5.4 per 1,000 births, or 0.54%. For comparison, an estimated 30% of babies in the Middle Ages died before their first birthday and only about half reached adulthood
These claims are very misleading. The actual share of US adults who are illiterate is closer to 12%. In mediaeval times on the other hand, the VAST, vast majority of people, including the nobility, didn’t know how to read or write. Charlemagne, despite being a strong proponent of an educated citizenry, famously was himself illiterate. Writing back then was mostly reserved for the clergy
It’s certainly being eroded, but the present situation isn’t anywhere near as bad as it was in the Middle Ages. I don’t see anyone being burnt at the stake for heresy
With one-fifth of states seeing active measles outbreaks, the U.S. is nearing 900 cases
Oh wow a whole three people died from measles
Food insecurity isn’t famine. There is no mass starvation epidemic in the United States and there never has been, except among the indigenous population. This is a country where over 40% of the people are obese for Christ’s sake
Super duper nice, good star. Show us where anyone said capitalism wasn’t a stage of final development, anyone saying it should’ve never happened?
You’re comparing a system that lets people suffer unnecessarily with a time of lower technological development. It’s literally apples and oranges, not to mention you’ve failed to address what they meant, something someone else spelled out.
This isn’t saying one system is better, it’s just making the observation that as class society develops, workers have less and less control over their lives and labor.
