Fact Check: Medieval Peasants Worked Only 150 Days a Year Due to Religious Holidays?

Claim:

Medieval peasants worked only around 150 days per year, a result of the church scheduling frequent holidays to keep the labor force happy.

Rating:

Mixture ( About this rating? )

What's True:

Many mainstream economic historians do believe the average number of working days for peasant laborers in England hovered around, and even sometimes below, 150 days per year for certain stretches of the medieval period, particularly the decades following the Black Death.

What's False:

However, other economists and economic historians believe medieval laborers had a significantly longer working year, averaging around 250 or more days. Either way, economic historians generally do not believe religious authorities had significant control over the total number of days per year peasants worked. Instead, economic historians generally believe the number of days worked a year was determined by a mixture of factors including the amount of wage-based work available and laborers' own desire to work.

How many days a year did a medieval peasant work? According to a popular meme that has circulated for years, the answer is simple: "Medieval peasants worked only about 150 days a year."

(Instagram account @classicaldamn)

The meme, which consists of text placed above and below a detail of a miniature from the "Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry," a 15th-century illuminated manuscript from France, continues: "The Church believed it was important to keep them happy with frequent, mandatory holidays. You have less holidays than a Medieval peasant."

The meme appears to have originated from a May 15, 2022, Instagram post by historical meme account Classical D*mn (Snopes has reached out to Classical D*mn to confirm their authorship of the meme, and will update this story if we hear back). As of this writing, that post had received around 15,000 likes.

Was the claim made in the meme, that medieval peasants worked only 150 days a year because of frequent and mandatory church holidays, correct? Some popular social media posts have called the claim nonsense. For example, a May 2022 post in the r/badhistory subreddit called it "bizarre," "unreasonable," and "ahistorical."

Similarly, an October 2022 thread by the popular X account Fake History Hunter opened by pairing the meme with the caption:

Yeah but no.

Has any historian debunked this nonsense yet?

Any groovy online articles that take this silliness apart?

Yes, I'm looking for something I can share in stead of having to write it myself whenever I find this being mentioned ;)

(X user @fakehistoryhunt)

Despite these assertions that the meme is nonsense, its circulation — along with the engagement it provoked — only increased over time. For example, a May 21, 2024, Instagram post that featured the meme in front of an animated background showing rose petals falling around columns received more than 388,000 likes, more than 25 times the number received by Classical D*mn's original post.

The meme's persistence in the face of the confident dismissiveness of social media users claiming to debunk it has, understandably, left many internet users uncertain whom to believe.

In July 2022, for example, a Reddit user made a post to the r/AskHistorians subreddit describing the meme and asking: "Is it true that medieval peasants worked only 150 days in a year due to the Church making sure they had frequent mandatory holidays?" In April 2023, a different user asked the same subreddit: "How accurate is this, and how would these 'holidays' actually be spent?"

Similar questions have also been asked on Quora and on Stack Exchange's History board . For years, Snopes has also received numerous requests from readers asking us to look into the question.

In an attempt to provide a definitive verdict on the veracity of the claim that medieval peasants worked around 150 days a year, Snopes spoke with multiple scholars including Gregory Clark, the economist most frequently credited with originating the 150-day-a-year estimate, and Juliet Schor, the economist who first popularized the claim in her 1991 book "The Overworked American."

We also spoke with Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf, two economic historians who currently study the question of the length of the medieval working year and have recently published work supporting a 150-day estimate, at least for certain decades in medieval England.

In addition to speaking to these scholars, Snopes also conducted extensive research into the online life of the claim in order to determine when it first began to spread online and how it has changed over time. We additionally examined a number of popular debunkings of the claim, with special attention to the evidence cited as proof against the claim.

Ultimately, we found that the claim that medieval peasants worked around 150 days a year is still largely accepted as a valid estimate by academic economic historians, at least in England for a period starting around 1350 and lasting between a few decades and more than a century, depending on the methodology used to study the data.

A caveat applies to the second part of the claim made in the meme, namely that the number of days medieval peasants worked was the direct result of a large number of mandatory Christian holidays. This was something no economic historian Snopes spoke to considered a significant factor in any estimate of the medieval working year.

Snopes also found that popular attempts to debunk the claim incorrectly presented the claim as outdated or not grounded in evidence, an estimate of around 150 days per year of labor is, in fact, currently accepted by many mainstream economic historians who study medieval England, which is the part of Europe that has received by far the most attention from English-speaking economic historians interested in the length of the medieval working year.

Because the claim that medieval peasants worked 150 days due to the frequency of religious holidays contains information that is both true and false — at least according to many mainstream economic historians — Snopes rates it as a "Mixture" of correct and incorrect information.

The 150-Day Estimate: What Experts Say

As Atlantic magazine writer Amanda Mull explained in a lengthy 2022 article about online interest in medieval working patterns, the claim that medieval peasants worked 150 days a year entered the public consciousness thanks to a bestselling 1991 book by Schor, an economist and sociologist currently based at Boston College.

That book , titled "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure," was a rebuttal of claims made in the 1930s and 1940s that capitalism would eventually result in shorter working hours, increased leisure time and improved standards of living for Americans. Instead, Schor argued, economic growth and living standards both stagnated in the 1970s, after which Americans became stuck in an "insidious cycle of work-and-spend."

In the third chapter of the book, Schor emphasized what she saw as the relatively recent nature of demanding and unrewarding work schedules by compiling pre-existing estimates of the length of the working year from earlier periods in history, beginning with the 13th century.

Schor's choice to start with the 13th century was not arbitrary. It was, in fact, during this century that cracks began to emerge in England's system of unfree peasant labor, in which many peasants were tied to a lord's land and were required to perform a certain amount of unpaid labor on the lord's behalf each year.

In a process that sped up significantly during the 14th century — notably during and after the Black Death, which reached England in 1348 — English peasants increasingly paid their landlords not with labor but with money, which they earned through wage-based work. As a result, accounts of daily and annual wages began to appear in greater numbers in the historical record.

Despite the emergence of increasing amounts of wage records starting around the 13th century, the evidence for this period was still nowhere near as robust or reliable as the data typically used by modern economists.

Specifically, estimates that place the medieval working year at around 150 days have largely been based on manorial records, which were nowhere near as comprehensive as modern accounting documents. As Humphries and Weisdorf, the economic historians, told Snopes in a jointly written email:

The core problem is that, while there are fragmentary data, there is no reliable systematic evidence on the number of days worked historically in any of our archival sources. Or, if such evidence does exist, we have not yet been able to uncover it!

In other words, scholars attempting to study the medieval economy are missing a critical piece of the puzzle, namely the number of days in the average medieval working year. Without that information, the medieval English economy as a whole cannot be fully understood.

For the 13th century, Schor cited an estimate of 150 days of labor a year per family, or 135 12-hour days per adult male. The estimate had been proposed in a 1986 paper written — but never formally published — by Clark, an economist who had completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University the previous year. In an email to Snopes, Clark, now a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, said he arrived at this number by comparing records of annual and day laborers.

Clark said he no longer agreed with the methodology used to calculate the estimate attributed to him in Schor's book, but had since come to support a significantly higher estimate. In a paper published in the Economic History Review in 2018, Clark expressed support for an estimate closer to 300 days a year, representing a working year similar to those recorded in the 19th century.

Clark described his current methodology as being based on living standards. One of the classes of evidence he has used as a proxy for living standards is the amount spent on supplies required to feed workers while they were on the job, as recorded in medieval employers' accounts.

If medieval workers worked only 150 days per year in certain periods, according to Clark, then the relative amount employers spent on rations during those periods should be roughly half what was spent during later periods on workers who, thanks to improvements in record-keeping, are securely known to have worked 300 days a year on average.

Instead, Clark pointed out, the relationship between the amount spent on workers' food and the amount spent on their daily wages remained surprisingly stable from 1350 to 1869, something Clark has taken as strong evidence that workers in medieval England on average worked roughly the same number of days per year as workers in the 19th century.

Although Clark has changed his mind about the 150-day estimate since he first suggested it in 1986, a number of other well-known economic historians working on the same questions have recently endorsed it, or estimates close to it, for significant periods of time in medieval England.

Two such economic historians are Humphries, a retired professor of economic history at All Souls College, Oxford, and Weisdorf, a professor of economic history at Rome's Sapienza University. In 2019, they co-wrote an article , published in the Economic Journal, that focuses on laborers who were paid wages annually, rather than daily. Annual workers, they told Snopes in a jointly written email, represented around 40% of the labor force.

Although the working year of day laborers was not the primary focus of the article, Humphries and Weisdorf included a chart showing the number of days per year a day laborer would have needed to work on average in order to earn the same income as a laborer who received an annual salary.

According to Humphries and Weisdorf's calculations, that number fluctuated significantly over the course of the medieval and early modern periods, but between around 1325 and 1350 it plummeted from a peak of slightly more than 200 days a year to just above 100 days a year — far below the 150-day claim. This drop has generally been attributed to the Black Death, which killed an estimated 30% to 45% of the English population between 1348 and 1350 and drastically reshaped England's labor market.

While the number of days required for a day laborer to earn the same yearly income as an annual laborer began increasing around 1375, according to Humphries and Weisdorf's calculations, it did so slowly, and stayed below 150 days a year until around 1525.

Humphries and Clark are not outliers in the field of economic history. Among the other economic historians who have supported the 150-day estimate, or estimates close to it, are Stephen Broadberry, Bruce M.S. Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton and Bas van Leeuwen, the coauthors of "British Economic Growth: 1270–1870," a survey of economic history published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press.

A review of the book, published the following year in the Journal of Economic History, noted that some of the authors' choices might prove controversial but predicted that it was "likely to be a reference and text for students of this history for the next several decades."

In the book's eighth chapter, the authors discussed estimates of the lengths of medieval and later working years based on subsistence baskets, a term the authors defined as the amount of money required at a specific point in time in order to afford basic living expenses, which were determined using historical price data.

Using this methodology, the authors established their estimates by calculating the number of days a laborer would need to work to afford the cost of the subsistence basket in a particular year. For example, on Page 312, they wrote:

In 1290, when an unskilled agricultural labourer earned around 1 and a half pence a day, a farmhand would need to have worked for 150–160 days in order to afford the respectability basket of ale, bread, beans and peas, meat, eggs, butter, cheese, soap, cloth, candles, lamp oil, fuel and rent.

The authors continued on to say that, according to these calculations, a 150-day workyear probably would not have been sustainable for a sole breadwinner who needed to support a family of four in 1290, but they also noted: "For a single man that was a realistic possibility."

In their correspondence with Snopes, Clark, Humphries and Weisdorf all emphasized that, for economists and economic historians, the question of how many days per year medieval peasants worked remains an open debate.

"It would be natural for us to point to our own estimates as the more reliable ones," Humphries and Weisdorf told us, "but we believe all the existing numbers are valid in their own right."

Another factor all three economic historians agreed on was that it is unlikely the calendar of Christian holidays had much effect on the reality of the medieval working year.

For Clark, who now supports a high estimate according to which medieval English laborers worked as much or more than modern American workers, the math for that part of the claim simply doesn't work. Even if workers did only work 150 days a year he told us, "it likely did not stem from Church prohibitions of work on Saints' Days."

Similarly, Humphries and Weisdorf described this part of the claim as a "moot question," explaining:

We know that there were many cases when proscription against work was ignored, as to be expected when so much agricultural labour was relentlessly continuous (feeding animals, milking, herding, etc.) … Using religious and later political holidays as a guide to working time is like using advice books as a guide to behaviour, indicative perhaps but not decisive.

Rather than religious holidays, the factors economic historians who study this period tend to view as reasons why peasants did not work for significant periods of the year include the availability of wage-based work, wage rates, and even, simply, their own desire to work.

In sum, the economists and economic historians who have conducted research into the length of the medieval English working year are well aware of the limitations of their evidence, including the problem of unpaid labor. These scholars still believe this is a question worth studying using the evidence available, however, because understanding the average number of days laborers worked per year is a critical component of understanding the medieval economy as a whole.

As a result of the difficulty of quantifying the medieval working year, a significant amount of the work of economic historians interested in the period consists of proposing and evaluating different methods for estimating how much medieval laborers worked.

These methods, which rely on different types of evidence, have resulted in different estimates that have found varying degrees of acceptance among economic historians as a whole. Among these estimates, the 150-days-a-year one has — at least for certain periods in England — been backed up by multiple different types of evidence, and it continues to have many expert supporters.

The 150-Day Estimate on the Internet

In a phone conversation, Schor told Snopes that when she published "The Overworked American" in 1991, she had some expectation that readers might be interested in the section on the medieval working year. However, she said, the amount of interest in the 150-day claim that she's seen online in recent years has taken her by surprise. "It just popped up at random times," she said.

The online life of the claim appears to have begun in earnest in August 2013, with the publication by Reuters of an op-ed written by Lynn Parramore , a writer and senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic History.

That op-ed, titled "Why a Medieval Peasant Got More Vacation Time Than You," introduced Schor's work to a new, broader audience, updating it at points with more recent data. The passage most relevant to the claim investigated here read:

The Church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent mandatory holidays. Weddings, wakes and births might mean a week off quaffing ale to celebrate, and when wandering jugglers or sporting events came to town, the peasant expected time off for entertainment. There were labor-free Sundays, and when the plowing and harvesting seasons were over, the peasant got time to rest, too. In fact, economist Juliet Shor [sic] found that during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th-century England, peasants might put in no more than 150 days a year.

In this excerpt, Parramore stuck close to Schor's original framing, particularly regarding the role of the church. Notably, both authors mentioned the observation of frequent religious holidays as one of many ways — not the only way — medieval peasants might have spent their time outside of work.

Parramore's digestible presentation of Schor's work did not immediately result in memes about the 150-day claim, but it did provoke the earliest example of an attempt to debunk the 150-day claim addressed to a wide audience that Snopes has been able to identify.

Published in September 2013, this debunking took the form of a blog post on the website of the Adam Smith Institute, a British think tank and lobbying group that generally supports pro-capitalist and anti-regulation policies. That blog post, which is unsigned, began:

One of the things that irks my choler, yanks my goat if you like, is this idea that the medieval peasant led a life of incredible leisure, had to work vastly less than we poor saps ground down under capitalism have to. It's entirely nonsense of course.

Over the course of the brief post, the author pointed to the existence of unpaid work, both unfree labor done for a lord and tasks that might be considered chores, such as feeding livestock or cooking.

The author ended on a political note, claiming that Schor's research, then 22 years old, was being "trotted out" in an attempt to shore up support for legislation ensuring paid vacation days for American workers, something that had been discussed in Congress earlier that year.

Although some comments left on the Adam Smith Institute blog post agreed with its author's evaluation of Schor's work as presented by Parramore, others defended the 150-day claim, citing inaccuracies in the post's claims about medieval history and characterizations of Schor's scholarship (the post does not mention Clark). "This is a rather dishonest and shameful piece," one commenter wrote in 2015.

Regardless of the debunking posted on the Adam Smith Institute blog, Parramore's op-ed about Schor's work continued to spread online. In November 2016, Parramore's piece was republished by the economics blog Evonomics and written about by a columnist at Inc. Also in November 2016, Schor's research was summarized in the Daily Mail.

The next major development in the online history of the 150-day claim took place in April 2022, when Azie Dungey, a television writer, made an X post that read:

Medieval peasants worked only about 150 days out of the year. The Church believed it was important to keep them happy with frequent, mandatory holidays.

You have less free time than a Medieval peasant.

Snopes has, so far, been unsuccessful in reaching Dungey for comment about where she first encountered the claim, but in a follow-up post she linked to a 2021 Medium post that presented Schor's research, largely following Parramore's 2013 op-ed.

Dungey's post, which at the time of this writing had received around 20,000 reposts and 114,000 likes, represented the claim's first real social-media moment. Within a month, Dungey's post was covered by The Atlantic and became the subject of a second debunking, this time posted by a Redditor to the r/badhistory subreddit.

Although this debunking went into more detail about the history of the 150-day claim than the Adam Smith Institute blog post, correctly tracing the estimate from Schor back to Clark, it did not mention the research multiple different economic historians had published supporting the 150-day claim in the decades since Schor's book first appeared. In other words, the post presented the estimate as out-of-date and fringe, despite the number of mainstream economic historians who currently support it.

Like the Adam Smith Institute blog post, the r/badhistory debunker's post focused on what they saw as the 150-day estimate's lack of accommodation for unpaid work done for a lord. They did not, however, mention the impact of the Black Death on the English labor market, which led to a drastic reduction of labor-based obligations among English peasants at the same time the average working year dropped from around 200 days to below 150 days — at least according to Humphries and Weisdorf's calculations.

The r/badhistory debunking also pointed out that the 150-day estimate does not account for time spent doing chores such as cooking or feeding livestock. This is true, but the debunker did not note that higher estimates like the one endorsed by Clark, in which medieval peasants worked as many as 300 days a year on average, also do not account for these tasks. In other words, on this point the debunker's complaint was not properly about the 150-day claim, but instead about the types of activities economists and economic historians consider work, something that for the medieval period is largely dictated by the restraints of the quantifiable historical evidence.

Two days after the r/badhistory debunking was posted, the Instagram account Classical D*mn posted the meme mentioned at the beginning of this story. Notably, the words used in that meme almost exactly matched Dungey's post, including the "frequent, mandatory holidays" phrase that originated with Parramore's paraphrase of Schor's research.

The Medieval Peasants Meme in Context

The claim that medieval peasants worked, on average, around 150 days a year has a history that can be traced back to 1986, when Gregory Clark first proposed it. Over the following decades it was introduced to increasingly broader audiences through a series of citations and paraphrases.

Of these introductions, four were noteworthy: first, Schor's citation of Clark in 1991's "The Overworked American"; second, Parramore's summary of Schor's work in a 2013 op-ed; third, Dungey's 2022 X post; and fourth, the Instagram account Classical D*mn's posting of a meme based on Dungey's X post, also in 2022.

As public awareness of the claim increased, so too did attempts to debunk it through posts on X, Reddit and various blogs. However, despite what some of these attempts to debunk the claim have asserted, Clark's unpublished 1986 paper is not currently the only academic source for the 150-day estimate.

Instead, based on more recent scholarship, many — though not all — academic economists and economic historians have come to accept the 150-day estimate, at least for England during much of the 14th century, and sometimes even later.

In a phone conversation with Snopes, Parramore said that, in her opinion, the broadening of scholarly support for the 150-day estimate can be at least partly attributed to changes in how academics understand the role of history in economics. Specifically, she cited the growth of interest among economists in considering historical data from pre-modern periods, as opposed to the purely mathematical models that dominated the field for much of the 20th century.

"One of the problems with economics as a discipline since the 1950s has been a lack of attention to history," Parramore said. "It's only been recently, really, that economic history has come back into the picture."

At the same time, she said, online interest in the 150-day estimate likely reflects popular dissatisfaction with the realities of the modern Western economy, much along the lines of what Schor described in 1991. According to Parramore, that dissatisfaction worsened dramatically during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, which she described as "a really traumatic experience for the labor force."

Whether presented in the form of scholarly literature or online memes, Parramore said, the claim that medieval peasants worked around 150 days a year "strikes a nerve because people feel overworked, and this gives them a historical perspective. They're looking back in time and thinking, did everybody work this hard for so little?"

Ultimately, the claim that medieval peasants worked 150 days due to the frequency of religious holidays contains information that is both true and false — at least according to many mainstream economic historians. As such, Snopes rates it as a "Mixture" of correct and incorrect information.

Sources:

Bilyeau, Nancy. "Do You Work Longer Hours Than a Medieval Peasant?" Medium, 2 Oct. 2021, https://tudorscribe.medium.com/do-you-work-longer-hours-than-a-medieval-peasant-17a9efe92a20 .

Broadberry, Stephen, et al. British Economic Growth, 1270–1870. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107707603 .

Clark, Gregory. "Growth or Stagnation? Farming in England, 1200–1800." The Economic History Review, vol. 71, no. 1, Feb. 2018, pp. 55–81. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.12528 .

Field, Alexander J. "British Economic Growth: 1270–1870. By Stephen Broadberry, Bruce M.S. Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton, and Bas van Leeuwen Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 461. $39.99, Paper." The Journal of Economic History, vol. 76, no. 1, Mar. 2016, pp. 236–38. Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1017/S002205071600005X .

Gregory Clark - Professor of Economics - Welcome. https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/ . Accessed 22 Aug. 2024.

Humphries, Jane, and Jacob Weisdorf. "Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England, 1260–1850." The Economic Journal, vol. 129, no. 623, Oct. 2019, pp. 2867–87, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/uez017 .

"Institute for New Economic Thinking." Institute for New Economic Thinking, https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/experts/lynnparramore . Accessed 22 Aug. 2024.

Mcguire, Caroline. "Medieval Peasants Had 7 TIMES More Holiday than YOUR Average American." Mail Online, 8 Nov. 2016, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/~/article-3916280/index.html .

"Medieval Peasants Really Did Not Work Only 150 Days a Year." Adam Smith Institute, https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-industry/medieval-peasants-really-did-not-work-only-150-days-a-year . Accessed 22 Aug. 2024.

Mull, Amanda. "What Did Medieval Peasants Know?" The Atlantic, 6 May 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/05/medieval-history-peasant-life-work/629783/ .

Parramore, Lynn. "Column: Why a Medieval Peasant Got More Vacation Time than You." Reuters, 29 Aug. 2013. www.reuters.com, https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us/column-why-a-medieval-peasant-got-more-vacation-time-than-you-idUSBRE97S0KV/ .

Professor Jane Humphries. https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-jane-humphries . Accessed 22 Aug. 2024.

Smarthistory – Limbourg Brothers, Très Riches Heures Du Duc de Berry. https://smarthistory.org/limbourg-brothers-tres-riches-heures-du-duc-de-berry/ . Accessed 22 Aug. 2024.

The Overworked American. 2017. www.hachettebookgroup.com, https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/juliet-b-schor/the-overworked-american/9780465054343/?lens=basic-books.