What Did Medieval Peasants Do All Day?

Medieval peasants had up to 150 days off per year. They slept twice a night. They ate three meals together every single day. You probably worked more than them this week. The story you were told about lazy medieval peasants was invented by Industrial Revolution factory owners, and your textbook still believes it. This video covers the medieval work calendar, two-phase sleep, communal meals, the invisible women's work economy, and how the Industrial Revolution rewrote what "normal" meant for human time. Welcome to The Basic Ages where you can find medieval history, told plainly, with all the parts your textbook left out. New medieval history every week. Subscribe so the algorithm remembers you exist. SOURCES: MEDIEVAL WORK HOURS Schor, Juliet (1991). The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. Basic Books. Clark, Gregory (2007). A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton University Press. THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH CALENDAR Cheney, C.R. (1945). "Rules for the Observance of Feast-Days in Medieval England." Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research. BIMODAL SLEEP Ekirch, A. Roger (2001). "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles." American Historical Review, 106(2). Ekirch, A. Roger (2005). At Day's Close: Night in Times Past. W.W. Norton. SMALL BEER AND MEDIEVAL HYDRATION Unger, Richard W. (2004). Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. University of Pennsylvania Press. Bennett, Judith M. (1996). Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600. Oxford University Press. WOMEN'S INVISIBLE WORK ECONOMY Bennett, Judith M. (2006). History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. University of Pennsylvania Press. Hanawalt, Barbara A. (1986). The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England. Oxford University Press. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION WORK DISCIPLINE Thompson, E.P. (1967). "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism." Past & Present, 38(1). de Vries, Jan (2008). The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge University Press. #MedievalHistory #History #TheBasicAges #HistoryExplained #MedievalLife #historysimple #2DAnimations #POVYouAre #simplehistory #2dhistory #ancientpeople