This is the start of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the structures of life for pre-modern peasants, who made up the majority of all humans who have ever lived. In the last few sections, we’ve looked broadly at how mortality, marriage and childbearing patterns shape the households these folks live in: high mortality, particularly child mortality shapes marriage and childbearing patterns, however even under extremely high mortality regimes, some level of fertility control is required to avoid more rapid population growth than we generally see in the evidence. As an aside, that should also help explaining why these populations ‘bounce back’ from catastrophe so quickly: in a situation where the land and resources to support rapid growth are available, these communities are capable of fairly rapid population growth.
Most of all, those models give us a broad sense of what these households might look like. Of course within that sense there is variation, but within a range – these households are more like each other (excepting the late/late European marriage model) than they are like most households in the modern industrialized world.
This week, we’re going to start to take that understanding of household structure and see how it shapes and defines the daily activities of these peasants, which is to say labor. Part of the reason I wanted to write this series was to debunk the utterly silly idea that people today work more than medieval or ancient peasants. In the context of the very low labor productivity that peasants faced, it took a tremendous amount of labor just to manage bare subsistence and even more to obtain ‘respectability’ in terms of material needs. That isn’t to say peasant life was joyless or lacked free time, but there is a reason that the moment industrial life in cities became available, millions of peasants flocked to it.
Finally, before we dive in, I want to note that since the school year has started back up and I am again teaching, I am going to be breaking this part into a lot of smaller components, working through various shaping concerns of peasant labor and how we might model them. We’re going to start this week by just thinking through what a peasant household might need and then in subsequent weeks we’ll look at the labor they have to put in to get it.
But first, if you like what you are reading, please share it and if you really like it, you can support this project on Patreon! While I do teach as the academic equivalent of a tenant farmer, tilling the Big Man’s classes, this project is my little plot of freeheld land which enables me to keep working as a writers and scholar. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter and Bluesky and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.
Subsistence
Paul Erdkamp framed the economic goals of peasant small farmers as “subsistence – and a little bit more” and I think that is a sharp way to understand the aims these households have.1 On the one hand, bare subsistence – just enough food and clothing to survive – isn’t enough: our small farmers will need some goods they cannot produce themselves and on top of that will be forced to support non-farmers through things like taxation. So ‘just subsistence’ wasn’t enough.
On the other hand, the gains to be had by working for more than subsistence were slim. We’ve discussed this before, but stockpiling money was of only limited use for our peasants. Banking as a service was simply not generally available in most of these societies for the poor and not necessarily reliable where it was available.2 Holding cash was remarkably risky: it could be stolen or lost and it provided a ready supply of easily extractable wealth for elites or the state to tax.
Worse yet, the moment where our farmers might really need their savings – a harvest failure – was the precise moment that food would be so scarce no amount of money could buy it anyway.
Storing up goods had equal problems. Some amount of moveable property might be worth keeping safe as security against catastrophe or as a supply for payments – fabric was a good option for this, being immediately useful, valuable and portable – but there were sharp limits to this too. Of course the primary production of the farm – food, mostly in grains – doesn’t keep forever. There was no way to, for instance, stockpile enough grain ‘to retire on’ because grain spoils, it gets eaten by pests and so on. As noted, fabric is a little better for value preservation, but only a little and once you have a lot of it, it ends up being exposed to the same theft-or-taxation risks as money.
Mostly importantly, there’s almost no way in these societies for a farming household to work its way out of the peasantry. These are, almost invariably, remarkably low social mobility societies by modern standards and indeed they expect low social mobility as part of their generally communal attitude: you are supposed to fill the same role in the community as your parents did, in the context of a community whose social and economic order is not supposed to change. But equally as a matter of finance, escape from the peasantry is nearly impossible, because the price of productive capital (land, work animals, tools and in many of these societies, enslaved laborers) is very high, while the value of labor – the thing a peasant has to give – is very low. Do peasants sometimes work extra hard and save carefully to buy an extra field or keep a plow team? Of course. But buying one’s way out of the peasantry doesn’t mean going from a 3 acre farm to a 3.5 acre farm, but from a 3 acre farm to a twenty or thirty acre farm, to have the amount of land necessary to no longer need to fully take part of the daily back-breaking labor yourself. The returns to agricultural labor were simply not typically high enough, compared to the typical cost of land, to enable that kind of growth even over a whole lifetime – and that’s without the existence of Big Men, landlords and the state all of whom will want to have some claim on all that wealth being built up.
In short, few peasants could hope, by dint of ‘hard work’ to work their way into something other than being a peasant and so as a result there was very little material comfort extra labor could buy them beyond a certain level. I should note this is a big difference from modern societies, where the high productivity of labor means that a extra labor often can bring greater material comforts or financial security.3
So much like with fertility, our peasants are aiming to work a lot, but not – generally – for maximum labor. Instead, they’ll aim for a workload that ideally puts them securely above subsistence – although as we’ll see, the unpredictability of agriculture means this security is always, always precarious – and ideally approach an invisible line of “subsistence – and a little more.” That “and a little more” is representing access to the tools and comforts that might be available to the working peasantry, keeping in mind that in these structures, the kinds of comforts available to the elite – or even just the urban merchant and trade classes – are essentially forever out of reach (or at least, forever impractical) for the peasant. Beyond that point, it makes little sense for our peasants to do even more labor (as we’ll see, by that point they’ll be laboring a much lower marginal returns, so each new hour invested earns less and less) because they can’t realize much in the way of benefits from it.
So in understanding peasant labor we also have to understand peasant subsistence, because these households will work hard to a point, after which the incentives for more labor go down substantially. Thus understanding what subsistence – and “subsistence – and a little more” – are is going to help us to understand both what a household needs to do to survive but also how it is going to allocate the labor time it has. But to explore that, we’re going to need some model households to think with.
Some Model Households
Now, as we’ve discussed, our peasants do not meet their economic needs as individuals, rather they do so as households. So we need to begin by proposing some households. As we noted back in the first post, the average household size for a peasant community under conditions of high mortality is going to be between four and five, but since there are a lot of households and larger households contain more people, the average person lives in a household of around six or seven people. And now, of course, we’ve explored the mortality, marriage and fertility patterns that are going to produce that sort of household size (again, there will be variation – within limits – both regionally and temporally, but we’re dealing here with a relatively high degree of abstraction, a general rule from which specific places may deviate to a greater or lesser degree). And then, of course, there are very small households (less than three persons), which will come back into our story a bit later.
So let’s propose for our model three households along those lines, keeping in mind what we know about plausible marriage and fertility patterns. First, a household on the smaller side with four individuals, meet the Smalls: Mr. Smalls (M, 40), his wife Mrs. Smalls (F. 32) and their two children, John (M, 14) and Jane (F. 6) Smalls.4
Then, we’ll have a slightly larger, but still broadly typical multi-generational household of six members – meet the Middles: Mr. Middles Sr. has passed away but is survived by his wife Widow Middles (F. 46), with the nominal head of household being her son Mr. Middles Jr. (M. 27), who a few years ago married his wife Mrs. Middles Jr. (F. 22), with whom he has two daughters, Fanny Middles (F. 4) and Freida Middles (F. newborn).5 Widow Middles had two other children surviving to adulthood, a daughter now married (and thus in another household) and a younger son, Freddie Middles (M. 16), not yet married and still in the household.
Finally, we’ll have a larger household, something sitting basically on the mean for multi-family household size in the Egyptian data, with ten members. Meet the Biggs: Mr. Biggs Sr. was married twice (first wife lost in childbirth) and recently passed away, leaving behind his second wife Widow Biggs (F. 50). The household is instead run by Mr. Matthew Biggs (M. 43, from the first marriage) and his wife Mrs. Maddie Biggs (F. 33). They have three children, Mark (M. 16), Matilda (F. 12) and Mary (F. 8) Biggs. Matthew’s half-brother, Mr. Martin Biggs (M. 28) is also married to Mrs. Martha Biggs (F. 22) and they have two children, Michael (M. 4) and little Melanie (F. 1) Biggs.
I know that was hard to follow, so here’s a chart (beneath each name is the relation to the male head of household, just to help keep track):6
| The Smalls (4 members) | The Middles (6 members) | The Biggs (10 members) |
| Mr. Smalls (M. 40) Householder | Widow Middles (F. 46) Mother | Widow Biggs (F. 50) Mother |
| Mrs. Smalls (F. 32) Wife | Mr. Middles Jr. (M. 27) Householder | Mr. Matt Biggs (M. 43) Householder |
| John (M. 14) Son | Mrs. Middles Jr. (F. 22) Wife | Mrs. Maddie Biggs (F. 33) Wife |
| Jane (F. 6) Daughter | Fanny Middles (F. 4) Daughter | Mark Biggs (M. 16) Son |
| Freida Middles (F. newborn) Daughter | Matilda Biggs (F. 12) Daughter | |
| Freddie Middles (M. 16) Brother | Mary Biggs (F. 8) Daughter | |
| Mr. Martin Biggs (M. 28) Brother | ||
| Mrs. Martha Biggs (F. 22) Sister-in-Law | ||
| Michael Biggs (M. 4) Nephew | ||
| Melanie Biggs (F. 1) Niece |
Now as you might imagine, these households are going to have radically different amounts of labor available but also different kinds of labor because of the differing ages and genders of their members. But it also is going to impact their resource demands as well, because while children are resource intensive, they’re not as resource intensive as adults. Which gets us back to the question of what “subsistence and a little more” is.
Bread and Baskets
So we are looking to establish two ‘baselines’ of economic survival here: a ‘subsistence’ baseline and the ‘a little bit more’ baseline, which we’ll call ‘respectability‘ for reasons that will become clear in a moment. The subsistence baseline is the line below which the household is actively in shortage. A household can dip below this line temporarily, relying on the charity of neighbors or on belt-tightening, but it cannot operate below this line permanently without eventually running short on the essentials of life. By contrast, ‘respectability’ reflects something closer to the ideal amount of material comfort a peasant could access. We’ll come back to the respectability line in a moment, but let’s return to subsistence.
In calculating subsistence, one handy thing is that a peasant household can actually produce almost everything it needs for subsistence itself. What is going to dominate these subsistence requirements are two major concerns: food and clothing. For food needs, when modeling past societies, historians often resort to a simplifying assumption: since grains (wheat and barley, generally in the form of bread) make up the large majority of all calories these folks are eating, we can work in ‘wheat equivalent’ to simplify our understanding of food demands, even though our peasants will be growing a somewhat wider range of crops in order to feed themselves.
Determining the wheat requirements is itself, however, a bit tricky. There are two approaches. The first is to assume that the nutritional needs of human beings haven’t changed that much over time – we are, biologically, mostly the same humans we’ve been for the last 10,000 years – and so using modern nutritional estimates, most often the World Health Organization (WHO) and Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) statistics.7 The tricky this is these figures come in meaningfully higher than the figures we find in our sources and that makes sense – the WHO and FAO are suggesting ideal not minimum standards and it’s just very clear that ancient and medieval peasants did not survive on modern ideal nutritional standards. The alternative is to use figures derived from ancient or medieval sources, as for instance Paul Erdkamp does,8 though these can be tricky to use because they generally come not in calorie counts but in ancient units of dry measure, with all of the complications of back-filling to a caloric measure.
Now because I believe that the best solution to any situation in which there are two or more unsatisfactory standards is to develop a new standard, I am going to use the approach I use in my book project – which if you want updates on the progress of that project, patrons get monthly updates – which more or less splits the difference between Erdkamp’s ancient-derived figures (which struck me as too low, being inter alia below ancient figures we have for military rations) and modern figures from the FAO/WHO, etc. Because I am a Roman historian, I am going to do a lot of the background calculations of model here in Roman units (iugera rather than acres and – relevant here – modii rather than dry litres), but my split-the-difference approach gets us roughly the following food requirements, assuming all food intake is wheat (with the activity level and then the food requirement in rough annual kilograms of wheat (with the original calculation in modii in parenthesis) and then the estimates calories per day below):
| The Smalls (4 members) | The Middles (6 members) | The Biggs (10 members) |
| Mr. Smalls (M. 40) Vigorous 338kg (50 modii) c. 3000 calories/day | Widow Middles (F. 46) Active 237kg (35 modii) c. 2,150 calories/day | Widow Biggs (F. 50) Sedentary 202kg (30 modii) c. 1,850 calories/day |
| Mrs. Smalls (F. 32) Active 237kg (35 modii) c. 2,150 calories/day | Mr. Middles Jr. (M. 27) Vigorous 338kg (50 modii) c. 3000 calories/day | Mr. Matt Biggs (M. 43) Vigorous 338kg (50 modii) c. 3000 calories/day |
| John (M. 14) Vigorous 269kg (40 modii) c. 2,450 calories/day | Mrs. Middles Jr. (F. 22) Active – Nursing 289kg (43 modii) c. 2,150 calories/day | Mrs. Maddie Biggs (F. 33) Active 237kg (35 modii) c. 2,150 calories/day |
| Jane (F. 6) Active 134kg (20 modii) c. 1,230 calories/day | Fanny Middles (F. 4) Moderate* 121kg (18 modii) c. 1,100 calories/day | Mark Biggs (M. 16) Vigorous 302kg (45 modii) c. 2,770 calories/day |
| Freida Middles (F. newborn) Nursing Adds c. 500 calories/day to mother | Matilda Biggs (F. 12) Active 202kg (30 modii) c. 1,850 calories/day | |
| Freddie Middles (M. 16) Vigorous 302kg (45 modii) c. 2,770 calories/day | Mary Biggs (F. 8) Moderate 161kg (24 modii) c. 1,475 calories/day | |
| Mr. Martin Biggs (M. 28) Vigorous 338kg (50 modii) c. 3000 calories/day | ||
| Mrs. Martha Biggs (F. 22) Active – Nursing 289kg (43 modii) c. 2,150 calories/day | ||
| Michael Biggs (M. 4) Moderate 134kg (20 modii) c. 1,230 calories/day | ||
| Melanie Biggs (F. 1) Nursing Adds c. 500 calories/day to mother | ||
| Annual Total: ~974.5kg (145 modii) | Annual Total: ~1,280kg (191 modii) | Annual Total: ~2.197kg (327 modii) |
So that gets us our rough totals for a modest minimum nutritional demand for each household. Again, I should note, while I am using the FAO figures as a guide for adjusting for age and gender, my calorie estimates here are generally around 10% less (or so) than the FAO figures because relatively poor farming laborers in the past do not seem to have eaten quite so well as the FAO or the WHO (or I) would like.
The other immediate major survival need the family has is clothing. Here we have no nutrition figures to anchor our estimates on and clothing demand is very clearly context sensitive. Households in cold climates will need more, but equally the question of minimum social expectations will differ substantially in the amount of expected coverage. Meanwhile, while human beings have a clear limit to how much food they can really eat, there is no such limit to how much clothing they can have, as demonstrated by all of our overstuffed closests, any one of which would have embarrassed your average rich peasant. Clothing demand thus could ‘expand to fill the space’ – the family could certainly consume whatever production was available.
But we’re interested in minimums. We’ve actually tackled this problem before. We get a suggestion of the absolute minimum for survival from a writer like Cato the Elder (De Ag. 59), well known to be a cruel and miserly master towards his enslaved workers, who recommends each worker get a new long tunic and cloak every other year. That comes out to something in the neighborhood of 21,650cm2 per year, per person. Roman soldiers seem to have been issued two sets of clothing per year, which might suggest that something a bit more normal for a well-off peasant household (from where Roman soldiers were recruited). Our peasants might be somewhat less than that: if we assume something like a single new complete set of clothing (a bit more ample than Cato’s allotment and every year, not every other) per year (I am going to calculate assuming Roman clothing – these values would need to go up for colder climates), we might figure something in the very rough neighborhood of c. 50,000cm2 per adult, perhaps half as much per adolescent child and a quarter as much for very young children. That might suggest the total fabric need of the family as follows (expressed in square meters), along with a very rough estimate of the amount of raw fibers (wool, flax) required (again, these are per year estimates):
| The Smalls | The Middles | The Biggs |
| 13.75m2 | 18.75m2 | 32.5m2 |
| c. 6.35kg raw fibers | c. 8.68kg raw fibers | c. 15kg raw fibers |
Fiber requirements in kilograms follow Aldrete et al.’s work and thus assume linen fabric but the mass of raw fibers required to make fabric is heavily dependent on the type and quality of fibers, the density and style of the weave and a host of other factors, so these are only very, very rough approximations.
Of course there are going to be some other requirements. Our household already has land and a farmhouse (almost certainly inherited) but the farmhouse will demand regular cleaning and maintenance to remain livable. The family also needs heating and to a limited degree, lighting. For now, we’re going to assume our bare-bones subsistence family is generating its heating needs with wood fuel gathered from something like a common forest.9 And of course keep in mind that our calculations for food above are in ‘wheat equivalents’ but we understand they represent a wider range of foods including beans and other legumes, possibly vegetables out of a small garden, potentially a modest amount of meat from the keeping of a small number of animals10 and so on. These other foods might not be as land and labor efficient as wheat, so to represent their requirement for basic survival – enough protein and vitamins to not get sick and die – we might raise the wheat requirement by perhaps 10% over our raw calculation (which was derived from wheat rations that would have been supplemented by other foods in any case).
We also need to adjust for taxes. After all, even if these peasants only farm on land they own free and in the clear – neither sharecropping the land of a Big Man nor having to farm the land of the lord’s manor – chances are they still have to pay taxes. The amount of these taxes vary tremendously, based both on local productivity – the more productive the local land, the heavier the taxes can be – and the political economy. In societies where the large mass of small farmers wield real political power – the Roman Republic and some Greek poleis jump to mind – taxes are often kept somewhat low. By contrast, in societies where the peasantry is broadly disarmed and politically irrelevant, kings and temples can (and do) tax the peasantry down to the subsistence line. This is another topic for the book project, but I suspect one of the reasons Rome, and, to an extent, Macedon and the Greek poleis were relatively good at producing a lot of heavy infantry is that their political structures made it harder – not impossible, but harder – for elites to use taxes and rents to drain away all of the wealth of the peasantry, which in turn resulted in peasants with enough wealth to equip themselves as soldiers.
In any case, taxes on agricultural production were ubiquitous. Tax rates varied, but a tithe – a 10% tax on agricultural production, which the Romans called the decumae – is about as low as they go. So to survive, our peasants need to exceed their basic subsistence needs (which, you will recall, we’ve raised already by 10% to account for non-wheat foods) by enough to pay taxes and still not starve, so we need actual farming production to be high enough that 90% of it covers our subsistence needs to simulate a low taxation environment for our peasants. That produces an estimate of bare subsistence for each family that looks like this (again, as per-year figures):
| The Smalls | The Middles | The Biggs |
| ~1,189.5kg (177 modii) 159.5 modii to family 17.5 to taxman | ~1,569kg (233.5 modii) 210 modii to family 23.5 to the taxman | ~2,686kg (400 modii) 360 modii to the family 40 modii to the taxman |
| 13.75m2 fabric (6.35kg fibers) | 18.75m2 fabric (8.68kg fibers) | 32.5m2 fabric (15kg fibers) |
Man Can Not Live On Wheat Equivalent Alone
But of course, those figures are pretty close to bare minimum: again, families could (and did) slip below those figures from time to time, but they could not operate long-term much below them without starvation, health complications from exposure to the elements, or angering the taxman.
But what of the “a little bit more” beyond subsistence?
That, of course is a lot trickier, because we’re no longer dealing with basic necessities and minimums. One tool historians use to think about this is a “respectability basket” – a collection of goods that we suppose, based on our sources, added up to what was understood as a respectable lower-class or working-class living.11 Generally scholars use these respectability baskets as a way of converting needs into currency figures which can then be assessed against the wages for labor.
But we don’t want to assess against labor, because our interests are peasants who (generally) have a bit more to offer than labor. Our peasants, after all, are defined not merely as laborers but also as possessing some rights – either outright ownership, or some sort of attachment – to land, which is to say capital. That puts them in a different economic space than the urban tradesman or unskilled laborer of the sort whose wages might be reported in our sources. As a result, we do not want to convert into money, which is limited direct usefulness for our peasants, but instead to try to stay in units of what they do produce: grain and fabric in our simplified model here.
What makes that tricky, of course, is that a lot of the things that we’re going to add for our respectability basket – fancier foods, wine, lamp oil and so on – are things that the household is not going to produce itself, but must acquire from others. Of course fundamentally the household has to acquire these goods in exchange for the things it can give, sell or exchange, which are agricultural goods (here still simplified to ‘grain’), textiles or unskilled labor.12 Our peasants might, for instance, sell their surplus grain, or the surplus fabric made by their spinners and weavers, to afford things they cannot produce themselves, but I should note ‘market exchange’ is not the only way they could do this. They might also exchange with other households, often on credit and favors (rather than barter) and may also be involved in vertical systems of banqueting and gift-exchange with the Big Man, all of which provide non-market ways to effectively exchange grain, textiles or labor for things they cannot produce themselves.
What can help us here in thinking about how much our peasants would need to produce to basically satisfy all of the ‘optionals’ of their material needs is looking at the relationship between the costs of a ‘bare bones’ subsistence basket that produces a minimum caloric value and the fancier ‘respectability basket’ which reaches the same caloric value (along with some material comforts) in a substantially more expensive but more pleasant way. The ratios between the two ‘baskets’ can give us some sense of how high above ‘subsistence’ the line for ‘comfort’ was.
So, for instance Robert C. Allen13 proposes an early modern Northern European respectability basket consisting of bread, beans/peas, meat, butter, cheese, eggs, beer, soap, linen, candles, lamp oil and fuel. Our bare subsistence model has effectively already accounted for bread, beans/peas, linen and fuel which represent 46.7% of the full basket’s spending, along with (remember our 10%-for-other-foods – this is that) 5 out of the 26kg of meat and 3 of the 5.2kg of the butter, along with half of the candles and lamp oil (as these are included in Allen’s own bare bones model), which is another 9% of total respectability basket spending (out of the 26% spend on the full basket’s meat, butter, candles and oil). All of which is to say we might imagine our bare bones subsistence total of food and fabric represents something like 56% of the respectability basket following Allen’s Northern European respectability basket (put another way, to achieve respectability, our household needs to produce something like 178% of its bare subsistence production).
That said, Allen’s early modern basket is useful to think with but tricky in one immediate regard which is how small a portion of the budget is in fabric – five square meters of linen make up just 5.3% of the total – a product of the substantially greater textile productivity of a post-spinning-wheel,14 post-horizontal-frame-loom15 making fabric a lot less labor intensive than it was for most of the ancient and medieval peasants we’re focused on. Because the adoption of those technologies increased textile worker productivity, potentially several times over, they create a ‘discontinuity’ in the structure of household budgets we need to be wary of. Now Allen does also run numbers for antiquity, but I think we’re better off relying on Walter Scheidel’s approach to the same math a year later, tweaking some of the numbers.16
And here Scheidel does us a remarkable favor: while Allen calculated a ‘bare bones’ early modern subsistence basket, he didn’t detail its monetary cost, but Scheidel makes his two baskets (respectability and bare bones subsistence) directly comparable not only in calories but also in direct cost, which makes our task here a bit easier. Scheidel breaks down ancient price data into two periods, 1-160AD and 190-270AD (there was a substantial bought of inflation between them) and he has to adjust for goods which we know might be consumed but for which we simply do not have prices, like cheese; I am using these “adjusted totals” here. In period 1, respectability’s cost was 249 drachma at the lower end, compared to a bare bones cost of 112 (44%); in period two the respectability cost was 535 compared to a bare bones cost of 266 (49%).17
Now as you can tell there is significant chronological and regional variation in these figures: what defines respectability and what it costs varies place to place. However, for the sake of our model we can make a decent ballpark assumption, going off of these figures that the complete ‘respectability’ package of material comforts reflected achieving something like double the basic bare-bones subsistence requirements. That doesn’t mean the family is necessarily eating twice as much food – or even wearing twice as many clothes – but that they might be producing double subsistence and then trading away (market sale, gift exchange, etc.) the surplus in order to acquire things they cannot produce themselves.
Assuming that ‘roughly double,’ we can now, at last get a sense of the material needs for our three model peasant households:
| The Smalls | The Middles | The Biggs | |
| Bare Subsistence Annual Requirement | ~1,189.5kg wheat-equivalent (177 modii) 13.75m2 fabric | ~1,569kg wheat-equivalent (233.5 modii) 18.75m2 fabric | ~2,686kg wheat-equivalent (400 modii) 32.5m2 fabric |
| Respectability Annual Requirement | ~2,379kg wheat-equivalent (354 modii) 27.5m2 fabric | ~3,138kg wheat-equivalent (467 modii) 37.5m2 fabric | ~5,376kg wheat-equivalent (800 modii) 65m2 fabric |
Now in practice of course, our peasants, like everyone else are going to experience diminishing marginal returns as they push over subsistence: each extra bit of production is going to buy a bit less comfort, so they may decide to stop doing more labor well before reaching the full respectability basket, but the overall picture here gives us a decent sense of what the upper-end of ‘aspirational’ for our peasant families would be.
So we now have our model families with their model members and thus we have a sense of how much labor the family has and what the family needs from its labor. We are at last ready, in the next few weeks, to explore how these families might deploy the labor they have to try to meet those needs and what the implications would be for how much they work and how they live.
- Erdkamp, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire: A Social, Political and Economic Study (2005), 96. Probably the best current work modeling the economics of smallholder households in the Roman Empire specifically.
- The modern notion that the safest place for your money is a bank is predicated on the existence of deposit guaranteeing institutions like the FDIC or individual EU Deposit Guarantee Schemes, which back up the value of your deposit with the power of the state to issue money (and if necessary, compel compliance). But for the peasant, the state is far more likely to be seizing their money rather than protecting it.
- Yes, yes, I see you there in the back preparing to discuss all of the ways the modern labor economy is unfair. We can have that discussion another day, but what I want you to understand is that however unfair and static you think the modern industrial or post-industrial labor market is, the pre-modern agricultural labor structure was dramatically more fixed and inflexible. The leap from “no one retires” to “not enough people can afford to retire” is a larger one than we often appreciate. And in terms of material comforts, there is little comparison – relatively few peasants could own their own plow team, much less a horse for transport. By contrast, 92% of American households own a car, a one ton (or more) mass of steel precision machinery, with enough worked metal in it to equip close to a hundred knights. So yes, I will grant you, modern labor can be unfair, but it is differently unfair than pre-modern labor and also much less unfair.
- Mr. Smalls’ parents lived with them but have recently passed away. Mrs. Smalls has been pregnant six times, but lost two to miscarriage; two other children had died, a daughter in infancy and a son before the age of 2.
- Alas, we know as Mrs. Middles does not, that little Freida Middles will not make it to her second birthday.
- I know the way I have structured these families may seem more than a little male-centric, but in most of these societies, that is how the law will understand these families. How decision-making actually works by contrast is a different matter – one imagines that Widow Middles, for instance, is a formidable figure in her household, whatever the laws in our imaginary community may say.
- E.g. World Health Organization, Energy and Protein Requirements: Report of a Joint FAO/WHO/UNU Expert Consultation (1985) and Food and Agricultural Organization, Human energy requirements: Report of a joint FAO/WHO/UNU Expert Consultation Rome 17-24 October 2001 (2004).
- Erdkamp, op. cit, 49.
- In many cases, that forest is the property of the Big Man or the local lord, but the smallholders of the village might often have a right to gather any fallen branches (even though they couldn’t cut down trees) which could be stockpiled through the year to be burned in the winter.
- Likely to be sheep, goats or pigs, not cows; cows are big and expensive and so likely belong to the Big Man. Beef was (and is) a luxury meat.
- I am drawing this concept from R.C. Allen, “How Prosperous Were the Romans? Evidence from Diocletian’s Price Edict” in Quantifying the Roman Economy (2009) and W. Scheidel, “Real Wages in Early Economies: Evidence for Living Standards from 1800 BCE to 1300 CE” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53.3 (2010). Note also a similar approach with the working paper B. van Leeuwen, R. Pirgruber and J. van Leeuwen-Li, “The standard of living in ancient societies” (2023).
- We’re going to deal with the skilled labor the household might offer – farming labor – as tenants or sharecroppers later on in this analysis.
- op. cit. above
- reaching the Mediterranean in the 1100s and 1200s, but substantially enhanced by the addition of a treadle in the 1500s
- Reaching Europe and the Mediterranean by the 900s, becoming common in Europe by the 1200s, with treadles again, as far as I know, coming later
- W. Scheidel, “Real Wages in Early Economies: Evidence for Living Standards from 1800 BCE to 1300 CE” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53.3 (2010).
- Scheidel constructs his prices, in the face of uncertainty as a range. Here I am using the lower end of that range in all cases for consistency. In any case we are focused only very roughly in the percentage relationships between the totals, rather than the totals themselves.
For anyone wanting to see more about what peasants did all year, I highly recommend the BBC documentary “Tudor monastary farm” from 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXVzSkfPX4g&list=PLjgZr0v9DXyK9Cc8PG0ZhDt2i2eQ_PEvg
Two archeologists and a historian live and work one year on a 1500 farm, doing all the seasonal farming tasks, but also venture into all kinds of crafts like tile making, lead mining, eel fishing, ale brewing, cloth production and many more. Plus they show the seasonal festivities and customs, It stays highly entertaining and educational for six hours! And there is a second series with the same team working on Guedelon Castle!
There were a total of 5 series, from Tudor/Stuart running through until Edwardian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_historic_farm_series
There were a total of five different series, running from Tudor/Stuart until Edwardian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_historic_farm_series, and several related programs.
Animals “likely to be sheep, goat or pig” but not chickens or rabbits? Was this not a thing in premodern rural household (like you can see in 19th century rural communities in Europe) that every household would have a chicken coop and many would also have rabbits?
You may find this of interest in regard to your question!
“Peasants and poultry in England, 1250-1540” by Christopher Dyer
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1040618220301208
Chickens were definitely a thing, but they were much more valued for their eggs.
I am interested in whether rabbits were common or not as well.
I can only speak for medieval England, where the situation might be susbtantially different because rabbits are a non-native species and thus only exist as deliberate imports by the nobility, but rabbits would have only been kept by landowners, in bulk, on constructed warrens that took up entire fields. Keeping rabbits was an aristocratic privilege, similar to deer, rabbit warrens were guarded and peasants would have been forbidden to take rabbits from them. On top of this I don’t think the methodology or technology existed for a peasant household to keep a small number of rabbits for household production. Rabbits are the proverbial for fast-breeding animals, and even keeping a small number I think you’d quickly find yourself with too many rabbits to reasonably maintain.
Prior to the 20th century keeping rabbits at home might not even have been necessary for peasant households in Europe, as wild rabbits were vastly more abundant: myxamatosis outbreaks in the 1950s killed off more than 90% of the wild rabbit populations in most European countries, going up to something like 99% in the UK. The pre-modern European countryside would have been heaving with rabbits in a way that it’s quite difficult to imagine now.
> Rabbits are the proverbial for fast-breeding animals, and even keeping a small number I think you’d quickly find yourself with too many rabbits to reasonably maintain.
Doesn’t sound like a problem to me. Eat or sell the excess.
That’s what I would think. And the pelts would be quite useful! How could you ever have too many rabbits? Unless you get tired of rabbit stew every day….
“How could you ever have too many rabbits?”
If they’re loose rabbits then they can get into the vegetables and eat more than they’re worth. If they’re hutch rabbits then you still have to feed them (grass and scraps maybe, but something) and clean their habitat, so there’s effort. And being rabbits, maybe they’re more prone to escaping than an Andes guinea pig (originally domesticated for food, but seeming rather more sedate.)
That said, wiki says
“The European rabbit has been widely kept as livestock, starting in ancient Rome from at least the first century BC”
“As livestock, European rabbits are bred for their meat and fur. The earliest breeds were important sources of meat,”
“recorded as early as the 1st century BC, when the Roman writer Pliny the Elder described the use of rabbit hutches, along with enclosures called leporaria.[6] In Rome, rabbits were raised in large walled colonies with walls extended underground.[7]”
The issue is that not many people would want them, given they were so many, and they were so much of a nuisance. Myxomatosis wasn’t an accident, it was just the only way we could work out to get rid of the things in Australia and Tierra Del Fuego (introducing it to Europe was slightly more accidental, as that was more of a wildly over-successful attempt at localised eradication).
Rabbits came to England with the Romans.
And then went extinct and had to be re-introduced after the Norman conquest.
It’s easy enough to keep a few rabbits, but scaling up is hard.
Cattle and sheep can be turned loose onto a field or pasture and contained by a simple fence. Herd instinct and domestication means a few humans and/or dogs can control a large number of animals and keep them from straying.
For the same amount of meat as one cow you’d need a *lot* of rabbits. If you keep them in hutches, someone has to bring food to them. If you turn them loose in a field, you won’t get them back. A rabbit proof fence is a serious piece of engineering even in the modern world.
I know that in Holland there was a tradition in small towns where people who had small yards would keep one young large-breed rabbit, which would be fed mostly on vegtable scraps by the kids and then eaten around Christmas (we keep a couple of rabbits and very old visitors have occasionally jokingly made reference to this tradition when they visit)
Hmm, I read a book detailing life in a medieval English village, and I remember seeing a “capon” listed as one of the dues peasants could be expected to pay to their landlord at various times. I don’t know whether the small farmers were eating chickens themselves, though, or just producing them for the nobility to meet their tax obligations.
People kept chickens for eggs, and only ate the chickens when they stopped producing them. Same with cows/goats/a lot of sheep with milk and dairy. The amount of food you got from them that way vastly outweighed getting a single meal out of a chicken.
@Brett,
I think the importance of cows/goats/sheep for milk, on a global scale, can be overrated: about two thirds of the world’s population is lactose intolerant to some degree, and that includes most people in the Sinosphere, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the southern and eastern parts of the Indian subcontinent where bovine species were quite widely raised. I think the *most* important purpose of cattle would have been for traction, not for meat or milk.
You’re right that the *primary* purpose of chickens, and to a lesser extent ducks, would have been for eggs, but don’t forget that half the chicken population is male and doesn’t produce eggs. In modern commercial chicken farms the male chicks are eliminated shortly after birth, but in premodern societies they would have been kept around for meat (or as a small investment which could have been quickly sold for petty cash when you needed it for an emergency).
“Lactose-intolerance” as used today refers to intolerance to BOVINE lactose, so an intolerance to cow milk, not that of sheep or goats.
Lactose intolerance also doesn’t necessarily preclude eating cheese; much of the lactose is consumed by the bacteria that turn milk into cheese, leaving a lot of cheeses with very little of it. This applies especially to aged cheeses; fresh cheeses like mozzarella tend to be higher in lactose.
I read someone that nearly half of Italians are lactose intolerant. That didn’t stop them from having a robust food culture around cheese. I’m lactose intolerant, and I have no trouble eating sheep and goat’s milk products, or any cow’s milk hard cheeses. I’m fine with yogurt and butter. Even in Asia, dairy products are part of Mongolian cuisine and certain regional Chinese cuisines.
I’m not aware of any such distinction being made clinically, though I’m a psychiatrist and not a GP. If you’re intolerant to bovine milk as an adult you’ll be it to any mammalian milk, with reasonable levels of lactose (some species that fast while lactating, such as bears, have low lactose milks). Lactose is a simple disaccharide; a carbohydrate and not a peptide or protein so there’s no difference between species. Lactose from a human is the same as lactose from cattle (or their close relatives, sheep and goats) just as the fructose in a banana is the same as that in an apple. The levels of lactose doesn’t vary _that_ much between milks that humans encounter either; sheep milk is about as lactose-rich as that from cattle; roughly 5%, with goat milk being in the range of 3-4%. Human milk, incidentally, is around 7% (and bears 0.5% or so).
The details are going to depend on the agricultural system. So in Europe, perhaps half the farmland had to be left fallow every year, and you are going to be happy about having dairy cattle to exploit that land.
You probably don’t have to do that with rice in China. So guess where the lactose-tolerant people evolve! OTOH, I gather you could raise carp in flooded fields of rice, and even today the worlds aquaculture is dominated by China.
> is lactose intolerant to some degree
“to some degree” doesn’t always conflict with milk consumption; q.v. modern Japan. More importantly, cheese and yogurt pre-digest much of the lactose, as well as preserving the milk for longer. So lactose tolerance is not good predictor of dairy consumption.
> half the chicken population is male
Half of the _chick_ population is male, ditto newborn calves. If a society values eggs and dairy, the males are likely to be killed as soon as they’re identifiable. Which could get you some meat, but maybe not a lot. You might feed them longer for a bigger animal, but you might not, preferring to keep the food for your more productive females.
Wiki says that veal tends to be young male calves of dairy breeds. But veal doesn’t grow to adult size!
That is an expert job in the poultry industry, called chick sexer, to determine the sex of new born chicks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_sexing
In a premodern (or modernizing rural society today), where the chickens are not intensively kept in barns and fed on corn/soy, would it have been worthwhile for the farmers to get rid of male chicks at birth? Or would it have been more economical for them to wander around feeding themselves till they’re a decent size to eat? Unlike modern chicken farms with housing, feed, veterinary costs etc., it’s not like people in a premodern village are necessarily going to be *investing* that much in their chickens.
Just to add to Hector, it’s worth noting that chickens are predators that are/were kept for pest control as well as food. You don’t expect to get much food out of the cat and her kittens who’ve moved into your barn, either, but you aren’t going to actively go out of your way to get rid of them.
For that matter, half the cattle in a natural population aren’t going to be producing milk anyway, so unless you’re actively using them for traction, or have religious or cultural reasons not to, you might as well use them for meat (or more realistically, keep them around as a form of wealth whose ultimate value is conversion into meat).
In India, in Hindu areas most male calves were commonly starved to death after birth, and the bodies sold to leather-workers or communities with no prohibition on eating beef.
@PeterT,
That sounds right, particularly in urban or semi-urban areas with no real need for animal traction (or as a method to deal with excess bulls). In rural areas though cows would have been (and continue to be) very useful for agricultural labor, it’s not like the *primary* role of the cow is for milk. Cattle are raised extensively in the parts of South Asia where people are lactose intolerant after all (and are also raised in portions of Africa where milk isn’t a major parts of the diet: like in South Asia, some African ethnic groups are lactose tolerant, others are not).
I’d also suspect a lot of those cows don’t produce much, or any, surplus milk, beyond what’s needed to feed calves.
I grew up on a cattle farm with probably hundreds of meat-breed cows, but we only ever milked the two or three that were specifically-bred dairy cattle.
@isikyus,
Yes, and for that matter, most “unimproved” chickens (i.e. not subjected to 20th c selective breeding) aren’t going to lay eggs every day either.
I’ve lived in a place with “premodern” style (like I’ve said before, I was a Peace Corps worker in an East African country for 3 years) and while there were chickens everywhere, also plenty of ducks, Muscovey ducks and sometimes turkeys, geese or guineafowl, I wouldn’t say that eggs were a major part of the diet. Chickens were around either for eating on special occasions, or for eating if you were a little higher up the income scale, or as a small investment that could be easily converted into cash. If someone needed to see the doctor they’d take their chickens on the minibus with them to the nearest town, quickly sell them there and then use the cash.
Old joke; when does a poor Jew eat chicken? When he’s sick or the chicken is. Obviously applied to others too.
Yea, i knew a poor family (again, in Africa) who was gifted a piglet but couldn’t afford to feed it, so they waited till it died of starvation and then ate it (it was small enough, having, you know, starved, that it just about fed four people for a meal).
Why did they wait for it to starve? Why not slaughter it immediately?
Why did they wait for it to starve? Why not slaughter it immediately?
@Bullseye,
I think they were hedging their bets, waiting to see if the pig would be able to forage for itself and survive without being fed (it wasn’t).
If I *do* keep a sheep, goat, or pig, what happens when I slaughter it? I now have more meat on my hands than my household can probably eat before it really, *really* spoils. But there isn’t much of a market for me to sell it. It’s not like I have time to go around the whole village looking to see who wants to buy a packet of meat. Do I just banquet my neighbors with it and expect reciprocity later?
Yes to the banqueting. But you can also make dried meet products like sausages and jerky.
A lot of the time, you’d salt most of it for preservation.
That or smoked it in the eaves of your un-chimneyed thatch.
Also, the meat would have been *heavily* salted, so would keep much better than modern salted meat products. I recall reading that salted meat often needed soaking to make it palatable before actually cooking with it.
I recall reading that salted meat often needed soaking to make it palatable before actually cooking with it.
Right, when I lived in Africa the salt fish sold in markets was definitely inedible without long soaking.
That said, they also dried meat, fish and even shellfish *without* salting (maybe the climate in that region was just arid enough to do that), and I definitely ate a lot of that stuff with no ill effect. Again, you had to really know what you were doing, though: the insufficiently dried meat or fish turned out quite disgusting.
“salted meat often needed soaking”
Yes. Butter, too; historical salted butter had like 10x the salt of modern salt butter.
Unsalted dried meat didn’t need soaking for salt, but might for softening up. (Or just toss it into stew.) I’ve had dried horse and goat in Chile, they were pretty bland; jerky is tasty due to various additives (and modern store jerky is probably often a bit too moist for really long keeping.) Basque salt cod was a big improvement over Norse dried cod.
My impression is that salted meat was so salty you needed to soak and change the water even before adding it to a large stew, though I suppose that could depend on the meat/stew ratio. Presumably at low levels you could just let the meat salt the stew by itself.
Basque salt cod was a big improvement over Norse dried cod.
I much preferred unsalted dried fish (mostly freshwater fish, in my experience) to salt fish (mostly salted), but each person to his/her taste, i guess.
I think in antiquity salt was expensive enough that salting meat was an option only for relatively well-off people, not the average peasant. Drying seems more plausible.
Hmm, your comment made me wonder about something.
In the past plenty of ‘not-good’ governments from Ancient Regime France to the British Raj had salt taxes. Did those increase food insecurity by making it more expensive to store meat long term? If so, salt taxes might have been even worse than they look like at first glance.
However, I doubt that such an effect had ever been studied. Even, so it might have been small.
Admittedly I don’t have a strong source for this, but I recall hearing that salt wasn’t supremely expensive (per kg) in pre-industrial times, and the reason it was economically significant was *because* peasants were getting through a lot of it for food preservation
I’ve also read that salt wasn’t expensive.
I’ve read that soldiers getting paid in salt is implausible because salt was too cheap; there are sources saying how much money soldiers got paid, and giving them them that much worth of salt would mean carrying around unreasonable amounts of salt.
I’ve also read that, while they didn’t really salt the earth at Carthage, some Near Eastern armies really did salt the earth of their enemies, which would be crazy if salt were expensive. (Also, they salted cities rather than farmland, and spread weed seeds along with the salt; apparently the salt promoted weed growth.)
Drying and salting are pretty effective for preserving meat, although they’re going to depend on climate and on the availability of salt respectively. (WHen I lived in an area, without refrigeration, where people routinely dried meat as a form of preservation, it was a semiarid and fairly predictable climate where that really worked).
There’s also smoking. I gather that the process of turning meat into sausages might entail curing that is a bit more efficient than trying to do it with fillets.
@Isator,
right, although smoking is probably going to require a fair amount of fuel (and I think works better for some kinds of meat/fish than others).
“smoking is probably going to require a fair amount of fuel”
Might not require any extra fuel, if you’re already running a hearthfire for cooking or general warmth. Hang the meat from the rafters, it gets smoked by the smoke you’re already generating.
Might not require any extra fuel, if you’re already running a hearthfire for cooking or general warmth.
Oh yea, I guess I was thinking more of, e.g. commercial fishermen smoking large quantities for sale.
Drying and salting works, obviously not forever but usually for a bit. But meat is often a fairly seasonal thing (IE: You eat meat in autumn and winter after the slaughter, still a bit of a thing there in christmas feasts who are often fairly meat-heavy)
One study looked at manor records which recorded animals slaughtered. They killed them progressively through the late autumn/winter as feed stocks declined. So the meat would be eaten fresh or preserved for a short time.
If you can find accounts of pig slaughtering in Eastern Europe – it was regularly done within living memory – you tend to find two things. One is it’ll be done in winter to drag out how long you have before spoilage, but also a not-small amount of your output is going to be sausage and smoked meats that are shelf-stable (ish).
So my off-the-cuff answer, porting some modern practices backwards (a cardinal sin of history but oh well): you have cuts of meat that for whatever reason cannot be preserved. With these, you banquet your neighbors and feast yourself. Everything you can you process into sausage, smoke, or (in regions and periods where this is economically viable) salt. The butcher (this is the biggest modernism – there’s a skilled butcher you call in to slaughter your pig) takes some portion of the fresh meat as well as the preserved meats in payment.
Soft sausages will spoil fast-ish, but hard sausages are remarkably long lasting and we get plentiful reference to them so I can only assume that they form a fairly sizable proportion of your peasant’s meat consumption (supplemented by the occasional low game they take).
“The butcher (this is the biggest modernism – there’s a skilled butcher you call in to slaughter your pig) takes some portion of the fresh meat as well as the preserved meats in payment.”
Some places still don’t do this. My sister called up a woman in Texas about ten years ago and the woman said something like, “Just a minute, my husband is slaughtering the pig and he’s doing it wrong.”
Chickens were not primarily raised for their meat but for their eggs. Pre-WW2 chickens were small and didn’t have a lot of meat. When reading 19th century books you often come across a passage reading something like “he sat at a table in the local inn and ate a chicken”. A chicken back then was good enough for a single meal, no more.
Rabbits would be likely hunted, but hunting is time consuming and the result is uncertain. That is, even if we assume that the peasants had the right to hunt, which was not always the case.
I was about to post something similar — not to overlook poultry and fish. Beans/legumes and cabbage were a staple foodstuff, I gather; later we’d see potatoes.
I don’t think it is quite right to say “but there is a reason that the moment industrial life in cities became available, millions of peasants flocked to it.” Those reason included a variety of factors that very much forced peasants off of their lands. Industrialization and mechanized farming changed the agricultural landscape, enclosure destroyed the peasant way of life, and the central governments of rapidly industrializing countries violently forced peasants into urban factories. It was absolutely not the case that peasants en masse jumped at the opportunity to leave their farms for city life.
Peasants flocked to the cities even in countries with no coercion, like Sweden (which had engaged in extensive land reform empowering the peasants) and the Northern United States (where the vast majority of the population – white people – was not coerced, and had plentiful land). The United States industrialized more slowly than the United Kingdom but this was largely because of the South; the Northeast industrialized almost as fast as the UK in the middle of the 19th century, and was even with Britain by 1890, both standing at 60%.
Isn’t it the case that resource-rich peasant populations tend to have an over-replacement birth rate, which leads to a population surplus that has to go somewhere, which is normally to the cities (some could go to the frontier, but in practice not all)?
So rural areas basically export population, since before railways population was basically the only good rural areas could produce that was worth shipping long distances.
Before railways, long-distance shipping was based on …ships, loosely defined. This included a wide variety of things:
– loose timber floated downstream with the spring flood (any timber left high and dry would stay there until next year; the operation also made the river temporarily unnavigable, especially if it should happen to create a logjam);
– more valuable timber transported as rafts and disposable ships (e.g. belyana), generally also carrying other goods downriver;
– ordinary riverboats going in both directions (whether towed, rowed, punted, or sailed);
– unintuitively to us, most seagoing ships until the steam&steel era were tiny by modern standards and could go quite far up the major rivers;
– largely starting in the 17th and accelerating in the 18th centuries, improvements to riverine navigation and completely new canals were built in a number of areas in Western Europe.
In terms of cost per ton-km, railways have never beaten riverine transportation of the same age. Their higher speed and better coverage was what moved most traffic flows over. (Then very much the same pattern happened from railways to lorries.)
So we have a bunch of ancient shipwrecks and medieval cargo manifests (and surviving artwork) showing that a bunch of wine (and in the Mediterranean, olive oil) was shipped around, in addition to cloth, cereals, and a variety of other things.
To the first point: a “population surplus” has always existed, almost from the start of agriculture. However, before the 18th century, it used to sit in the villages, far from resources and from each other. As will be explained in the coming weeks (and has been mentioned in various posts, including a Rings of Power one), to a crude approximation, men make food and women make cloth. To a very large extent, this “exchange” closes within the household; that’s what subsistence is. The new development was marketization and monetization reaching the point where it peasants would routinely interface with it (with both food and, due to the putting-out system, with cloth). This made possible for the two industries to finally not be in the same place; suddenly there turned out to be a “surplus population” that, and the stream of “surplus food” it ate, moved to the cities and paid for that with a stream of manufactured goods. That the total population also increased at the same time is something of a distraction to understanding this, but is a natural result of more efficient manufacturing, as well as technological advances, making agriculture more efficient per acre while simultaneously making it possible to pull under cultivation land previously unsuitable for that.
Peasants did move – to new arable areas opening up, to towns, into the mobile occupations. EG, one study in Yorkshire showed that after the Black Death created a lot of vacant tenancies in richer areas, marginal farms were abandoned en masse as people moved to take advantage (it used to be thought the poorer villages were depopulated by the plague).
Resource-rich peasant populations have population booms, but this doesn’t always translate to urbanization. Russia had fast population growth in the 19th century, but urbanization remained low. There was a frontier in Siberia, but not a lot of Russians lived there – and at any rate, the US both had a frontier too and was much better at building infrastructure to settle it in the 19th century, and its urbanization rate ex-South was respectable.
Much depends on wages and the ability of the urban economy to attract migrants. The US had very high wages – the wages of urban Northern workers in the middle of the 19th century were even with those of British workers, and by 1900 they were higher. Swedish, German, and French urban wages were respectable enough to attract rural migrants without coercion, even if they were much lower than American wages. Eastern European ones generally weren’t. (In 1900, Sweden was 30% urban, the US ex-South was 49%, Russia was 14%.)
“Much depends on wages and the ability of the urban economy to attract migrants.”
The other issue is how fluid is the population of potential migrants? If they all want to stay on the family farm, no attraction might get them to move. Because during a famine, wage labourers in a town are probably the group whose families starve first.
OTOH, if life cycle servants are a thing, they might as well spend that phase of their life cycle serving someone in a town. That kind of population is probably going to be a lot more mobile, which might be very helpful if you want an Industrial Revolution or to colonise North America.
Of course, in the worst case, you can always buy slaves. They might not be cheap, but at least you don’t have to persuade them to come.
What famine? The United States has never had since it came to exist as a country. Sweden had one in 1867, which led to widespread emigration, but did not lead to mass starvation (cf. the famines under Louis XIV in 1693-94 and 1709, which together killed around 10% of France’s population).
“The United States has never had since it came to exist as a country.”
The United States did not exist as a country until the brink of the Industrial Revolution, so it is not a good example of a preindustrial peasant society. Especially as land acquired from the Indians was available so cheaply. Maybe they were not making any more land in the United States, but they were certainly seizing it from the Indians. That is not something to be relied on in the Old World agricultural heartland.
The US has had a number of famines – among Indian populations deprived of land and food.
This is quite true, but here, you must note that a “peasant” in Northern Sweden, or for that matter, in Finland or Norway, is not quite the same as elsewhere in Europe: most land in those areas was owned by peasants, but this didn’t mean that the society was equal. Instead, the land-owning peasantry formed the upper-class of the local society. Even in the areas with least inequality, perhaps every third adult man would be an independent landholder at some point of their life, and perhaps 5 percent of the total population were landowners at any one time. Most men would be crofters, servants or military personnel (or children and elderly people who had handed over the reins to the younger couple of the family). Women, of course, would be mostly deriving their social position from their husbands or fathers, or they would be servants.
In any rural community, the heads of the largest farms formed practically sort of a gentry: the big men, the “fathers of municipality”, as they were called, decided the local matters quite freely, even after the labour movement and equal municipal vote equalised the political possibilities. Such farm-owners could often recount their family history at least to the 16th century, and were (and still are) as self-consciously proud as any nobleman. On the other hand, bad farms changed hands surprisingly often, providing some possibility of social advancement.
As there was never enough land, there was a permanent problem of a growing underclass, people who didn’t inherit land, and these would move to the cities. The farmer would not move to a city. It would be the kids of a crofter or cotter who would do that.
“The peasant way of life”? You mean being slaves for buck-toothed, horse-faced, cousin-loving inbreds (so-called “aristocrats”). It’s sickening that people who had the good fortune to have been born in modern industrialized (relatively) free republics romanticize these horrific periods in history.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
To be fair, a lot of them, historically, were slaves to Roman senators, or Greek (and especially Spartan) aristocrats. Or, for that matter, similarly subservient to the gentry of the early US, if not always outright enslaved.
Um no. We never had a peasantry here. We had free farmers and slaves. Tenants were a rarely because there was land everywhere
“We never had a peasantry here. We had free farmers and slaves. Tenants were a rarely because there was land everywhere”
a) There isn’t a fixed legal definition of “peasant” but historically the peasantry has generally included at least some free farmers who own the land they farm (often under some sort of feudal obligation), as well as tenant farmers and serfs. “Peasant” isn’t just another word for “tenant”.
b) Even confining “peasant” to mean “landless farmer”, then, yes, of course the US had a peasantry. Tenantry was less common in the US than in some other countries, but it still existed on a large scale. And, notoriously, there were a lot of sharecroppers.
“You mean being slaves for buck-toothed, horse-faced, cousin-loving inbreds (so-called “aristocrats”).”
Slaves were considerably worse off than peasants. And the second half of that sentence looks more like an expression of racial hatred than anything else.
While they are exaggering (serfdom and slavery are a bit different despite the similarities) and being inflamatory (aristocracts were not inbred) they have a point. The peaseant way of life is nothing to envy.
And I very much agree that romatisation they complain about it is exists and it is very wrong.
I agree that it’s not something to envy. However, in the context of the phrase being responded to, I think it’s worth considering that at the time it was the only way of life that the people would have known, and they would have some sense of not only their security but their identity and dignity invested in it (not least if it’s generational property and there’s a sense of custody for a legacy). In that regard, one can see how being forcibly disrupted from it could be traumatic.
Even in the middle ages with a lifetime of being told “this is the way it’s always been and always will” there were egalitarians. John Ball in England preached that everyone was equal, drew massive crowds, and is credited as a major inspiration for the peasant’s revolt of 1381. France had the Jacquerie.
Towns didn’t just draw those looking for economic mobility, but also those who resented being told what to do by some twit on a horse solely because the twit’s great-grandfather had been on the winning side at the battle of IDontCare. (Of course when they got to the town they’d then be told what to do by their master, the guild master, and the town oligarchs, but at least they could aspire to those positions themselves.)
Have you ever looked at, o, say, the family trees of, o say, the Hapsburgs?
Agreed.
Hapsburgs were royalty not aristocracy that is a separate social class. And that is not just a nitpick, but relevant here. Since interclass marriage is frowned up the only peole royals can marry are other royals with all the gentic problems it implies.
“Since interclass marriage is frowned on the only people royals can marry are other royals with all the genetic problems it implies.”
I don’t think this has ever been the case in any royal family in history. Certainly not in any European royal family in history. Sure, royals tended to marry other royals – dynastic marriages and so on – but the idea that a marriage between a royal and an aristocrat was frowned on is nuts.
Let’s take a mediaeval European monarch at random. Henry II of England (r 1154-1189). He inherited through his mother, Matilda, but his father wasn’t royal – he was Count of Anjou. He married Eleanor of Aquitaine – she wasn’t royal, she was the duchess of Aquitaine.
His children? Henry the Young married the daughter of the King of France, who is definitely royal, Eleanor married the King of Castile, Joan married the King of Sicily, and Richard married a princess of Navarre, but Matilda married the duke of Saxony, Geoffrey married the duchess of Brittany, and John married a couple of countesses. No obvious rule against aristocratic spouses there.
It’s almost a mediaeval and early modern cliche that the king is surrounded by aristocratic courtiers trying to marry him off to their daughters and become grandfathers of a future monarch.
I was going off this case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie,_Duchess_of_Hohenberg#Courtship_with_Franz_Ferdinand
It is possible that this was only Hapsburg thing and I assumed to be the case in general. And to be clear I have seen this marriage described as scandalous outside of wikipedia. Ease of access.
I mean, the Hapsburgs, like the even more extreme Ptolemies, are famous for being unusually intense cases of inbreeding. If it was normal they wouldn’t be so famous for it.
https://net.lib.byu.edu/estu/wwi/bio/s/sophie-c.html
that and we are talking about two different periods so perhaps this idea appeared later
“It is possible that this was only Hapsburg thing and I assumed to be the case in general.”
This was only a Habsburg thing, and specifically only a Habsburg heir-to-the-imperial-throne thing. Franz Ferdinand was the nephew and heir to Franz Josef I.
But Franz Ferdinand’s younger sister Margarete was not the heir to the throne and therefore when she married a duke of Wurttemburg it caused no issues whatsoever – his other sister Maria got engaged to a duke in Bavaria without any problems (the wedding didn’t happen, for other reasons, but the family didn’t disapprove of him on grounds of rank).
“Have you ever looked at, o, say, the family trees of, o say, the Hapsburgs?”
Have you ever looked at o say the family trees of o say any other royal houses. Yes I have o say looked at the family tree of o say the Habsburgs which is how come I know how to spell o say “Habsburg”.
The timing on that’s mostly wrong – most enclosure happened long before industrialization in the late 18th/early 19th century, and the big wave of industrialization beyond textiles was actually in the mid-19th century (nearly 70 years after the last of the British enclosure acts).
The “central governments” didn’t force them into factories – they didn’t have the state capacity for that. They moved into factories because cities offered more prospects than being a landless farm laborer (or the 2nd/3rd son of a small-time farmer who stood to inherit little).
Correct, but part of what enclosure acts and similar land reform acts did was change the distribution: It became harder to subsist as a mariginal landless/with only limited amount of land rural worker or cottar. Thus probably indirectly making city life more attractive. (but likely the incitement worked the other way: The cheap labour forced off the farms helped induce industrialization, not industrialization making people leave the farms, at least in the early stages)
Much effort has been spent over the last few centuries to romanticize our collective ancestors’ long tradition of rural immiseration and incest, but in fact in every human generation people have been willing to die fleeing it.
Well, they did not flock to cities for a better life, at least for the first several decades of industrialisation in Britain. There was a marked decrease in most indicators of standard of living c1820-1850 (the US experience may have been quite different).
Not only did infant mortality fall dramatically in the 18th and early 19th centuries in the UK, but also it fell especially in the cities, with London life expectancy converging with that of the rest of Britain by 1840 after previously being markedly worse.
http://www.localpopulationstudies.org.uk/PDF/LPS77/Article_1_Woods_pp12-23.pdf
Floud et al (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/changing-body/DE3BB0E3577205AC26823CF2120D8B7E) look at a wide range of indicators. Their broad conclusion for the UK is that “the average height of the population and average levels of life expectancy rose between circa 1750 and 1820, followed by a period of stagnation or decline, and then further improvement from the 1850s onwards”. They go on to note that the average covers a population where ten per cent of the population had a diet inadequate in all respects and another 40 per cent had a diet deficient in proteins, vitamins and minerals.
The marked decrease I refer to was concentrated in the new industrial cities – Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield and similar.
On infant mortality, they don’t see any major changes until after the 1850s.
“the average height of the population and average levels of life expectancy rose between circa 1750 and 1820, followed by a period of stagnation or decline, and then further improvement from the 1850s onwards”.
That tells you about their health, not their standard of living. And since infectious diseases were a major cause of ill-health, and found it easier to infect people in urban environments, urbanisation should go together with ill-health, even if it did make people richer.
Britons who moved to the Caribbean were richer than those who stayed at home by all accounts – but they were still more likely to die of something infectious. But not because they had been forced to move there and were being terribly oppressed.
[Height] tells you about their health, not their standard of living.
It’s largely set by early nutrition – and food (quantity and quality) is a basic measure of standard of living – more so when its by far the biggest item in the household budget.
“[Height] tells you about their health, not their standard of living.
It’s largely set by early nutrition – and food (quantity and quality) is a basic measure of standard of living – more so when its by far the biggest item in the household budget.”
Largely but not entirely. The other major factor is health.
Rich children brought up in cities full of poor people and with poor healthcare eat well, and grow taller than their poor neighbours. But they also catch infections from their poor neighbours, and despite good food end up shorter than children who have good food AND safety from infections.
What about the health care costs ?
Most of it was internal to the peasant society I guess, but was it statistically insignificant as would suggest the fact that you don’t mention them ?
The typical commoner did not ever consume health care. Doctors were only for the rich, well into the Industrial Revolution. The People’s Budget era was revolutionary for its time for habituating the working class to consume any health care, even for a fee – and that was the system decried as so unequal and difficult to access in the Beveridge Report that it led to the impetus to establish the National Health Service.
IIRC healthcare was one of those things that just didn’t work the same as today. Medicinal remedies would often fall along culinary lines(paraphrasing from a 18th century cuisine youtuber so take with a grain of salt given the different time period), such as mixing up remedies with alcohol, and what spices and aromatics you might have available. So if you have an illness, you might be assigned to eat nothing but thin soup for a couple of days, with small beer to supplement. But as you can imagine, separating out the cost of that sort of health care from normal household budget becomes difficult. How exactly do you account for the cost of an herbal tea made from flowers gathered in the meadow?
The Going Medieval blog(recommended by Bret, with delightfully thorough descriptions of medieval sexuality) has a post on the role of the church in healthcare. Specifically that prior to the Black Death, healthcare other than home remedies would have involved barbers for surgical matters, midwives and such for women’s health, apothecaries and the associated guilds in larger towns, and importantly monasteries filling in the role of a hospital. The post seems to imply that prior to Black Death, healthcare from the barbers, midwives, and apothecaries was at least fairly affordable, and healthcare from monasteries was free(I don’t actually know what the finances would have looked like. I am vaguely aware that monasteries raised money through selling products, famously alcohol, and got donations, particularly from nobility. If there was a system to expect donations from sick people who could pay and write off the poor people as doing charity for them, I don’t know. Not a historian.)
I suppose I would expect it to be a portion of the respectability basket, but healthcare that couldn’t be produced at the home(ie traded for or such) makes a small enough portion that it isn’t worth commenting on.
https://going-medieval.com/2017/05/26/on-medieval-healthcare-and-american-barbarism/
I think, generally, health care was ineffective enough to simply be lumped into the basket of ‘respectability goods’? Bret does talk about contraceptive and abortifacient treatments in the previous post, so he’ll definitely talk about health care when it’s significant.
Prior to maybe the 1800s, nobody knew anything about biology or medicine and most ‘treatments’ were worse than doing nothing, anyways.
I know the point you are trying to make, but it’s a severe exaggeration. Pharmacopeias, the reference works of pharmaceutically active substances, have been known for literal millennia – and though they did not have the refining techniques we do, a lot of the basic findings were not inaccurate even when they got filtered through the humor theory. And Avicenna’s The Canon of Medicine was considered the premier medical treatise across Europe and Near East for about 600 years for good reason.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2642865/
Some of the quotes from that Canon.
That article also lists his 7 rules for assessing potentially medicinal substances, such as: ensuring that the effects are consistent, trying to distinguish between treating the disease vs. treating its symptoms, recommendations for calculating the dosage and a warning to be careful about directly transferring results from animal testing to humans! I.e.
Of course, the whole “hot and cold ailments” thing was unfortunate, but in the absence of microscopes (which themselves required the kind of advancements in glassware that required centuries-long spillover of “excess” economic productivity, and probably could not have been shortcut without anything short of a royal fiat) it’s hard to think of how a contemporary could have had improved on it. As mentioned above, the big issue for peasants specifically is that anybody learned enough to have studied the Codex would have generally been well out of their reach.
P.S. As for “biology” – besides quotes from the canon (including fairly detailed description of how, say, a bladder works) there were dissections – often banned, of course, but the rules were getting loosened well before the 1800s. Dr. Janega’s Going Medieval blog, linked above, itself links to the UK’s Science Museum, which provides this illustrative quote.
I seem to recall a comment from Adam Smith somewhere that most people paid more attention to the advise of the village wise woman than to any doctor; and that they were right to do so.
And Sir Hans Sloane, then the president of the Royal College of Physicians, sent his niece to be treated by a bone-setting woman known as “Crazy Sally”: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/crazy-sally-mapp-bone-setting.
The Roman military knew enormous amount of how to treat wounds, injuries and related illness. They even washed their instruments, and used a specially concocted very strong vinegar to wash the wounds with.
The Moors and Jews of Andalusia — Cordorba! — knew a very great deal, as did those of Middle-eastern kingdoms, including how to treat injuries and war wounds.
The herbal knowledge of them all was extensive and retained through out centuries.
What we have become used to knowing since microscopes and electric lighting and the development of antibiotics, vaccines and radiology — and then the related treatments for polio, leukemia, heart disease, the eradication of measles, tuberculosis etc. is an extremely tiny window n the time of medicine, which magarats are determined to rid us of.
Of course, recourse to the medical expertise of medieval Spain and the medieval middle east was limited.
Health care would have been unpaid labour by the women of the household, mostly, and taken out of women’s leisure time.
(If you’ve read LotR, Éowyn being assigned the task to care for her sickly (mind-controlled) uncle, that was rather typical of pre-modern societies.)
Midwifery was rather more professionalized, pretty early on (if the fairytales about the fair folk paying for human midwives are anything to go by), but was also women’s labour, and thus likely paid badly, if modern patterns are anything to judge by. I expect that a village midwife needed a day job to get by, even if the pay was relatively generous, seeing as your average village wouldn’t have a birth per day.
So, likely not any significant percentage of the household income. Midwifery was required only once per year, if that, bone-setting only every couple of years (if at all – your average village may not have had anyone with expertise in that),and anything else, you wouldn’t have bothered finding a professional for.
Nuns and monks provided free healthcare to the poor, but the bulk of the people found in those hospitals would have been people whose relatives weren’t able or willing to care for them, seeing as the bulk of medical knowledge was about herbal medicines, which could easily be applied at home.
This depends on where one lived. There are quite a few surviving account books of various midwives from various European locations throughout, particularly from the 16th C on. Many of them were so busy all the time they couldn’t deal with the demands. Beyond that too, those who could afford it, often brought a well-reputed midwife to live in the household as pregnancy came close to term.
One good report is here:
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/oa_edited_volume/chapter/3628847
Highly trained doctors backed by a mass of science, drugs, and tools, didn’t exist.
I figure effective healthcare was midwifery (up to a point), setting broken bones, tooth pulling, some minor surgeries, maybe herbs that would reduce fever or pain. Most of which takes some skill and training, but commensurate with the peasant community and economy.
Really rich people could pay a lot for bloodletting and exotic medicines and doctors very well educated in old books, none of which necessarily helped them in any way and might well hurt the patients instead.
I suspect the biggest healthcare expense was simple _nursing_: can you take care of a person too sick to work for a while, making food they can eat and washing/moving their body, and keeping them warm or cool as needed, until they get better?
No antibiotics, no blood transfusions, no X-rays or MRI machines, no dialysis, no heart surgery; C-sections, but only to save a baby, you wouldn’t expect the mother to survive; very limited care for premature births… A lot of the drivers of expensive modern medicine aren’t there.
Smallpox inoculation could be done in the community, and would have been pretty useful, but its history is obscure; earliest clear written description is from 1500s China, but slaves taken from West Africa in the 1700s knew how to do it.
This may be more detail than is practical or useful for this purpose, but I’m curious whether the modeling in this post takes into account:
1) Differences in average size prior to the last 100 years or so. In pre-modern western Europe average height swung from a bit shorter than it is today to drastically shorter than it is today, which in turn would have an effect on calorie requirements.
2) I skimmed the FAO report enough to understand that their modeling for teenagers takes into account the caloric needs involved in physically getting bigger, but it’s not clear to me whether the modeling in this post incorporates that. That 14yo boy isn’t going to get to the point where he matches his dad’s caloric needs unless at some point he’s eating more than is required to stay the size he currently is.
3) Or is all of this a dog chasing its own tail, in that (of course) one of the primary reasons people were shorter in the past was the effect of food insecurity on physical development, and thereby the inadequacy of historical caloric availability to maximize human stature (and thereby establish even higher caloric needs) is already priced in to the modeling when it comes to this sort of thing.
Yep, 3). It was not infrequently observed that e.g. nobles were in general meaningfully taller than peasants, because they ate a diet that was more varied, included more (read: any) meat, and never calorically limited.
Conspicuous consumption/leisure:
– I wear embroidered velvet, it took several labor-years to make.
– I wear jewelry with precious metals, it took several labor-years to make.
– I am tall, my childhood diet could have fed let’s say three peasant children instead.
– I know courtly etiquette, I can extemporize poetry, I could spend my adolescence learning these things as opposed to engaging in productive work (and so could my mentor).
The height difference would be exaggerated due to the clothing worn at different levels.
The top hat/bowler/flat cap in England is an example outside of this period, but you can also look at other hats worn by nobility. Also heels (ostensibly useful for cavalry, but worn all the time anyway by men).
“The height difference would be exaggerated due to the clothing worn at different levels.”
I have never come across this suggestion before – is it your own, or is it a commonplace of fashion history?
What other upper-class high hats are there?
Referring to Wikipedia, Koreans had something called a gat which was originally for nobles only, and European aristocratic women had the hennin, the pointed “rapunzel hat”. Bishops still have mitres. I’m not sure whether the capotain – the “pilgrim hat” – was particularly upper class. The shako, the busby and the bearskin were for ordinary soldiers, not just officers.
But there are lots of upper-class low hats too, like the Tudor bonnet; and the top hat was originally worn by all classes (even policemen). I suspect the lower classes generally wore lower hats because a smaller hat is easier to make, easier to store, and substantially cheaper.
Interesting that wealthy (any) men stopped wearing lace once it could be mechanically produced and no longer a handicraft with manually manipulated threads.
Yes, the primary reason people are shorter than modern Westerners is food insecurity. Of notes:
1. In WW2, American soldiers were noticeably taller than British and Continental European soldiers. Subsequently Northern European heights overtook American heights as the region converged with American wealth levels and got better* nutrition.
2. Childhood stunting remains a serious problem in developing countries today, and is especially bad in India relative to its wealth level; there’s an entire debate in India over the magnitude of and the origin of the problem, but you’d be laughed out of the room if you said there’s no food insecurity there. (The political battle line: the left says that this is because of inequality and castism, as Forward Caste politicians enforce their standards on SC/ST and OBC**, those standards including lacto-vegetarianism but no eggs, which means that children only get high-quality protein if there’s a working refrigerator with reliable electricity. The right says either that the problem is exaggerated or that it comes from worm infections due to open defecation, and Brahmin and Brahmin-assimilated dietary standards are in either case not to blame.)
3. Northern Europeans were on average taller than Southern Europeans in the Early Modern Era, due to higher meat consumption. The Early Modern British and Dutch diet of urban commoners had disgusting quantities of bacon already. This is reflected in Robert Allen’s respectability basket, which assumes a baseline of meat consumption that was just not there in, for example, Japan, or even Southern Europe. (Allen also references direct caloric consumption levels in the 18th century in which Britain’s was somewhat higher than France’s in his original Great Divergence paper.)
*Better in the sense of nutrients, not necessarily flavor, judging by how tall Swedes are.
**If you don’t know what these acronyms are, Google them and do not @ me with your opinions about an issue you just heard about.
(The political battle line: the left says that this is because of inequality and castism, as Forward Caste politicians enforce their standards on SC/ST and OBC**, those standards including lacto-vegetarianism but no eggs, which means that children only get high-quality protein if there’s a working refrigerator with reliable electricity. The right says either that the problem is exaggerated or that it comes from worm infections due to open defecation, and Brahmin and Brahmin-assimilated dietary standards are in either case not to blame.)
This is a pretty good summary, but it’s worth pointing out that the “left” criticism here is obviously correct (it’s not complete, but it’s certainly more correct than the ‘right wing’ side).
protein consumption levels in India today are really shockingly low.
background for other readers: SC, ST and OBC stand for Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and Other Backward Caste respectivly.
It is correct, with one annoying exception: the common left criticism also holds that the proportion of stunting in India is increasing due to escalating imposition of upper-caste nutrition standards under Hindutva; in fact the proportion of stunting in India is decreasing, it’s just at an absolute level that’s worse than Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the more functional but still poorer than India parts of East and West Africa.
@Alon,
Yes, when I said “not complete” i meant that South Asian diets could also be much better, independent of eating more animal foods, if they switched to growing/eating soybeans instead of their traditional legumes. Soybeans are the richest source of plant protein that’s grown at scale, by far, and i think are the most efficient way to produce protein per land area. (As a side effect that would make animal protein cheaper as well since soy is widely used as an animal feed).
Vegetarianism is decreasing in India today, i think the last government survey data I saw indicated its gone from 29% in 2011 to 25% in 2021 or so. It’s also linked to region, as much as to caste- in the northwestern states a large majority of the population is vegetarian. Even the non-vegetarians though tend to eat insufficient quantities of animal protein though, since it’s still relatively expensive.
Although IIRC, the postwar U.S. health and nutrition programs were promoted by Eisenhower largely because a high percentage of military recruits were still being rejected due to health issues. It’s similar to his promotion of the Interstate Highway System due to the inadequacy of the road system for cross-country military transport.
Asians have been shorter for a long time, but with modern meat intake they have caught up considerably.
“But in the past century, human heights have skyrocketed. Globally, humans grew an average of about 3 inches, but in South Korea, women grew an astounding 8 inches and men grew 6 inches on average. So what exactly happened?”
How South Koreans got so much taller
https://www.vox.com/videos/2023/2/23/23611947/world-south-koreans-people-getting-taller
@Alon Levy,
I’m not even sure refrigeration would help with the milk situation, since I would expect that lactose intolerance is also more common as you go down the caste hierarchy, although i’m not finding any citations immediately on that.
I think you’re really overthinking the intolerance thing.
1) Intolerance is an _adult_ condition; kids can drink milk.
2) Intolerance isn’t some “milk poisons you” thing; sensitivity varies, but people can commonly consume some safely. And the effects are some bloating and messy shits. A paper found evidence of high levels of milk consumption in the very early Neolithic, and postulated the main driver of adult tolerance was famines, times when diarrhea could actually be dangerous (especially if living on just milk.)
3) Lactose is removable (cheese loses it in whey separation, yogurt bacteria digest it, butter is mostly fat, ghee is basically all fat). You can consume lots of dairy without drinking or consuming much if any lactose.
Relatedly, Alon’s ‘only get high-quality protein if there’s a working refrigerator with reliable electricity.’ seems off: rural kids could drink fresh milk, others could eat somewhat longer-lived cheese or yogurt. That said, the high-caste imposition of egg avoidance is a problem.
Cheese is commonly consumed in India; the typical Indian restaurant in a rich country will offer many paneer dishes, for example. The articles I’ve read about how upper-caste standards worsen nutrition for the poor explicitly mention paneer as high-quality protein that depends on reliable refrigeration, in contrast with eggs, which are high-quality protein that keeps longer.
Yeah, paneer is a fresh cheese like cottage cheese, so wouldn’t last long, though I’d guess the acid at least extends its life somewhat compared to fresh milk. (Paneer doesn’t seem to have salt added, which would extend further.) Dunno about the logistics of poor Indian schools.
Kudos for the xkcd reference.
“Holding cash was remarkably risky: it could be stolen or lost and it provided a ready supply of easily extractable wealth for elites or the state to tax.”
Not that easily.
Treasures.
Yes, a number of the high profile treasures are treasures of Big Men – thousands of silver coins, gold coins, large gold and silver artefacts like Hoxne or Mildenhall treasures.
But then you have the ordinary treasures. Handfuls of small silver coins, worn in circulation.
Some of them were buried by artisans, merchants or soldiers – but many represent cash savings of subsistence peasants.
It is not easy to extract a buried treasure from a farmstead if its very existence is uncertain and deniable, let alone its exact location.
How widespread are treasures which were savings of subsistence peasants?
Note that most of the treasures of subsistence peasants were used as intended. Retrieved and spent by their owners at some point.
The point is that if peasants tended to have the kind of savings that made trying to extract them worthwhile, then either the local Big Man would- by increasing the rents if nothing else, and if the peasant didn’t pay they lost the rented land- or either bandits or a pillaging army would come through, and the difference to a peasant frequently was frequently somewhat academic. Yes there would be some, but note that buried treasure likely to be from peasant households was small- certainly nowhere near enough to cover a failed harvest.
I think the fact that people felt the need to do all that actually proves the post’s point.
Chris Wickham makes the point (in The Donkey and the Boat – a survey of the Mediterranean economies c900-1200) that the peasants know more than the landlord or tax-man about yields, the harvest and all the storage places. There’s usually a hidden surplus (which he traces through evidence of fine pottery). See also the peasant in Seven Samurai, with their hidden stores of rice and wine.
Perhaps relatedly, one of the two books titled _Against the Grain_ posited that cereal grains were needed for state formation because the transparency they provided a taxman, from the harvest coming ready all at once (determinate crops), vs. the more spread-out production of legumes (indeterminate).
It’s also interesting to compare these approaches with the tools that people *today* in less developed countries without reliable access to financial services use to invest surplus income in good years.
I’ve read about how some houses in Tunisian cities, for example, have unfinished floors. If a household does well in any given year and has a bit of money to spare, they don’t really have access to savings accounts. Cash is vulnerable to thievery in these low-security societies. So what they often do with surplus money is buy bricks. Good luck stealing bricks once they’re literally cemented on the house. If the household slowly accumulates bricks over 10 or 15 years, well, they have a second floor, and letting that out to a tenant is your “return on investment”.
Of course, this sort of “construction as a means of saving” approach emerged not in the context of a low-income society, but a lower-middle income society, where multi-room apartments built out of durable, industrially produced materials are within the purchasing power of the urban working class, and where the liquidity of the savings don’t really matter because you don’t imagine having to suddenly take out your investment to cover a famine.
So, not something that would have been useful to your average pre-modern peasant.
Interesting!
The financial return also depends on having tenants you can rent out to, which probably doesn’t apply to the average peasant village.
If the Smalls’ son makes it to adulthood and marries well, he might have a shot at doing better – inheriting all the land from his parents, potentially getting more with marriage.
A small family also has a higher chance of dying out, leaving the land to the lord/state. In any case, I think the point is made – and history bears out – that given the inability to *accumulate* wealth beyond subsistence/respectability level, a one-generation bump in land acreage washes out in the numbers.
Whenever a peasant household comes to include enough land to support a second household, the land will divide into two households the next time there are two potential inheritors.
But one will be senior, and take some rent from the other. One could – with careful management over several generations – accumulate enough to go from ordinary peasant to small landowner. Not common – but it happened.
Would the lord or state inherit? The nearest relative would probably be someone in a nearby peasant household.
There had already been a fairly exhaustive discussion of medieval inheritance law in the comments on the first part of this series. To quote a reply from Dr. Devereaux himself:
https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/#comment-84127
Note that there’s a kind of limit too: While there’s *some* use, you usually can’t use more land than you can actually work with your family, and a small family is limited in how much land it can work… (you can extend this to some extent, but not neccessarily easily)
But Bret said before that peasant families tend to have a high labor/land ratio.
And if you have more land than than you can plow/sow/harvest, there are options like pasture, fallow (for more fertility overall), hiring a laborer.
Also options like woodlots or digging a duck/fish pond, though given the effort needed to clear farmland in the first place I’m guessing that wouldn’t be a top option.
[rough annual kilograms of wheat]
This bit in the text is the only place where you explain that the kg are on an annual basis, and it’s easy to miss. As a matter of information presentation, it would be good to include “annual” in the charts at the appropriate place. Not a big deal, just one of those things that makes the post read more smoothly.
Will fix.
“The leap from “no one retires” to “not enough people can afford to retire” is a larger one than we often appreciate. ”
A thought that’s been on my mind recently is the aging demographics around the world and how retirement (or services to the elderly in general) is going to be harder to obtain due to insufficient young people to support all of the old people.
This series has been interesting in the comparison of “We try to have quite a few children because a good portion won’t make it to adulthood WITHOUT overextending ourselves” vs. the increasing amount of modern adults who have the belief (possibly justified) that ONE child is overextending themselves.
Standards for childrearing have increased massively. It’s no longer enough to keep them mostly-fed and mostly-clothed.
The standards is only one side of the equation. It’s ‘standards for childrearing’ vs ‘surplus resources available to do so’.
Resources have increased dramatically, but standards have as well. It would be interesting to see some comparisons of how that might have looked for your average working class family across time.
I think framing the challenge as ‘insufficient young people to support the old people’ isn’t quite right. The actual challenge is ‘insufficient economic growth to support the old people’, considering that we don’t expect people from retirement age onwards to contribute significantly to economic growth (notwithstanding that many still do, he says with grandparents providing childcare for a 2yr old), and that pension payments are inextricably linked to stocks and shares (and thus operate mainly on the principle of unlimited economic growth).
You’re right that part of the challenge around moribund economic growth is the reduction in population growth (more people means more economic activity after all). That’s one of the reasons most governments have encouraged immigration policies to plug the gap. But it’s far from the only challenge, and likely not even among the most significant.
Mostly, our modern conceptions of what a retirement should be are based on a number of *really significant* changes that delivered economic growth. Industrial revolution, colonialism, post-WW2 population boom, women entering the paid workforce, globalisation, the internet etc. To me, it seems like we’re running out of ‘big wins’ for productivity growth and so the concept of unlimited economic growth is looking shakier by the day (I’m not convinced ‘AI’ is the next big breakthrough, though I can understand why so many are hoping that it is). This is the biggest challenge in my mind, especially in the context of climate change.
Furthermore, there’s other issues like the increasing accumulation of wealth among the richest in society, who have a far lower average propensity to consume than the majority of the population, thus starving an economy of spending when it needs it to generate growth.
‘insufficient economic growth to support the old people’
But ‘economic growth’ isn’t some magical thing itself; it has to cash out in goods and services. And the real sticking point is services like nursing and health care, or at the other end of life childcare and teaching. These things have not enjoyed industrial productivity growth (q.v. Baumol’s cost disease), and basically do come down to “how many productive adults per dependent child or senior”.
You’re right of course, though services like healthcare and teaching aren’t primarily limited by absolute availability of workforce. They’re limited by uncompetitive remuneration, meaning the workforce that exists would rather do other jobs than become a nurse or a teacher (I have direct experience of this in relation to agency work in staff nursing at a general hospital). Often it’s not even to do with absolute pay, but to do with general working conditions (which end up in a cyclical downward spiral where short staffing prompts more people to quit or burn out). Or the other end of that journey, inadequate investment in training new nurses and teachers.
All of that comes down to investment, either government investment in a system like the NHS, or private investment in a system like the USA. Both of those are influenced primarily by economic growth (and secondarily by the distribution of wealth).
Combine that with the frankly staggering return on investment that both education and healthcare have on an economy (meaning those workers are generally more productive for an economy being nurses or teachers than they are doing most other jobs), and the economic argument is a bit of a non-issue really. The only real issue as far as I can see it is that the return on investment is only really likely to pay dividends in 10-20yrs time when better childhood health and education results in a fitter more capable workforce, and there doesn’t seem to be a single Western state that is consistently capable of delivering long-term national improvement programmes like that.
To delve a little deeper into the ‘it’s not about the total number of people’ argument. In 2002 (when the NHS in the UK was broadly functioning quite well), the NHS employed ~1.16 million people. That provided good service for ~11 million folks aged 60+, so we can take about 10% of the 60+ population as a reasonable stab at a sustainable figure. This proportion has remained roughly comparable to today (though NHS productivity per £ is lower, due to fragmentation, poor workforce morale, and a host of other issues). By 2050, we’re projected to have 19 million people over 60, presumably needing 1.9 million NHS employees at the productivity rate of 2002 (before decades of underinvestment). Finding an extra 700,000 people in a population that’s projected to be 78 million strong isn’t a difficult feat (especially seeing as there will be proportionally fewer requirements in children’s education, or children’s healthcare for that matter).
The challenge will be attracting people to come and work in healthcare. Not whether we’ll have enough warm bodies to do it with.
The fact that you linked to an XKCD (and that I knew which one it was going to be as soon as I saw the link!) is what I am proudly going to call the Nerd Apotheosis for me. I love it.
Miss Melanie Biggs, as a 1 year old, is probably eating solids in addition to nursing. The recommendation for a modern 1 year old is around 900 kcal / day, so even if she’s still nursing as much as an infant (so getting ~500 kcal / day from the breast), she’s probably eating 400 kcal of food as well.
I also wonder if you’ve accounted for pregnancy in considering women’s calorie needs. A women needs around 400 extra calories in her second and third trimester; and given the extremely high natality of these societies, pre-menopausal married women are probably in the second or third trimester of pregnancy around 25% of the time.
If you look at the table, it assumes that male and female members consume the same amount of calories per day; looking at the FAO/WHO report females usually consume 25% less than males in the same age bracket due to lower body mass. So the female figures in the table have been rounded up to male level, enough to cover the extra consumption during pregnancy.
> 1-160AD and 190-270AD (there was a substantial bought of inflation between them)
I know Marcus Aurelius had budget issues and Commodus just didn’t care, but I thought there was a much bigger bout of Roman inflation in the middle of the second period during the Crisis?
A Polish numismatist, Zbigniew Żabiński, came up with trofa (from Greek trophe ‘alimentation’), a universal measure of the value of money. One trofa is defined as an average person’s daily ration of food typical for the given place and time. Altogether, it has 3000 kcal: 1800 kcal in 450 g of carbohydrates, 900 kcal in 100 g of fat, and 300 kcal in 75 g of protein.
Here is the content of one trofa in Diocletian’s empire, with prices in denarii communes:
400 g of rye bread = 400 g of rye flour = 0.95 liters = 7 d.c.
100 g of wheat flour = 0.2 liters = 2.5 d.c.
250 g of beans = 0.33 liters = 4 d.c
100 g of beef = 0.3 librae = 2.5 d.c
100 g of dessert grapes = 0.5 d.c
80 g of olive oil (second quality) = 0.09 liters = 4 d.c
1/2 litre of Egyptian beer = 4 d.c
Total: 24.5 denarii communes for raw ingredients. Add 20% for condiments and cooking.
Unfortunately, Żabiński published in Polish behind the Iron Curtain so the trofa is virtually unknown outside Poland. The Big Mac index is its pale reflection.
Scheidel actually ends up using quite a similar measure (a ‘grain-wage’) in his article to enable cross-culture comparison. Working in ‘wheat equivalent’ is also frequent and essentially the same trick.
And the Egyptians had a quantity which may be rendered as “baking equivalent”, to represent grain included in bread loaves of variable size, beer of variable strength and size of measures, in terms of measures of grain.
Also Robert C. Allen’s idea of the “subsistence basket” – the money cost of the minimum amount of calories, protein and fats in the cheapest possible form, plus a little bit for clothing etc. Allows you to compare wages across countries without the issue that wheat is the cheapest form of calorie in England, but in China it’s rice (or whatever).
The basket of respectability goods seems to consist mostly of processed plants or animals, which I would have assumed were also made by peasants. Would the peasant household aiming for respectability have engaged in regionally tradeable commercial production, or was that someone else’s purview? How profitable was this relative to ‘farming harder’?
It’s more difficult, as a peasant, to trade food when your society doesn’t have refrigeration and doesn’t have fast land transport. Unless you’re lucky enough to have your plot right next to a city or port, you’re going to end up taking whatever the local lord or local merchants offer for your surplus and you’re not in a strong negotiating position.
More detail in https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-iv-markets-and-non-farmers/
In some sense we can treat live animals (e.g. a fed pig ready for slaughter) as a way to “compress” harvest surplus in a way that is easier to stor, transport, and sell.
Not really compression. You’d get a lot more nutrition out of eating a bushel of wheat (or rather milling it into flour, baking it into bread, etc) than feeding it to a cow and milking or slaughtering the animal. Rather, consider it a way to convert things like grass and barely, which are not good grains for human consumption, to something that we do enjoy eating.
That *really* depends on region. Barley is absolutely eaten, at least in eg. Scandinavia. (my understanding is that wheat, while highly productive, tended to be less used than barley or rye because it was more sensitive to bad weather)
And of course, it’s turned into beer, which is another form of calories.
@Arilou,
At least in the modern era, wheat is considered more freezing tolerant than barley, although much less so than rye (I think rye is the most cold tolerant major crop we have). I think barley may be more tolerant to some other stresses though.
Here’s a good recent review:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378429022002064?casa_token=vpAYbr3SfHQAAAAA:CV4MPfLQ0uJp4IG4xK5rHF1H477bgQeGEgvvf0Sh4zu8Hn_gF-nFEE5oh6eLQOOy5NvIcXg
“Adaptation to cold climate” is also of course not always related to actual freezing tolerance. Buckwheat is not at all freeze tolerant but is grown in cold climates because it grows extremely fast and you can squeeze in a short season before the winter.
Though if you live in a climate which allows for it, drying or salting meat or fish can be an excellent method of preservation. You really do have to get it bone dry though, it’s certainly not as easy as throwing it in a freezer. (I’ve lived in a place without refrigeration before, had good experience with really bone-dry preserved meat/fish, and bad experiences with ones that hadn’t been preserved correctly).
Grains of course can last for a long while, as can dried tubers and roots.
Many of them will be made by peasants working as laborers (or similar) on large Big Man estates which have the spare capacity to produce these goods.
We can sort of turn the calculation around: The peasants could produce these goods themselves, by turning over some of their land to the less productive use of creating these “respectability goods”. The land would have to be about as much as the extra grain produced to buy these goods, which means that a respectable household would need about twice as much land per member than a poor household.
And here the economics of production and scale come in to explain why this the purview of Big Men and their estates: You can’t always easily shift land use from “surplus goods” to sustenance grain as the family grows, and you can’t make a kiln for a single pot or keep a single sheep. But somebody who already has more than enough land can build an orchard and keep it for long enough to produce fruit, and use some land as pasture even though it’s less efficient in calories-per-acre.
(And the flow of goods from Big Man to peasant isn’t always in the shape of grain-for-apples or money-for-leather as we might imagine. Somebody linked in a comment on a past post the work of an early Russian anthropologist, who reports behaviour she considers stealing, but is clearly considered part of the social contract in the community: If somebody is hired to bake bread for laborers, they are allowed to bake food for their own family with that flour as well. If somebody is hired to guard an apple orchard, they are allowed to take apples from it. see https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/russian-peasant-life)
If you look at the pictures, respectability includes curtains, furniture, as per Wickham, finer pottery (eg non-local glazed wares). It’s outside Brett’s period, but the Geniza archives document a substantial trade in linen fibre sent to Sicily for weaving and finishing in the 900s, re-imported to Egypt for sale there. Similar ‘putting out’ was common in the Netherlands in late medieval times.
” also made by peasants”
Depends on the products. Wine and olive oil might come more from larger farms, wealthier peasants if not actual Big Man estates. Likewise raisins. Dyes, or dyed cloth. Not sure about tallow for candles. Beeswax (_very_ respectable). Honey. Salt fish. Spices and seasonings you can’t grow on the farm. Better qualities of soap (especially if made with olive oil.) White flour. Nicer mattresses.
Lots of things to splurge on that might be beyond the production of a small farm, due to lack of resources or specialization.
Of course you could also be trading for metal tools and finer ceramics; respectability might include everyone having their own knife, or a metal pot instead of clay-pot cooking. And in some places, arms and armor.
If the grapes are growable at all, wine would likely be made by pretty much everyone.
This is a somewhat later example. My father was born in 1933 and grew up in a village (Revò) in Northern Italy.
Yes, he worked with oxen (slower, but much less fussy about food than horses) and mules. I think there was one automobile, owned by the village priest.
At the time, pretty much *every* family grew wine grapes and made wine, generally enough for the year for the family.
The climate wasn’t really all that good for wine grapes, but it was grow your own or you didn’t get wine.
I visited in 2003. Pretty much everyone had switched to growing apples, as being much more suitable for the (mountainous) climate. They’re a variety that’s pretty well known in Italy, but isn’t exported to North America.
*One* guy kept his grapes and made a wine that was sold locally. I think it was something of a hobby for him.
Did/should the costs also include the necessity for seed corn (corn here meaning any grain) for next year’s crop? I gather that pre-modern yields were lower and so setting aside a fixed amount of your harvest for seed could be a significant part of the harvest (lower in good years, higher in bad years [though in really bad years one might need to consume the seed corn]).
We’re going to factor seed corn in when we start talking about farming productivity in a later part.
In a discussion among friends recently, one of them pointed out another reason why social mobility for the peasantry was hard: The same horizontal ties that provide security also inhibit advancement. In less abstract terms, if a peasant wants to save up the money to buy another field (or twenty) that puts their reputation within the village community as risk, because all wealth they hoard is wealth they don’t share with their neighbours who are having a bad time. And then, once they would have the money together, they might not be able to buy land, because nobody wants to sell their land to a miser who clearly will not put the land to use to benefit the community (because they haven’t put the land they already have to that use).
But they did anyway. Hence ‘kulaks’ = “fists”. Villages always have a gradation of status and wealth.
I hadn’t known the translation.
I wonder if “kulaks” was the name before the Communists, or if it was a pejorative introduced by them.
They used the existing pejorative. One indicator of status studied in a village in the forest zone in Russia was whose sons were conscripted. It was always the poorer villagers who somehow lost the lottery.
Money spent helping your neighbours when they were temporarily in trouble *was* an investment. It meant that they and others would help you out when you were temporarily in trouble. That’s what insurance is.
OTOH, no amount of saving will allow the average peasant to afford much more land. He is competing for the same land with all the other average peasants. Give them all a mountain of gold and all that will do is drive the price of land up. The people with control of the scarce asset will always be the winners.
Land tenure tended to change depending on the return from direct control by the landlord (demesne) vs that from renting. There was always a mix, with some freehold peasants in there too. Customary tenures allowed expansion of holdings – you rented an extra field and hired labour, then maybe bought when the landlord needed cash, then rented another field … It’s not the average peasant, but it’s not at all unusual.
I can’t say I’m quite happy with the footnote about social mobility. When the criticism is “Too often the income class of a child just depends on the income of their parents”, the statement “You have a car” is not a counter-argument, because one has nothing to do with the other.
Here’s a more useful simple argument how social mobility is higher: New businesses. Nowadays, the amount of new businesses opened is an important economic indicator because it does happen to an appreciable amount. And each new business basically represents a social mobility event, because it’s a child *not* taking the same job as their parents. In the agricultural dominated world Bret paints here, new businesses are extremely rare, with most trades being passed from parent to child (or apprentice). Even a new farming household being founded within a village (meaning new land being put under cultivation) is not something that happens often enough to compare to the ability of people in an industrial world to do something completely different than what their parents did.
“Here’s a more useful simple argument how social mobility is higher: New businesses. Nowadays, the amount of new businesses opened is an important economic indicator because it does happen to an appreciable amount. And each new business basically represents a social mobility event, because it’s a child *not* taking the same job as their parents. In the agricultural dominated world Bret paints here, new businesses are extremely rare, with most trades being passed from parent to child (or apprentice). Even a new farming household being founded within a village (meaning new land being put under cultivation) is not something that happens often enough to compare to the ability of people in an industrial world to do something completely different than what their parents did.”
What are you calling “social” “mobility”?
Founding a new farming household is “mobility” as in becoming a subsistence farmer in a new “place”. But who is the founder of the new farming household?
Someone who already was head of a farming household?
Or someone who was of social status lower than head of a farming household? Like a poor relative, a spare son who otherwise could not hope to get his own farm or wife? Or a slave, who had the social mobility of becoming a freedman and householder?
“Mobility” means “moving”. Is getting evicted from a croft rented from one Big Man and moving to rent a croft at similarly onerous terms from a neighbouring Big Man “social mobility”? Because that happened quite often in some societies.
All of that are important questions that I agree will with their answers give a better understanding of actual social mobility than “You have a car and a pre-industrial peasant does not”.
I also fully go along with the implied problem that the definition of social mobility is fuzzy, which is of course also why it’s still hotly debated today. For me, I’d maybe just paint the following rough hierarchy, from lowest to highest:
– Doing the same job as your parents, but moving up from “household member” to “household head” without inheritance
– Doing the same job as your parents, but moving to a new place
– Doing the same job, but moving in a legal class (e.g. slave to freedman farmer)
– Doing a different job than your parents at roughly the same income level
– Doing a different job than your parents resulting in considerably higher wealth
– Being a Big Man (or other Notable who actually has significant political power and wealth) when your parents were not
Note that “social mobility” also includes moving “down”.
And there ARE places to move down from the position of a “landholding, family-rearing subsistence peasant household head”.
One obvious position to move down to is “slave”.
> And each new business basically represents a social mobility event,
This isn’t true.
Firstly, there are plenty of new businesses that aren’t social mobility events, and also plenty of social mobility events that aren’t new businesses.
Example 1) Their dad ran a 1 man plumbing business, now they run a very similar (But legally distinct) plumbing business.
Example 2) Their parents got rich setting up elaborate networks of shell companies for multinational companies to dodge taxes, and now they do too.
But also, it’s possible for someone to go up a lot in social rank, not by starting a new business, but getting a well paid job at an existing one. Their parents stacked shelves for minimum wage, now they are a senior software engineer earning 10x as much.
Indeed, and having a new business might be a social step downwards, too. For example, there a few jobs worse than being an Uber driver, and technically, each of them is a business-owner.
Are Uber drivers legally business owners in Finland? Or is there a law like in France that requires a person to have multiple clients and control over their hours and pricing to count as a business owner and not be classified as an employee?
” each of them is a business-owner”
Ehhh. They control their available hours, and which jobs they take (with limited information), but not their pricing, except insofar as they can take higher value jobs or not. (And a different gig work, Instacart, will often hide the true value of tips at decision time, so customers can’t rely on slapping a $10 tip on their order for speedier response.) They can’t even count on getting a set proportion of what a passenger pays, these days. I’d say it’s more like being a shitty and weird part-time employer of Uber.
Out of the various tech ‘gigs’, I think only Airbnb hosts fully qualify as business-owner; host has full control over pricing, and the platform is more like Craigslist rentals enhanced with escrow and reviews and some level of authentication.
@Alon Levy,
The law is the same as in France, but Uber has been able to flout the law quite successfully, as technically, the driver does have multiple customers, i.e. people who use Uber to order a drive.
“But also, it’s possible for someone to go up a lot in social rank, not by starting a new business, but getting a well paid job at an existing one. Their parents stacked shelves for minimum wage, now they are a senior software engineer earning 10x as much.”
I wouldn’t particularly define that as social mobility either. That’s improvement in social rank *within a class*, which in my opinion is often confused with social mobility (moving between classes). It’s the equivalent of moving from being a farmer at subsistence to a farmer that can achieve respectability.
For all of its flaws, I do prefer the metric of new businesses started as a measure of social mobility as in many cases it represents someone taking ownership of their own means of production. They take ownership of productive capital (provided it goes well, of course). Note that they may well be much poorer than someone who doesn’t own productive capital, but that’s confusing wealth with class (which is loosely correlated at the lower ends of the spectrum). There were merchants that were richer than kings on a regular basis (and still are in the present day). Doesn’t mean they’re in the same class.
Of course, ownership of productive capital occurs on a cline in modern societies, and where you choose the cut-off for who is in what class is a subject of considerable debate. But for me there is a clear distinction at either end with one group who works entirely for their living, and another that lives entirely off ownership of productive capital.
@Ynneadwraith,
Thanks for making the (very important) distinction between class and income, I think people (on the left, right, and centre) often get these distinctions confused. Marx and his immediately followers had an overly crude and rudimentary idea of classes (understandably so, since he was pioneering a mode of thought and writing without the advantage of 150 years of knowledge that’s built up since then), but I think the basic idea of class as a way that one relates to the means of production, remains an invaluable innovation, even if it needs a lot of refinement and complexification.
I feel that the larger impact is solely by the fact that in this environment accumulation of wealth happens slower than the change of generations in people, so the “natural self-regulation” of family size means that a family which accumulates wealth doesn’t really grow the wealth-per-capita beyond ‘respectable’ but becomes a larger family; and a household which successfully buys and accumulates land is extremely likely to get to a point where they would split in two households long before they could accumulate enough land to become non-peasants.
I think the firewood requirement should not be skipped this fast. The amount of work needed to fell, cut, split and dry the literal tons of firewood every household needs, especially in colder regions, could require enough labor to rival at least cloth making. Firewood was discussed on the blog in the metal working series, but I would like to hear more about it in the more every day context. Did old houses require similar amount of firewood as modern houses? Old buildings were smaller, but also had worse insulation. I would not want to cut and split dozen cubic meters of firewood every year on handtools only, and probably without a saw as well if we are talking about medieval or ancient household.
As the footnote on here suggests quite strongly (“In many cases, that forest is the property of the Big Man or the local lord, but the smallholders of the village might often have a right to gather any fallen branches (even though they couldn’t cut down trees) which could be stockpiled through the year to be burned in the winter”), for a good number of peasants, felling an entire tree just to heat their single-room dwellings would have been an impractical luxury! As both of us know from the “iron” series, 1 kg of iron = ~105 kg of wood with the preindustrial European methods (and then even more wood to turn that to a 1 kg of steel for “higher-end” customers), and the demand was pretty much always greater than supply.
Instead, whenever the climatic conditions were such as to permit broad-leaved (rather than coniferous) forests, coppicing was the primary source of firewood. After all, as this highly detailed paper from the Journal of Historical Geography notes, it requires almost none of the labor-intensive steps you have mentioned.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5424077/
The same paper also notes that “dozen cubic meters of firewood every year” is a severe overestimate as far as these households are concerned.
Thank you for an insightful reply. The dozen cubic meters I used as an estimate is stacked firewood, not solid wood, as that’s how wood is measured in Finland these days. By combining that with the the number of people in a household as your numbers were per person, not per household*, I don’t think my estimate is much higher than that you provided. The process to get firewood seems to have been much more arduous up in the north where coppicing wasn’t possible.
The different ways to heat a house can change the wood consumption in huge ways. Open fire at the center of the house and a smoke hole in the roof is extremely inefficient way to heat and was replaced at least in Finland with huge stone “kiuas” type stoves, which were heated once in the morning and the hot stones would keep the house warm until next morning. The use of the stove might have halved the wood consumption.
*I find the use of per person wood consumption weird, as keeping a house warm for two people and ten people require pretty much the same amount of wood and the increase in firewood used for cooking doesn’t scale lineary with the number of people.
Ten people require less firewood! With enough density and some insulation, body heat alone can make the room unbearably stuffy.
Though considering cooking is being done via firewood and 10 people eat a lot more than 2, the requirement is still probably higher.
Interesting! I live in a 16thC thatched cottage in the south of England with a log burning stove for heating (though not cooking and hot water), and I’ve estimated we go through about 8m3 of stacked timber in a season. Having done at least one year of splitting and drying that myself (not felling or cutting), it’s no mean feat.
Undoubtedly there’s extraneous factors here though. The south of England is much balmier than pretty much anywhere in Finland (or the same place in the medieval era). We get down to about 13deg unheated in a winter, and only tend to put the stove on when it hits 16deg inside (or we have company). Our stove is probably much more efficient than medieval fires, but less so than the block-kilns used in nordic countries. We’re not using logs for cooking, which would add quite a bit I’m sure.
You have an interesting living situation for sure. I am not sure if there is a single 16th century or older building still used as a home in Finland. My family uses about 3 cubic meters of stacked firewood yearly, some for heating during winters to save on electricity bill but most to heat the sauna. Modern chainsaw makes the job quite easy, one or two days to fell and cut the trees and few days to split them with an axe. I like doing it, but I don’t think I would like it without the chainsaw or in much larger amounts. We can’t test how cold our houses would go without heating in Finland, because the waterpipes will freeze and burst, which is a huge problem if there is a long blackout in the winter.
I have seen some great photos of Finnish town harbors in the late 19th century. The amount of firewood stacked there was unbelievable, stacks as high as four storey building. That wasn’t all for heating tho, as all the steam engines ran on wood in Finland.
Fuel was a major expense – hence communal ovens and weekly baking (the ovens are still to be seen in rural France), and one-pot dishes. Chimneys are a late arrival, as are closed stoves in much of Europe.
I’m curious about the number of significant figures that numbers are quoted to in this article. It doesn’t even begin to follow the rules used in STEM which were drilled into me from middle school onwards. I’m guessing that this is the humanities using a different convention (or not at all) thing because I’ve similar things in many otherwise excellent books.
The way I was taught – and see in every technical field and spec sheet I’ve come across – is that measurements / statistics / estimates / etc… that aren’t given with error bars (which is the gold standard but implies a rigorous analysis of a confidence interval) should only have as many significant digits as you are confident are correct. So writing 2,197kg is communicating to your audience that you are significantly more confident that 2197kg is correct than 2196kg or 2198 kg. If you rounded it to 2200kg that implies you think the true value is most likely between 2150kg and 2250kg. In other words, unless you explicitly write down otherwise, you imply an error of +/-0.5 in the last non-zero digit written down.
As a broad rule, a calculated number is no more accurate than the least accurate number used in its derivation. So numbers ought to be quoted to as many significant figures as the number with the fewest significant figures used in its calculation. Which is why giving numbers to the “correct” number of significant figures is important – it lets others use your number in their own calculation while keeping track of how precise it is. All of this matters because quantifying (even roughly) the degree of precision to which a number was calculated is almost as important as the number itself.
As it’s written, when I see that the Middles need 3,138kg per year of wheat equivalent for respectability, my gut jumps to the conclusion Bret has calculated this to number to 0.03% accuracy! (not 3 percent, but a thirtieth of a percent). Which is absurd, and clearly not is meant, if only because he adds a tilde in front of the number and mentions some rounding in the caption to the second table. But those caveats don’t tell me how precise the number is. It’s very unlikely to be to the nearest kg, but is it to the nearest 10? to the nearest 100? Or is it just “about 3 tons” because an equally plausible assumption somewhere in the derivation of all this would have the answer shift by several hundred kilograms?
If there is some convention for significant figures when writing numbers in history, I’d love to know it. If instead there is none and historians simply write down every digit they calculated out of reflex, I’d urge them not to! Rounding is not an evil or a sloppy thing! It’s getting rid of superfluous, meaningless, trailing baggage; an efficient alternative to a formal calculation of error bars; a very clear way of communicating precision to the audience; and leads to nicer looking prose.
Argh, messed up my closing tags, apologies for that.
In general, though, you don’t do the rounding until the end of any calculations, and there might well be further calculations yet to come. A lot of people have been very badly misled by rounding errors.
That’s true enough, sequential rounding can lead to its own problems (obligatory xkcd/2585). But, in this case, the moment that a number is “published” in a table that’s meant to be compared as a thing in itself is the moment you ought to round it, or write down some sort of error bars or confidence interval. You can always keep the “full” number for internal calculations. I think the risk or someone seeing a number written down to 5 sig fig, being mislead about its precision, using this in further analysis, and ending up feeling overly confident in conclusions that were actually nothing but numerical noise, is a much bigger problem. IME, it’s a far more common problem in history.
Very much so, and a bugbear of mine in my previous profession (intelligence) – estimates should be in round numbers.
The nice part about significant digits is that small errors add up slowly with increasing number of calculations and if you’re highly uncertain, then you don’t worry about some silly rounding errors.
Proper calculations should be: find symbolic formulas -> evaluate error margin -> evaluate exact result -> write it down with error, rounding both to the most significant digit of the error. That’s for STEM fields particularly when there’s significant theory behind. However, it isn’t done for its own sake, but for the sake of other researchers who will sometimes (sadly, less often than ideal) want to validate your work or continue from it and being vague is bad for that, so you include everything others could be interested in. Historians aren’t as ridiculously overmathed so just giving numbers to a proper degree of accuracy with a verbal explanation is enough for others.
OGH is doing his calculations for grain weights in Roman units (modii) instead of kilograms because he’s used to doing that as part of his research.
And if you look at those numbers (which are also given on the chart right next to the kilos), they use reasonably nice rounded numbers. Unfortunately his audience isn’t reasonably going to have a good mental model of how much a modius of grain is (very roughly 6.75kg), so he had to convert those nice neat rounded numbers into a unit that we’d understand.
Long story short, the numbers look awkward and overly precise because of unit conversion, not because historians are weirdly overprecise.
But that’s sort of my point. “About 18 modii” is equivalent to “about 120kg”, but not “about 121kg”. Not to mention the obvious point that even the modii amount is at times given to 4 significant figures.
And this is an issue I’ve seen with many different history authors: out of what I’ve read, far more do this than have sensible rounding. If you want a concrete example, and one well loved by our host, take Michael Taylor’s Soldiers and Silver. This is a great book that tackles difficult quantifying questions where evidence is short, like the domestic product of Republican Rome. So it has to make educated guesses and assumptions to get there. Some of these are inevitably broad estimates something like “between half and double”. But the final results are given to an absurd number of significant figures (6 IIRC, it’s been a few years since I read it)! It’s very hard to know how much merit there is in the conclusion that the Seleucids were x% richer than the Romans when there’s no hint as to the precision of those GDP calculations given by the author.
Ideally there’d be some error-bar type analysis. Or a “lowest plausible” and “highest plausible” estimates so we could see if the Seleucid and Roman numbers were meaningfully different or whether plausible estimates overlap. At the very least do some rounding to communicating some notion of the level of trust you have in the precision of your answer.
I’m sure you can find some counter examples where sensible rounding is done by historians. Maybe it’s more common in some subfields than others. But in classical antiquity it’s very rare outside of technical reports like carbon dating.
The funniest and earliest example I’ve got is ideal body temperature of 98.6°F, a very precise figure. Which when I look around is actually just conversion of 37°C.
It’s even funnier when you know that the Fahrenheit scale was originally calibrated such that 100°F was the body temperature, but done poorly.
It’s even funnier when you know that the Fahrenheit scale was originally calibrated such that 100°F was the body temperature
Also that 98.6 F isn’t really average human body temp *anymore*- it was in 1724 Amsterdam, but that’s because more people had low-grade fevers or inflammatory responses than they do today.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/time-to-redefine-normal-body-temperature-2020031319173
Medical textbooks were wrong because the Dutch were all slightly sick all the time was not something I expected to learn today lol.
I’m not on the same hobbyhorse as the parent poster, but … didn’t you just do the same thing? How can an ancient weight be “very roughly” 6,750 grams? That seems pretty exact, and makes the reader do work to figure out what you mean. Maybe the issue is that quarters, eighths etc. look overly precise when translated to decimal.
The kg numbers in that section are calculated in ancient Roman units before being converted to kilograms, so the figure which would be subject to significant digit concerns is completely obscured from the audience.
The information in Wiki that OGH refers to suggests that the dry measure he refers to is probably only good to 2 figures.
https://xkcd.com/2585/
Relevant XKCD. The problem with the accuracy based rounding (Ie turning 2173 into 2200 ) is that, each time you do it, your results get a little more inaccurate. So if you need to do a long series of conversions and calculations, and you lose a little more precision with each step, you can end up with a wildly wrong final answer.
It’s useful to keep several extra digits of accuracy in the intermediate workings.
And if we are going to use these numbers for other calculations (agricultural productivity per acre?) then these are intermediate workings.
Lol, already mentioned and addressed further up the comment chain ;). Short answer: your working precision doesn’t have to be the same as the one you use when publishing a table. Especially when you’re already made a note in caption that things might not add up perfectly because of unit conversions.
For my part, I would argue the opposite.
What Bret is doing is inherently imprecise to such a degree that any numbers are essentially meaningless as numbers. They provide a sense of scale and, more critically, way to get a sense of the difference in scale between certain things. Further, they provide a way to rigorously track the various inputs and outputs. In a very real sense the final number is the least relevant part of the equations; the equations instead provide a framework within which to think about these problems.
For stuff like this, language is far superior to math. The numbers are sign posts showing the route the arguments are taking; the important thing, though, is the arguments. How accurate Bret’s calculations are is something which is fundamentally unknowable–and he’s leaving out significant areas of uncertainty, such as changes in nutrient content in various locations and over time (wheat today isn’t wheat from 4 BC), so even if we could verify his numbers with anything approaching rigor, which we can’t, the amount of uncertainty would still swamp any rounding that would be reasonable or possible.
It’s a lot like the Drake Equation. Arguing about the precision of any result misses the point. It’s impossible to get any number with any degree of rigor, and no answer has any actual validity at this point. The point is to provide a framework to think about the question, and (once you have a defensible framework) to see how inputs can change the outputs. Since the answer is only useful in comparing against other answers anyway, and the uncertainty in the inputs dwarfs the numbers used as inputs in many cases, there’s no real sense in going through the effort of properly using significant figures.
To put it yet another way: Significant figures are intended to reflect, as you say, the level of certainty in these numbers. Given the tremendous variability of each of these numbers across time and space, the number of significant figures we can rigorously justify is zero. So you may as well run the math, then explain what it means, with the caveat that “This is just to get us into the ballpark, there’s a lot of variability in all of these.”
Now this is the sort of opposite convention I was hoping someone would present. I see the internal logic in deliberately avoiding any-and-all rounding in order to signal that the number is not to be trusted.
It’s an utterly alien logic to me, and it has the opposite to the intended consequence on me. If you want me to focus less on the numbers and more on the words, then put fewer (non-zero) digits in the numbers! Detail attracts the eye and the attention, it doesn’t repel them.
Further more, even if I was to read 5 sig fig as meaning “just in the ball park”, it still doesn’t tell me how big the ball park is. And neither do the words around the numbers (they do for the initial data fed into the model, but not for the numbers spat out afterwards). This is really the fundamental drawback of doing things this way.
Widow Biggs is the stepmother of Matthew Biggs, not the mother!
I think in many of these social systems, that distinction is not really made.
This is minor, but the paper linked in footnote 11 gives linen measured in “meters”, not “square meters”. Is it normal practice to use “meters” to mean “square meters”? Parses as very strange to me, and I can imagine a convention that “5 meters of linen” actually means “5 meters long by some standard width that may not be exactly one meter” (though I admit this seems less likely).
The width of peasant-made cloth is set by the armspan of the specific peasant who does the weaving. So it’s not standard, but it’s within a close enough range across the world that you don’t see people with really long arms getting paid a premium, the market just treats all person-width cloth the same.
A multi-person loom could make wider cloth but that would either be for special use or from a non-peasant workshop. A person could make noticeably narrower cloth, and you do see some regulations specifying a breakpoint of a certain width between ‘cloth’ and ‘narrow cloth’ but I don’t think of that as directed at peasants.
At least here in Australia, it’s fairly common even today to calculate things like fabric by “linear meters”, where 1 linear meter is 1 meter times the width of the loom the fabric comes from. I’m not sure if the loom widths are standardised or not.
I am confused.
> Cato the Elder recommends each worker get a new long tunic and cloak each year.
> (a bit more ample than Cato’s allotment and every year, not every other)
So Cato recommends that slaves get a new tunic/cloak every other year, not every year? Or is it tunic one year, cloak next year, rotating like that? So cloak/tunic set every two years, but spread out?
It’s every other year, I’ll fix the typo.
I was curious what sort of conversions I could find knowing that a bushel is roughly 60 lb and 35.2 L, modern (maize) corn has energy density about 15 MJ/kg, and according to the given link, a modius is about 8.73 L.
So, if it is of interest, here is another method to calculate values that are (unsurprisingly) consistent with Bret’s.
The number of kg in a modius would then be (8.73 L/modius)*(60 lb)*(0.4536 kg/lb)/(35.2 L) = 6.75 kg/modius. This is roughly the same as what appears to have been used (although it looks like 6.72 kg/modius may have been the actual conversion used).
The energy per modius would then be (15 MJ/kg)*(6.75 kg/modius)= 100 MJ/modius.
The article gives 338kg (50 modii) annually for a (3000 calories/day) diet. This translates into 4.6 GJ/year. My estimate would give (100 MJ/modius)*(50 modii) = 5 GJ/year, so pretty much the same given what I expect the uncertainty in values is.
The modern maize corn values appear to correspond pretty well to ancient values. I was not sure if ancient grains had roughly the same energy density at first, but upon further reflection, I think it is productivity of the land that has mostly improved due to mechanization and modern fertilizing methods. I assume that yields (kg/m^2 or bushels/acre) were much less for the ancients and more variable, although I am happy to be corrected if this is not thought to be so.
I would guess we will go into this in the following weeks, but it’s already interesting to see the Middles family showing the most efficiency (that is, requiring the least amount of kilograms of wheat per person for a lifestyle), followed by the Bigs family, with the least efficiency in the Smalls family.
I just want you to know that I’m really loving this whole series. This kind of population-level breakdown of “normal” life is incredibly fascinating. I’m sure you get more views from the Milhist vs Nerd Media breakdowns (which are also fun, to be clear), but as far as I’m concerned this series could go on forever. Or more of the bread/iron/fabric series.
And while I’m complimenting you : I don’t know if you did it on purpose, but you’ve started using maps/diagrams that are *significantly* more colorblind friendly. I can read them and everything, it’s great.
Thanks for what you do!
Thanks for reading!
I don’t see tools or other small capital items. If I’m a peasant, do I own a shovel? It may not be as hard to make as a sword, but a decent shovel has metal in it. And it makes a *huge* difference over trying to dig a hole with a stick. What about pots and pans or the like?
If I remember right, you’ve written elsewhere that I *don’t* own a plow; if my field gets plowed, it’s because I rented a plow and team from the Big Man. Is that rent included in “taxes”, or where does it show up in the budget?
“If I remember right, you’ve written elsewhere that I *don’t* own a plow; if my field gets plowed, it’s because I rented a plow and team from the Big Man.”
Counterexample from my area.
16th century. King of Poland. Was entrusting a big chunk of land with a number of Crown manors to a nobleman and had a thorough inventory made of the Crown property handed over.
The inventory listed in detail various vessels, pots and pans handed over as contents of Crown manors… and there were absolutely no agricultural tools anywhere. And very few working animals. Many of these manors had significant demesne farming.
The obvious explanation is that the peasants were responsible for owning working animals and farming tools such as ploughs, and had to cultivate the demesne fields with their ploughs and teams. Not vice versa.
You do probably have a shovel, but it’s probably made out of wood, maybe wiht a metal rim on the edge. It’s not going to be all-metal like a modern shovel.
Or the team is communally owned, along with the heavier ploughs and carts. The average peasant has a range of small tools – wooden spade with metal edge, axe, knives, carding comb, spindle, hand-cart, baskets plus soft furnishings and a few chests as well as rough furniture. Inventories rarely go down to this level, but there are a few that do, plus archaeological finds : https://silo.tips/download/furnishings-of-medieval-english-peasant-houses-investment-consumption-and-life-s
Interestingly, that source notes that pretty much all free peasants (which was most by the 14th century) had a weapon – a spear or axe – in token of their defence obligations.
Or maybe not communally owned, but one peasant owned certain tool and another one something different. That practice probably lasted for a long time. My parents owned a dairy farm in Northern Finland in the late 80s. We had our own tractor since it is needed constantly, but for example a tractor-operated potato planting machine or hay-baler were loaned every year from some of our neighbors.
Nowadays this practice has commercialized. Some more expensive equipment like large combine harvesters may be owned by companies that do contract work for different farms. My brother-in-law runs a forestry company, but during hay season local farms hire him and his tractor to help with baling. That is apparently very intense week of work.
I know it’s meant as a metaphor, but I keep picturing peasant households that literally keep all their best items in a single basket.
“but there is a reason that the moment industrial life in cities became available, millions of peasants flocked to it”
Given that early workers had 12+ hour workdays over a 6 day workweek, isn’t reasonable to assume that they moved there just because the alternative was starving as seasonal wokers?
I’m wondering if the extra income provided by manufacturing jobs simply enabled more people to survive and reproduce by trading manufactured goods for food imported from outside the country.
12+ hours a day, 6 days a week means you have time off. Subsistence agriculture did not provide that. There were downtimes, sure, but those were usually times you prayed to whatever god(s) your culture had that you’d live to see the good times. And you were ALWAYS on call. If a cow got out, or a fire started, or rain hit at the wrong time, or the ewe or mare started to give birth, or…well, basically whatever, you had to immediately take care of it. In contrast, at a factory, once you clocked out you were 100% done. Maybe the foreman would offer you a chance to make some coin in an after-hours job, but once you were done, your time was your own, in a way that subsistence farming cannot, by its nature, allow.
In addition the skills were transferable to other things. You saw this to some extent in the Middle Ages–masons could get hired by anyone, for example–but for peasants it wasn’t until widespread industrialization occurred that they could leave an employer they didn’t like. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t easy, or good, or at times even safe to do so. But the difference between being fired from a job, vs being thrown off your land, was tremendous. Someone fired can be hired again. A peasant without land was going to starve.
I have a perhaps naive question. Why are we calling the goods above subsistence minimum a “respectability basket”? I mean, I do understand instinctively what a “respectable lower class living style” means, but “respectability” implies social and moral standing in the community. Did respectability (in the social, moral sense) really hang on material comforts? They really had to know that a bad harvest would deprive the family of much of the “respectability basket” (and not necessarily because they are any less hardworking and upright than the previous year)and then, the unfortunate family was no longer respectable?.And yes, I suppose the cultural experience does support it (impoverished people clinging to the outward aspects they and their community associates with “respectability”). This seems a strange moral and worldview aspect I haven’t considered before.
I think part of the issue with the ‘peasants worked less’ thing is that many of the things peasants did a vital and necessary work that if you didn’t do right or on time or enough would literally result in your death are now regarded as leisure activities. Even for the people who don’t personally like knitting or gardening or DIY themselves, they will still likely see ‘working on your own roof’ ‘making a sweater’ or ‘planting carrots’ as a non-work activity that must be done outside of work hours, and not as ‘the reason you didn’t die of exposure or starvation this year’ which is the genuine threat of not working enough. But as a peasant you fixed your own roof or knitted a jumper because otherwise you’d be sat outside in your birthday suit, and you planted carrots because that’s how you didn’t get malnutrition.
tldr; saying peasants worked less is like saying full-time videogame streamer is unemployed – just because it sounds fun to you doesn’t mean it’s not work.
This has always been my take on this as well. Farming defined a peasant’s life in ways that most of us simply cannot comprehend today. Time not spent in the fields was spent preparing for being in the fields. Time not spent preparing to be in the fields was spent building or maintaining horizontal and vertical social ties that were absolutely necessary for survival. Even leisure activities had survival components. Dances re-enforced social ties; contests distributed resources (greased pig contests, for example); other competitions honed skills necessary for work (think shooting competitions among hunters today); and others were straight-up putting food on the table (hunting, fishing, and the like). EVERYTHING a peasant did was tied to making sure they had food to survive. To draw a hard line between “work” and “not work” in such a situation is lunacy.
OK, I now what I will comment now is a bit off topic and a bit late. However, as discussions here often go even more off topic and people make even later replies, I assume this is still acceptable.
I have encountered even worse claims than ‘people today work more than medieval or ancient peasants’ on the internet. One and a half months ago I encountered on r/AskHistorians the following four years old question:
Did average Roman slaves really have more time off work than the average US worker? (https://np.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rhydpm/did_average_roman_slaves_really_have_more_time/)
An excerpt:
In trying to find it again, I accidentally ran into a few other questions in that vain on r/AskHistorians.
That is so absurd that even most of those ‘medieval peasants worked less than us’-people would realize it is nonsense; or at least, I hope so.
@Tus3,
I’m not going to, at this point, express a normative judgment on life in different time periods, different parts of the world or different socio-economic orders is “better” in the abstract sense than life in modern day America (a lot of that is going to come down to normative judgments). I will just say though that, while you’re certainly right in your point about peasants not having nearly as much leisure as people on the internet often sloppily assume, I’d also add a different point. I don’t think leisure is necessarily a great proxy for quality of life in general. It’s perfectly possible to have *more leisure than you would like*, just as it’s possible to have less, and it’s very possible that a lot of the people with a ton of leisure time would prefer to have less free time, in exchange for more material goods. “Quality of life” is too complex to be summed up by a single indicator, especially because life usually involves trading off some goods against others.
In this thread I’ve mentioned numerous times my experience with the Peace Corps in a rural African village (and not one of the more prosperous African countries, either). There were a lot of people in that village who visibly had a lot of free time, if you stopped by the village store mid-morning on a nice day you would see a lot of men out front playing dominoes and drinking coffee. These people weren’t sitting around playing dominoes because that was the optimal use of their time, they were doing it because they didn’t have the capital or land to make efficient use of their labor time, and because most other people in the vicinity didn’t have enough capital or land to make it worth their while to hire them. If you had driven up to the coffee shop with, like, a truckload of fertilizer, people would have immediately dropped their game and gone off to put it on their fields (and likewise if you showed up with other forms of capital goods, or just cash).
I can easily see the Hadza hunter gatherers, say, having a lot of leisure time because there’s a natural limit to how much time they spend hunting (if you spend too much time hunting game then you’ll draw down the population below the limit of sustainability). Maybe they would rather have less leisure time and more return on their labor time, though.
Indeed.
In the abstract, I am well aware of the ‘leisure-living standards trade off’; I have myself even joked about Keynes’ prediction that in the 21th century people would only work 15 hours a week*.
However, I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of developing countries, outside of a single vacation; so I’ll defer to you on how ‘leisure-living standards trade off’s work there.
I had read some books in which developing countries are discussed, from Hans Rosling’s Factfulness to Banerjee and Duflo’s Poor Economics; though those certainly are not substitutes to considerable personal experience.
I also agree with the importance of ‘normative judgements’ in general**. However, I doubt those would change much in these specific comparisons; I do not think that lengthy debates about whether personal freedom is more important than standards of living, or political rights and security from arbitrary violence are more important than leisure would succeed in getting many well-informed people to change their minds about medieval peasants or Roman slaves having it worse than modern US employees.
* For example, that in the USA post 1950 annual working hours had, despite Keynes’ prediction, barely decreased. What had happened instead was that the sizes of houses had about doubled, which actually understates the increase as household-size had declined in the same period; the sizes of cars and televisions also greatly increased; and the size of the Yankees themselves also increased because food portions had also increased in size.
However, to be honest, I am not sure how much of that, the USA having not seen as much a decrease in working hours as the rest of the developed world, is caused by runaway consumerism. I am unsure how important other factors, like amongst others single-family zoning laws driving up house prices or extremely inflated health care costs, increasing costs of living for people who found themselves on the wrong end of the increase in inequality…
** A further complication is the importance of various external factors such as technological advancement.
For example, I heavily suspect that Blacks in the US South during Jim Crow had higher living standards and also did it better in social indicators like life expectancy than medieval peasants but that is clearly not caused by the socio-economic order of the US South being better than that of Medieval Europe; I presume that if we are comparing them with free peasants instead of serfs, this is even despite the differences in how they are treated by their socio-economic orders.
However, I think that is going off topic.
“I have myself even joked about Keynes’ prediction that in the 21th century people would only work 15 hours a week*”
It’s a very crude analysis, but if you want to have the income (adjusted for inflation) of a typical British person in 1930, you only need to work less than 18 hours at the average hourly wage of a British person in 2025. So he wasn’t far off!
Average income of £300 a year in 1930 is £17,054 today. At £18.64 an hour that’s 914 hours worked a year, or 17.6 hours a week.
The thing to remember is that the typical British person in 1930 was by modern standards (unlike Keynes) very poor. That average income in 1930 is considerably less than what modern Britons consider a living wage (around £25,000).
Love the series so far.
China in the 20th century might be an interesting footnote as a society that relatively recently transitioned from something like 6~ TFR in 1970(?) to below replacement by the end of the century. At least, that’s what I was reminded of reading @briankturner101 doing a thread on the CCP 1-child policy on X recently.
Otherwise, love the blog. I would love a one-time tip jar, otherwise I’ll have to join the Patreon one of these days. I certainly spend more than a few dollars of time per month on the job reading new posts as they come in. (Only when the local Big Man-ager isn’t looking.)
China in the 20th century might be an interesting footnote as a society that relatively recently transitioned from something like 6~ TFR in 1970(?) to below replacement by the end of the century. At least, that’s what I was reminded of reading @briankturner101 doing a thread on the CCP 1-child policy on X recently.
The interesting thing is that China isn’t even that unusual in that regard! Maybe slightly on the extreme end, but a lot of Latin America has undergone the fertility transition almost as rapidly. El Salvador had a TFR of 6.7 in the mid-1960s and is 1.8-1.9, depending on which source you use, today.
The fertility transition is really one of the most striking things to happen in the last 75 years or so, at least to me, and it’s so striking partially because it’s one of the few phenomenon in the world which seem to be almost universal, across societies differing in race, language, religion, economic development, political order, and social/economic order.
I think that understates just how rapid China’s fertility transition was.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=line&country=CHN~IRN
They went from 6 Total Fertility Rate in 1970 to one below 3 in 1977; not even Iran had a decline that quick*.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=line&country=CHN~BRA~ARG~URY~PRY~BOL~CHL~PER~ECU~COL~VEN~MEX~CUB~IRN~GUF~SUR~GUY~BLZ~GTM~HND~NIC~PAN~CRI
Looking at the data for Latin America, I don’t see any country coming close to either Iran or China.
* Which I find strange, I vaguely recall reading the claim that it oddly enough had been Iran that had gone the fastest through the demographic transition. Maybe that had been based on different data?
Yes, as far as I am aware it seem to be only the countries with very limited education which avoided the demographic transition.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertility-rate-vs-share-of-women-between-25-and-29-years-old-with-no-education?time=2015
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility
Poorly enough, they don’t have split it up in separate charts showing gender and educational attainment; I always wondered how much of the demographic transition was caused by children being supposed to receive more schooling.
I always found the idea that peasants were idle kind of silly, but I don’t find “everyone flocked to the cities at the Industrial revolution” to be proof against the idle peasant. At this time the price of grain kind of collapsed. So if the poor farmers had a lot of free time before and were able to make enough food for themselves and enough to buy whatever non-food stuff they need, they certainly couldn’t after the price collapse. So I’m sure you’re right, but if that’s the reason you give then you’d be right for the wrong reason.
For the book project, make sure that you update your presumed calorie requirements with the most recent data about how much activity level (“vigorous vs. not”) correlates with caloric needs. The answer is maybe a little less than one might think? For example:
The Exercise Paradox
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-exercise-paradox/
Energy expenditure and obesity across the economic spectrum. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420902122
Of course, as the latter points out, one *might* be getting fewer calories per modii back then since it’s less processed…