Is it true that medieval peasants only worked 9 hours a day and 150 days per year?

Working hours depended mostly on how much light there was in the day, so it would vary from ~16 hours a day in the summer to ~8 hours a day in the winter. 

The 150 days per year thing is somewhat debated, depending on the scholar’s views of capitalism vs. their views of medieval serfdom and how one analyzes incomplete information for example, Juliet B. Schor argues:

During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work “by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day.” And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income – which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year – 175 days – for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.

This, along with the many church holidays imposed by the Church, suggests very few working days per year. However, others argue that the records only capture the number of days of labor for one’s feudal landlord, not the full amount of labor needed to maintain one’s own lands or perform the necessary labor of the reproduction of the household. It’s not like animals stop needing to be fed on Day 121 of a calendar year, for example. 

What does seem to be indisputable, though is that the emergence of capitalism – and one of the problems I have with this debate is that there were a lot of stages in between (the commercial revolution, the enclosure movements, the early stages of the Industrial Revolution), so you’re comparing capitalism to a moving target – involved a shift from less regular although occasionally quite intense labor to much more constant labor. E.P Thompson’s work effectively demonstrates how this was bitterly resisted out of a resentment against the discipline involved, that an outside force was telling you when you had to start and stop work – the factory clock, often resisted or challenged by the worker’s watch if they could afford one – or telling you that you couldn’t drink alcohol on shift, whereas before labor had been somewhat more self-directed and self-regulated. 

Studied history as my main, switched career, and it as a strong interest. I actually have a question on the act of retelling of history. Just how grounded is the retelling of history caught in current events in your opinion? Obviously there is bias present in the author, but it seems to me that the retelling becomes a point to highlight events and people to lend weight to a cultural/societal ideal/though while ignoring the rest. Continued ==>

It is unavoidable that current events and societal preoccupations would color what topics historians are interested and how they approach those topics. Pace to those historians who believed in the Noble Dream of Objectivity,  but historians aren’t robots and there’s no way to eliminate it from our scholarship. The only thing we can do is be honest and self-aware about it: as David Blight says, we all have biases and don’t trust anyone who says they don’t.

To take a classic example, the Dunning school of American history was fatally flawed by the fact that the men who made it up were almost entirely white Southerners whose fathers had fought for the Confederacy and who were themselves violently hostile to Reconstruction and the idea of black civil rights, and trying to create a “usable history” for the dominant politics of white reconciliation in the 1890s-1910s. 

At the same time, the Dunning school would never have been overturned if it hadn’t been for the discipline reacting first to WWII and the ideological threat of Nazism (which led a lot of scholars to rethink the “needless war” thesis and the idea of fighting a war for the ideal of human equality, however flawed in practice), and then the rise of the civil rights movement and especially its popularity among Northern college students in the 1960s inspiring a whole bunch of historians to re-examine the Civil War and Reconstruction from the ground-up and completely undermine the Dunning school.

Wait… Did I just lose the other half of that history post? 

I think you might have, anon. If only there was some way for me to message you directly….