Medieval society consisted of villages built on lord’s land, with houses, barns, sheds, and animal pens clustered in the middle. Peasants had specific skills or trades, such as blacksmithing, carpentry, or weaving, which could provide additional income or goods for barter. The peasant diet in England was hearty and nutritious, with vegetables like cabbages, peas, and onions available. Peasants made regular pilgrimages to holy sites and sought blessings from local saints to ensure divine protection and prosperity.
The Church reinforced the social order and emphasized obedience to the ruling. Peasants faced hardships, challenges, and limited opportunities, including the burdens of the feudal system and daily struggles of agricultural work. Their lifestyle was extremely hard and harsh, with many working as serfs and peasants at the bottom of the feudal system.
Peasants had diverse jobs, including agriculture, spinning, weaving, clothes mending, home brewing, and cheese making. They enjoyed storytelling, singing, and dancing, as well as going to church for rest. They also took advantage of seasonal gifts, such as gardening in the spring and eating fruits in the summer.
Peasants played various activities, such as football, hanging out with friends, drinking, gambling, picnics, hobbies like embroidery or wood carving, watching men fight bears or bulls, reading, and watching plays. They also had to keep the household running by making clothes from raw materials and making cheese. Peasant pastimes included drinking, archery, church, fairs, and pilgrimages. They were also engaged in music, berry-picking, and reading, all suitable for women of good breeding. Songs and stories were popular during the Middle Ages, entertaining people with song, dance, music, and stories.
📹 How Medieval Peasants Spent Their Free Time
Life for peasants in the Middle Ages was difficult, to say the least – Medieval peasant jobs could often involve long hours of …
What were the main activities of the peasants?
In the Middle Ages, women were legally required to be subordinate to a male, such as their father, husband, or kinsman. They were responsible for planting food, keeping livestock, and making textiles. Women of different classes performed various activities, with rich urban women becoming merchants or money lenders, middle-class women working in textile, inn-keeping, shop-keeping, and brewing industries, and townswomen responsible for the household and engaging in trade.
Poorer women often peddled and huckstered food in market places or worked in richer households as domestic servants, day laborers, or laundresses. Evidence suggests that women performed not only housekeeping responsibilities but also other household activities like grinding, brewing, butchering, and spinning, producing items like flour, ale, meat, cheese, and textiles for direct consumption and sale. An anonymous 15th-century English ballad described activities performed by English peasant women, including housekeeping, foodtuffs, textiles, and childcare.
What did peasants do for fun?
During this period, people enjoyed singing, dancing, music, and stories, with minstrels or troubadours traveling from village to village providing entertainment. Other entertainers included jugglers, acrobats, and trained animals. Traveling circuses and puppet shows were common. Card, dice, and guessing games were popular, with noble classes playing new games like chess and backgammon. Vikings also swept in from the north to England, Scotland, Denmark, Germany, and northern Gaul.
What did poor medieval people do for fun?
During periods of leisure and days off work, people engaged in a variety of recreational activities. Children often engaged in play with toys such as wooden swords, balls, and hobby horses, as well as in group games such as badminton and lawn bowling.
📹 What was Work like for Medieval Peasants?
Despite conceptions of brutal workloads and little free time, medieval peasants actually had more time off than many realize.
Suggestion:The tendency to mix in a little aggression (jousting) to everything sounds like pent up frustration about their station. But is also related to BEER. The women were the first great Beermeisters, peasant women could make a living with zymurgy the art of making beer. I would prefer to make beer over becoming a nun or prostitute that was the spectrum of work oppurtunities for poor women. Can you please do a article about the women of Zymurgy? Medicinal herbs were also mixed into beer since ancient times. You just had to hope a nosey neighbor didn’t claim you were a witch.
I just recently purchased my first home and it has me wondering how home ownership worked in medieval times. Were peasants allowed to purchase homes or was it a luxury exclusively for Nobles. Is there a different between owning a home in a city vs the country in those times. Did they have to go to a bank and ask for a loan? Did medieval realtors exist?
@ 2:00 there’s a form of football/soccer played in a town called Atherstone in England that is pretty similar to the medeival form of soccer/football that is talked about in this article. there’s articles of the ‘atherstone ball game’ it on YouTube. It’s basically just a mass brawl. a lot of people get hurt and a lot of property gets damaged every time it’s played. looks pretty fun tho, not gonna lie.
So basically, my elementary school back when I was a kid and lived in Texas WERE playing real soccer x,D just medieval soccer… Ngl it was hectic, chaotic, and sometimes violent lmao. We tried to keep teams sooorta equal but people would just join in on a team (and thankfully not swap teams, one of the only few rules we really had, once you joined you stayed), and that sometimes led to some cool things too because sometimes one team would get massive and then some skilled mofos would join the smaller team intentionally and it was always super fun, but it would make a soccer coach weep. And geez, competitiveness was high, fights sometimes broke out Edit: team changing only happened if both teams agreed, it did happen sometimes
They worked less…? That depends on how you define “work”. Holidays are not days off for the people that make daily life function. Motherhood is never-ending. You can’t just ignore your kids for a day. Someone had to cook all the food, organize those games, clean up after all the festivities, treat the wounded and hungover, etc. Farmers never have a complete day off unless you want your animals to go hungry or you have someone else to do that work for you. Whose work was that? Mostly young people and women. Let’s be clear: Men worked less. Everyone else worked all day almost every day.
MEN had to work 180 or so days in a year… women still had to prepare food carry water and fire and collect firewood possibly milk the cow(s) in the morning collect eggs every single day. Also loundry was a formittable task back then. Food preparation was a long tast and fire had to be kept going all day long as each meal and bread had to be made and mess had to be cleaned up and start the next meal. So is the saying “womans work is never done”.
Id like to see how the stat that peasants work less than americans was made, for a farmer it’s total believable they only work 150 days a year as most of the time is spent waiting for crops to grow. But as I’ve heard from other historical websites most peasants had multiple jobs. Farming may only employ you for 150 days a year but your side hustles might have you working more than the average american
When peasants were not in the field, they were doing other tasks to keep themselves alive. Preserving and preparing food, making and repairing and laundering clothing, hauling water, tending animals, and an endless list of other difficult tasks were sufficient to keep them occupied. Medieval armies were professional, not conscripted peasants. Their use of bows by the latter was to secure game, not to kill peasant soldiers of rival kings.
I was extremely surprised to find out that the peasants had so much free time we always think of the peasants as having to work long hard hours 12 months a year the other surprising fact was that they were required to learn archery I thought maybe only the King’s Men could be archers so this really surprised me that the common Man would be a precision Archer