In the foreword to her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, the historian Barbara W. Tuchman offered a warning to people with simplistic ideas about what life was like in the medieval world, and what that might say about humanity as a whole: You think you know, but you have no idea.
The period, which spans roughly 500 to 1500, presents some problems for people trying to craft uncomplicated stories. “No age is tidy or made of whole cloth, and none is a more checkered fabric than the Middle Ages,” Tuchman wrote. Historians, she noted, have disagreed mightily on basic facts of the era: how many people there were in various parts of Europe, what they ate, how much money they had, and whether war deaths meant society was overpopulated with women, or childbirth deaths meant it was overpopulated with men. What’s even more complicated is determining the nature of life—how well different kinds of people lived, the quality of familial bonds, what people did to occupy their time and amuse themselves, how they thought about their lives. Draw broad, confident conclusions at your own peril.
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Tuchman’s warning was prescient, if not especially well heeded. Her book was published in 1978 and won the National Book Award for History, but in the nearly half century since, the Middle Ages have been a common hobbyhorse for people of all political persuasions who suspect modernity might be leading us down the primrose path, especially as the internet has become a more central and inescapable element of daily life. Our ancestors of the distant past can be invoked in conversations about nearly anything: They supposedly worked less, relaxed more, slept better, had better sex, and enjoyed better diets, among other things. Their purported habits are used as proof of recent folly, but also of future possibility. Things could be better; after all, they have been before.
The problem is that these assertions about our glorious history usually don’t quite check out—they tend to be based on misunderstandings, disputed or outdated scholarship, or outright fabrications long ago passed off as historical record. But that doesn’t stop people from regularly revisiting the idea, counterintuitive though it may be, that some parts of life were meaningfully better for people who didn’t have antibiotics or refrigeration or little iPhone games to play to stave off boredom. What, exactly, is so irresistible about a return to the Middle Ages?
To untangle exactly what is going on here, let’s use a recent example of the phenomenon. A few weeks ago, an oft-cited historical trope made the rounds once again, primarily on Twitter. The upshot: Medieval peasants worked less, had more free time, and were guaranteed more holidays with their family than you. The tweet, from the writer Azie Dungey, was hugely popular—it racked up 127,000 likes—and she followed it up with an explanation of her intent: “We give a lot more labor to increase someone else’s wealth than in times past. We generally work much longer hours. We have far fewer holidays and times of community festivity,” she wrote. “The idea that this is normal is completely wrong and frankly outrageous.” Dungey went on to cite her source: The Overworked American, a 1991 book by the sociologist Juliet Schor.
Schor’s book, a best seller and classic of its genre, may very well be the origin story for how so many people otherwise uninvolved in medieval history came to know and share this particular factoid. In it, she cites a then-recent estimate by Gregory Clark, a medievalist and economic historian at UC Davis, who pegged the average number of workdays per year in medieval England at about 150. Modern Americans work more—about 250 days a year, if you work five days a week and get federal holidays off. This kind of historical citation makes for a very compelling device: The circumstances of modern labor can feel inflexible and alienating, and that’s because, for many workers, they are. If even medieval peasants—most of whom performed forced labor as feudal serfs—worked fewer hours and got more vacation days than you do, then maybe you shouldn’t settle for whatever your boss thinks you deserve. Schor, an enormously well-regarded scholar, used this idea in much the same way that progressives on social media now tend to—not to assert that medieval life overall was paradise for the lower classes, but to highlight a modern absurdity through juxtaposition with an era that people tend to think of as unambiguously miserable.
The thing about history, though, is that much of our understanding of the past isn’t settled fact. Clark no longer believes that his estimate of 150 days, made early in his career, is accurate. “There’s a reasonable controversy going on in medieval economic history,” Clark told me. He now thinks that English peasants in the late Middle Ages may have worked closer to 300 days a year. He reached that conclusion by inspecting the chemical composition of fossilized human remains, as well as through evidence of the kinds of goods that urban peasants in particular had access to. These factors suggest that they may have lived more materially luxurious lives—eaten much more meat and other animal products, specifically—than usually estimated, suggesting that they had higher incomes than would be possible at the era’s common daily pay rates if they didn’t work most days of the year.. Across the world and throughout human history, poor populations rarely consume much meat and dairy.