Work and Leisure

30 A. J. Vealdomestic duties which in earlier times would have involved such activities asweaving and the making and mending of clothes. All this suggests long andcontinuous working hours and suggests that data on fluctuations in men’sworking hours are unlikely to be representative of women’s working hours.Animal husbandryAccounts of agricultural work often refer to the bursts of activity at seedtimeand harvest, with periods of idleness in between, but both women andmen were also responsible for animal care in peasant households – a 365-daya-yearresponsibility. Cows have to be herded to and from the fields andmilked twice a day. Most animals require at least some form of attention on adaily basis – including Sundays and saints’ days. In fact, such were thedemands on them that peasants often resented rather than welcomed themany saints’ day holidays because the various religious observances requiredof them took them away from their work.The feudal systemAs already discussed, the feudal system required that, in addition to workingtheir own land, at least half of the peasants of Europe were required to workon the land of the lord of the manor or other landlord in lieu of rent. Underunscrupulous lords, such requirements could be very onerous. Thus referenceto the amount of work time peasants spent attending to their own land maysignificantly under-represent total hours worked.Industrial sectorsIt is also notable that the available records tend to refer to peasant andhired labourers, but do not refer to those in domestic service, who would,no doubt, have been on call seven days a week. Later, data on workinghours in the nineteenth century often refer only to those in industrialjobs, a category which never rose above 40 per cent of the labour force(Veal 1987: 10).All this suggests that work outside the industrial sector may have been moreonerous than available statistics indicate. It is notable that, in the data presentedby Zeisel (1958: 146), working hours in agriculture in the United Statesin 1850 were higher, at 72 hours a week, than those in industrial occupations,at 66 hours a week. Thus, the view of Schor and neo-Marxist historians suchas Bailey (1978), that long hours were imposed by industrialists on an unwillingworkforce, might be countered by the view that industry attracted labourby offering a more attractive combination of working hours and wages thanagriculture.