What Did Medieval Peasants Do For Fun?
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- Опубликовано: 5 июл 2024
- Let’s be honest, daily life for a medieval serf in England, and many other European countries wasn’t much fun. The feudal system meant that peasants were bound by law to work for the nobility, who owned the land they lived on. The outside working day started at dawn, which meant that during the summer months it could be as early as 3am. And it didn’t end until dusk. Work in the fields was back breaking and included reaping, sowing, ploughing and haymaking depending on the time of year. As well as helping her husband with the farming, women were also responsible for the preparation of all meals. They took care of any children and livestock such as chickens and tended the vegetable plot as well as foraging for berries and herbs. Weaving, spinning and the mending of clothes were also part of a womans work. And children were also expected to join in. When all was done there was very little time for leisure activities given their work schedules, but medieval peasants would grab some fun whenever they could.
0:00 Introduction
1:44 Easter Eggs
2:59 Beer Parties
5:15 Bringing in the May
6:44 Midsummer Madness
7:50 You’ve Got to Know When to Walk Away
9:01 Winter Wonderland
🎶🎶 Music by CO.AG: / @co.agmusic
Narrated by James Wade
Edited by James Wade & Adam Longster
Thank you for watching.
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Copyright © 2021 Top5s All rights reserved. In this video, we've compiled information from a variety of sources, including documentaries, books, and websites, all with the aim of providing an engaging viewing experience. While we strive to ensure accuracy, we acknowledge that there may be variations in the authenticity of the content. We encourage viewers to delve deeper and conduct their own research to corroborate the information presented.
Water jousting is still a tradition in my hometown of Ulm, Germany where "Fischerstechen" is performed in front of large crowds every 4 years, accompanied by traditional dances and marches through town.
No they don't! Give me a break
Ikr@@MrThedonhead
They would entertain themselves by shouting rude instructions outside of their bedroom for fun because they were all drunk 🤣😂 that sounds like a pretty wild fun party lmao
Imagine how lit those festivals would be? A bunch of people who work day in and out getting to get rowdy for a day or so? Sounds like a good time
Smells horrible to
@@ryanreis8814 wahh, can't handle a little stink?
@@ryanreis8814 just like a festival today lol
@@DaPeePeePooPooCheck just like your mom
@@adel3475 Sick burn
Peasants had to work long hours in peak season, but sometimes had days with no work at all. In the 1400s a Medieval English peasant could feed their entire family with just 15 weeks work a year, whereas nowadays we work 50 weeks a year
Long live the corporation overlords, they are the modern aristocracy and we are the modern serfs, lol
@@miket0174 true but I'm not laughing out loud at that
@@damonpalovaara4211 laugh through the pain
@@damonpalovaara4211 same here. People think it's funny but it's actually really fucked up and there's nothing to make light of. If we're honest we should take the top 100 richest people in the world and put them in a cage and drop it into the ocean. Then redistribute their money to the working class
True. I have a book called "The discovery of France".
Its fascinating, it covers the lives of ordinary people through the ages.
In it it explains that workload varied dramatically throughout the year as they moved from ploughing and sowing to reaping. Animal husbandry varied by time of year. Also in northern France (and Britain) the huge difference in daylight hours affected the length of the working day.
At least their fun didn’t take 4 hours to update before you could actually play….
Fun is forbidden by the church. Return to your turnips at once.
Where is it written in the bible that only the church gets to keep the good turnips!?
@@sexualyeti7023 Why right here in… Romans chapter… 7! Yes chapter 7. “Thou shalt give thine best turnips over to thy church.” You’ll have to take my word for it as you are a peasant and cannot read nor write.
@@sexualyeti7023 Matthew 17 “Those outside the church shalt not reap mighty turnips”
What if the turniplooks like a thingy?
@@joshuabessire9169 Cleanse thy mind of sinful thoughts.
A great book to look into the life and workings of a medieval village is the book "The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village"
It describes the intimate workings of a village, its church and the inhabitants. Fascinating. Now I know why English village churches usually have a pub next door.
This was a period of history that I did not learn much about in school. Very informative video, thank you. 🙂
Anthropology major and esoteric practitioner here: Strictly speaking "Wiccans" didn't exist back then. They were all just pagan, though most of the traditions, correspondences and such did exist but a medieval person would have no idea what "Wicca" or "Wiccan" means.
You would have more credibility as an anthropologist if you spell “pagan” correctly.
“She’s a 9 but she leans on her incomplete degree as a source of authority”
Say what you will about typos but...wicca is a product of the 1930s. My apologies if you feel singled out but wicca as it is today is less than 100 years old. Which makes it no less valid or worthy of respect mind you. If antiquity were what makes a belief valid then most world faiths would have never gotten off the ground.
Gearald Gardner cobbled together Wicca from the cunning woman/man folk practices of those in his community mixed it with elements of wider driudic traditions and set it all in the fraimwork used by systems such as The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It does have ideas and correspondences that go back as far as the ancient sumerians but medieval pagans would have no idea what you were talking about if you asked them about wicca or many of their rituals. (Such as the LBRP)
Again. This is not to diminish wicca or any other system of Magik/faith. It's just what the texts and scholarly evedeince show.
@@wintermute7378 I read up too that "Wicca" is a modern thing. It's what obese goth chicks say they are as a way to seem edgy
You know you saw the other comment about this same topic and thought you'd get the same notoriety by copying it. Don't lie. You're both overly offended crystal worshipers anyway.
Not a single phone or black mirror in sight, beautiful
These people were specialist in going into standby mode as not much would prob be going on lol
One of the most common, and timeless threads throughout human history are the laws, rules, & practices used to keep the poor on the fields, and in Hovels that they often weren't even allowed to own.
Unless Democrats make those laws because Democrats love poor people and white people bad
Yeah. Nothings really changed at the very core of things.
That’s human history since the invention of Agriculture. Human history is much longer than the last 10,000 dystopian years.
Yes, but it looks like people are starting to wake up
@@cjsa7174 Slowly, but I agree. Human nature is a B..ch.
Wicca didn't exist until the early 20th century, so there's no way they'd be celebrating in Medieval times. Paganism comes in several forms, Wicca being the most modern one.
Right?
Celt/druid != wiccan
I noticed that as soon as he said it. I'm surprised to see it was the first comment I saw. A practice of Neo-paganism. Celtic/druids is not necessarily synonymous with Wicca. Although modern Wiccans consider themselves akin to the ancient druids.
"Pagan" is an exonym, like Gojim.
Wicca is a scam.
@@owimze Get over it kid.
@@owimze the channel is not that accurate more of a rough idea . Even on the other videos there are a lot of major historical inaccuracies that should not have got through , research is minimal at best . Just treat it as entertainment and you will be fine . Google or a library are worth looking at if you want accurate information
Yay my idea was used! So happy 😊 great and interesting video thank you! X
7m32s - in the Vallée du Rhône, (France) water jousting is still a popular pastime and pits one village against the other!
Feudal system heavily vary between different states, for example in most time in Medieval Poland peasant household(not each person) have to provide one working day a week, later increased to two days a week ina late medieval period. So if under one roof lived whole family, they have to provide one person for 1-2 days a week, rest of time they spend on land rented to them by feudal lord.
Basically peasants gets land rented for duty of working on lord lands.
In Medieval times, later it changed and peasants get more and more work/tax burden through times.
Btw. One or two days a week is much less than taxation nowadays, whey you start to earn on yourself like in mid of a year, depends of country.
Same thing as modern peasants. getting wasted.
Beer parties. Some things never change, am I right?
Length of video on Peasants having fun: 10 minutes...
Length of Medieval Madness videos on torture and execution: 164 minutes...
This proves that we both like pain more than fun as long as it's other people, and also that humans haven't changed much since the medieval era...
I think that it's more that the upper class cared more about when and how their justice was upheld to their dirty peasants than what the wretches did for fun. Who cares what they did when they weren't working? They weren't making the upper class richer, that's for sure!
So yeah, you're right, not much as changed at all
Sounds like way more fun than I've had in 5 years.
Wow water jousting actually sounds fun as hell even today. Cover everything in nerf and go wild!
9:33 Look, it’s Ed Sheeran and he’s come to haunt us again 🙃
He returns every century to haunt us all.
Yet another great upload! Thanks Again!
👍
Communities were so intimate back then. Wish it was still that way.
Call your mom and go say hi to your neighbors then! In this world u must be the change you wish to see
@@bigcheese2128 I have a great relationship with my mother and immediate neighbors. But overall, humans will go down the path of least resistance, and so will opt for online interaction over face to face interactions more and more.
Because they had no choice, it was a struggle to survive so they had to rely on each other out of necessity and not neighbourly love. It would have been a terrible situation to be in, the serfs were essentially prisoners in their village for life with little to no chance of betterment for themselves or their children.
@@bcfcbennjy99 They we’re not prisoners in their village. Serfs were allowed to leave their lord’s land when desired or necessary. They needed their lord’s “permission” on paper, but this permission was rarely withheld. Most lords merely asked to be informed if they planned to leave and to be given a rough estimate on when they could expect them to return.
There were no work hours either. Each serf was merely expected to produce a certain amount of goods/crops each year. Serfs were also by no means trapped in their station. There were many methods for gaining free status. Yet not everyone was scrambling to do so, because being under a lord’s protection had benefits in a feudal world. Many free citizens even entered into serfdom willingly.
Sure, life was hard, that isn’t disputed by me, but life was hard for pretty much everyone except the very very top. That didn’t make the intimate communities most had any less valuable. Humans are made to exist in such communities. Look at humans today in the first world. We’re the most connected we’ve ever been, yet levels of loneliness and depression and suicide have never been higher.
@@bcfcbennjy99 and that’s not the case now? American workers work more days and hours on average than medieval serfs would have
Same way we have fun now... Serf's up m' lil hat lords!
I think what I especially like are the paintings that show everyday life by everyday people done by artists who lived at that same time and who personally witnessed the very same theme or subject of their work.
I remember an artist from this medieval period by the name of 'Bruegal' (or something like that) who did paintings of regular people engaged in regular things. Personally I admired these paintings much more so than military campaigns or the aristocracy posing in front of their mansions or church commissioned subjects depicting holiness or admonishments like horrors of hell.
IF YOU CAN BELIEVE THIS,
the church back then actually offered a 'get-out-
of-jail-free' card if the money was right ! - What I find so jaw-dropping - incredulous, - is that televangelists today DO THIS VERY SAME THING;
and YES - people do it, - even to the extent of freely giving their ENTIRE life savings.
I guess that even back then, - what people did with their free time just wasn't as important as coddling swindlers, charletans, and outright ROBBERS and trading the sinfulness of any free time with every-penny-you-own
to be given to criminal ostentation, luxury, - and the salvation of your soul !
Or, a little more accurately, a get-out-of-HELL-free card.
Brueghel painted many of the pictures used in this but he lived in the Renaissance, he died in 1568 or 1569.
The word you're looking for is 'indulgences'. And yes, the nobility would basically bribe their priests for these indulgences. Basically it was buying forgiveness and absolution _before_ you commit the sin.
My son and I love watching your channel. Thank you for the detailed content.
Who can blame them? If I was forced to live back then I'd be a complete drunkard also.
Didn't the medieval peasant have more days off than the average worker today?
Yeah
They probably found that if they didnt have enough time off they would become less efficient. Wish people understood that now and actually hired enough workers to make that work.
@@chumon1992 True the amount of work just required to survive is insane today.
@@sniperelite360 it's mostly because companies are obsessed with cutting costs at any measure. They refuse to hire enough people to make their work efficient because they dont want to pay mor people. Then they expect people to devote every waking hour to their jobs because they dont have enough people. It's a huge mess.
@@chumon1992 And workers are often too tired or poor to demand any changes. Especially in third world countries where your life isn't worth anything.
Great info and well done! Thank you!
Didnt peasants have like 5-6 months of free time every year when it is the off season and there is no work to be done on the farm? You cant plant/ grow crops when the grounds frozeb solid
Yes. People worked hard during planting, and then again during harvest, but many months during the winter and before harvest were much more leisurely than today.
Men, yes. Women had to work year round.
Men being the working force is a 20th century concept.
And I suppose all that food smoked itself and all the clothes made themselves?
And you still farm in winter. Many things don't stop growing.
@@FC-hj9ub when plants where growing, work was minimal on the farm, most work in farming is at planting and harvesting
And if you need to spent less time at the farm, you automatically have more free time, yes it wasnt 5-6 months free time, but it was like only 4-8 hours of work during those months, iso 8-12 hours of work a day (rough guesses)
I love this channel 🖤
This is literally every swedish holiday except… more. A bit sad to see tradition go as holidays seem to get more and more scaled down as time goes by
To busy wasting money on new iPhones etc Christmas is solely about "what are you getting me" that's why it's lost it's soul.
Speaking of celebrations getting worse, are your Halloween's getting worse? I'm Canadian and Halloween was unbelievable as a child in the 1980s, but it sucks now. Fireworks are banned, kids go to the local shopping mall to trick-or-treat more than they do outside, and it's all done before dark, etc. It sucks now. Used to smell like fireworks and mayhem. It was the funnest time of the year for kids and almost all of it was pretty harmless.
What the narrator of this video fails to mention is that a huge part of a peasants life is hard therefore fornicating with as many people as possible becomes a peasants ultimate form of fun because of the pleasure it brings. Forget about the "productive," reasons for engaging in copulation, just like alcohol brings pleasure and temporary relief from a boring and mundane dreadful existence it also may taste good to some peoples palate which is the same reason why people engage in sexual activity because it's fun, feels good and provides some form of temporary human connection. Make no mistake about this fact as I don't care what time period in human history that person lives in . A human will engage in any activity because it makes them feel good and provides some form of temporary distraction/excitement.
you have no evidence for anything you are talking about, you are making this shit up.
and yet we still have drug prohibition rip
Fornicating as much as possible sounds good but “with as many people as possible” not so much. STD’s were exceptionally BRUTAL, rampant, and nasty back then. 🤢
Great video!
at 4:33 , that is a modern chinese erhu in the upper left corner. it would be great to do an episode on medieval chinese folk music 💛
lovely. have liked each video!!!
Great video.
Thank you. 👍
This is one of my new fave episodes
Me: *[cracks beer]* That's a great question!
So, they _could_ dance if they wanted to!
At the end of the annual harvest of the lord's crops, a lord would give each peasant or serf a 'sporting chance'. A sheaf of wheat would be hoisted onto each peasant's scythe, and he was expected to balance it on the thin blade out of the field. Drop it and you lost, make it to the road the sheaf was yours. A lot of cheering and booing, and advice was shouted out at each attempt.
When I was a peasant, I fought to stay alive during the Black Plague for fun.
The artwork is fantastic but as a portrait artist,how did they make a living painting the peasants?
Peasants sure knew how to party, aye?
Back in those days , royal wedding , royal consummation was viewed by the wedding guests, being in the room as the deed was done … cheering them on … 😳🤷♂️🤷♂️😀😀
The peasants seem to be enjoying themselves at the local Faire -1:28 - for the all ages show, that must be the 'beer party' gazebo in the background, nice. No tilt-a-whirl or porta potties back then, but the juggler is awesome, and runs a clean act.
Funny how most of those festivals are still practiced today.
How did they wake up on time to start working at dawn?. Surely they may have slept in because of malnutrition and exhaustion from the previous day’s toil so did someone stay awake all night to get the others in the village up. After all, they obviously didn’t have alarms and you couldn’t guarantee the local cockerel would crow on time…..I’ve often wondered 🤔
Humans have a "biological alarm". When you wake up the same hour for several days, your body just get used to it and does it everyday automatically. Of course there must be exceptions due to exhaustion.
Maybe the cocks or the church bell might also play a part in this.
I myself don't have alarms set up and I wake up every day at the same hour, roughly.
Peasants had a better diet than nobles. They ate a variety of vegetables and only occasional lean meats. Peasant women had a much easier time giving birth, for example. Things like heart disease and obesity were only seen in the nobility.
Hmm, from someone who had a rooster: Those a-holes wake you up even with earplugs in.🐓🔪🍽️
How did they wake up? I wake up just after 5:00 am every day naturally. I set an alarm for 5:30 AM just in case, but I wake up before the sun is up all but a few months of the year. I work in construction. We start early. I just make sure I go to bed early enough that I get my eight hours of sleep. The body isn't going to sleep for 10 hours just because you don't set an alarm. At least my body isn't. Alarm clocks are a very new invention. People are hardwired to get up at specific times.
The same way peasants have fun today, we watch, play, enjoy or fight over football.
Epic
4:50 ish sounds like you made a mis-edit.
what about magic mushrooms? also known as liberty caps
"Your honor, I did not kidnap that woman, I was simply hawking her because God was short on cash this month."
Cockfights, bear baiting and casual domestic violence. And this was before 6pm!
Sounds comfier than modern life.
@8:54 The group of competitors on the left side of the Tug-O-War are the Swedish metal band Brothers of Metal! Strange place for a video of them to appear...
and they lost but acted like they won
@@mysterycrumble they had fun, which was the point…they were happy even losing- true metal!
but fitting
5.15 anyone have a link or idea what where that music is?
Beated donkeys, drank alot of ale. Whatched executions and waged war. My quesses....
Ye Olde Soccer was a hoot
I remember dancing around the maypole in primary school. And may festivities generally. It was a lot of fun. PS: WICCA was a pagan/witchcraft movement invented in the mid
20th century.
Why people link to the page they got their music from but never say what damn song it was?
Not sure why you’re making mention of wiccans in a video about medieval peasants… considering that Wicca was first created in the 1950s by Gerald Gardener. Yes it takes inspiration from older practices but it is a very modern creation.
Not watched it yet but I'm gunna take a wild guess at alcohol and gambling
If all livestock was culled in the fall where did the peasants get their new livestock in the spring?
@James Wade: No one should expect you to be perfect; you are human and will therefore make mistakes, just like all of us. Errors will creep in from time to time, and that is totally understandable.
That said, it would be appreciated if, when an obvious error has been pointed out more than once, you could make a brief reply to set the record straight. Something like: "You are correct, thanks for pointing that out!", followed by a quick correction. If you were to acknowledge the occasional error, I would have a lot more confidence in your videos; I would be able to assume that the information being presented in your videos is factually correct, and that on the rare occasion you got something wrong, it would be mentioned and corrected in the comments section.
Why this comment? Because, as a few others have pointed out, there were certainly no "Wiccans" in Medieval times, as the religion didn't even exist until sometime in the first half of the 20th century. Despite being inspired by many pagan traditions, Wicca is a very new religion.
It's not a big deal to me that you got something wrong. We all get things wrong from time to time. No sweat. But it *is* a much bigger deal if you don't make an effort to correct any errors that might creep into your work. If you don't make it clear that the historical accuracy of your channel is important to you, then what is even the point?
I love your channel. I love your content. You are extremely talented at what you do. Just please, *please* don't be so afraid of making a mistake that you can't admit when you got something wrong. Just set the record straight and move on. Keep up the good work. 👍
I was a bit disappointed this video. When I saw 'Medieval Madness' I expected to see Suggs & Co performing Baggy Trousers or Our house with lutes.
I am sure American "football" was derived from medieval football. Bunch of guys bashing each other's head in to take the ball home 🤣
3:51 wait… what kind of rude instruction? 💀
Looking for some tips are you?
You must have cut out the part talking about people fighting each other for fun for RUclips guidelines or something. When you got nothing and got nothing to do you smash it up with friends and enemies alike. You can find it everywhere during every time period I'd imagine.
3:40 The guy on the far right with the red shirt carrying the plates of slop has too many feet.
Could you imagine trying to buy 3 shoes at a time
Also, nice catch noticing that 👍
Some opium from the apothecary helped
8:35: That's the way it always goes; first your money, then your clothes.
Water jousting sounds fun!
I was having fun watching this video up until the moment u mentioned chained bears forced 2 fight dogs ;that is when i collapsed ,,😭😭😭
at 8:54 did anybody see salior moon ?
How many forest fires do you think there were with bonfires being lit in summer lol
Oi, 4:04, Wales did and does jigs too.
Wiccan religion was founded in England somewhere between 1921and 1950 according to historians. So how could "wiccans" be doing anything in medieval times?
If the poor slaughtered their animals for winter, how would they then get replacement animals as surely they would have been expensive to buy?
Think they kept some to breed. They couldn't feed the whole herd probably
@@dorismahoney1440 That makes sense, thanks for replying.
they didn’t slaughter all of them, they had to keep a few for wool, breeding, milk, and eggs as well as producing fertilizer.
Was there anything that WASN'T shaped like, or a representative of A PHALLUS?!?
The pagan goddess Oestera must have loved Easter. Her symbols were eggs and rabbits...ring any bells?
I wonder how a government got these people to work so hard for so little and they didn't revolt
their masters were the government…
simple; didn't work, didn't survive. also, they did revolt?
Their cat videos were only live-action.
Dice and drinking
You REALLY need more variation in background music. I’m watching multiple episodes back to back, and the track you play for the beginning of every episode is becoming obnoxious.
each other?
They played Wii U.
so with bob apple you have a 1/3 chance of getting a woman, and now with tinder and bumble you have a 1/365 000 chance of getting the woman (if she stays single for 1 year)
Wait. WHAT? 9:45 😬😨🤢
Was it pleasant being peasant
Did they eat cats and dogs ?
TLDR: they made more peasants.
corn didn't reach Europe until 1500. read a book.
Ah yes, ✨eggs✨
They drank mead and ale.
There's a glitch in the video. You talk about storytelling and then go onto say "this cruel Pasttime was sadly". Also so say Morris dancing remains unchanged is extremely untrue
They got drunk and bumped bits.
Looks like the only thing we don't practice anymore in the latter activity, is slaughtering our domesticated animals because they became too expensive to keep
Wicca began in the 20th century though?
No, Wicca has been around since Pagan times; I think you may be thinking about a gentleman who created his own form of Wiccan and wrote a book on it! Since he wrote a mass published book is the form of Wiccan he created that is the one most non practitioners recognize and why you may be thinking it began in the 20th century!!!!
Yes, you're absolutely correct.
@@themasqueradefiles Incorrect. Wiccan is a form of neo-paganism formed in the 1900s that draws from ancient pagan and benevolent witchcraft practices. While it may be practically identical in practice to the old pagan ways, they did not call it "Wiccan" back then.
@@themasqueradefiles Wicca itself is a modern religion partly based on ancient pagan traditions. Pagans of the past didn't actually call themselves wiccans or pagans.
@@themasqueradefiles Wicca has most certainly NOT been around since pagan times. Gerald Gardner created the entire religion inspired by his research into pagan practices, but literally no one who lived before the early 20th century had ever even heard of it, much less actually practiced it or identified as a Wiccan. 🤔