The world is supposed to have been informed by Dr. Juliet Schor, citing medievalist Gregory Clark, in her book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, that medieval peasants worked no more than 150 days per year. That Clark seems to have since recanted and given the peasant 30 days of vacation a year is barely to the point.
The general public is informed through news articles that those peasants enjoyed vacations lasting more than half the year. Some refer to them as holidays. Again, lasting more than half the year.
First, it is clear that such highly qualified scholars as Schor and Clark are unlikely to have said what they are reported to have said. So what I am about to inform readers is not a refutation of their claims. I have no idea what exactly they actually wrote that has been paraphrased by the journalists in question with such a popular response. My information is not intended in any way as a refutation of any part of their work.
I will start, instead, by stating that our words “vacation” and “holiday” bear only a distant relationship to the meanings of those words in medieval or Tudor times. Getting holiday out of the way first, in Tudor times it was not used as we do. What we call “holidays” would then have been called “feast days”. Christmas, for example, was the “feast of Christ Mass day”. Easter was “the feast of Easter Mass day”. January 13th was the Feast of the Mass of St. Hilary”. When a group of high feast days were gathered together, around Christmas and Easter, they might be called “the holy days” or “holidays”.
Since medieval Catholic times, almost every day on the calendar has been dedicated to at least one saint of the church. Every day's mass was dedicated to a saint whose name day it was. Each day, then, was indeed a day holy to its given saint. If we call saints' days “holy days,” then not half but rather nearly 365 days of the year were holidays. But peasants and others worked hard on those “holy days,” nonetheless. They were not “days off”. Only the high holidays offered some respite and not as much as the articles in question suggest.
Well then, one might think, the long stretches free from labor must have been vacation days, not holidays. And, indeed, the error we are addressing relates to the fact that there were a lot of vacation days on the medieval and Tudor English calendar — nearly half. But one did not put in a request to vacation in October in order to indulge one's love of foliage and quaint little Vermont inns.
The days of vacation were the same for everyone. They were fixed. Not only that, but, while all were effected by them, only certain groups of people got to enjoy them. London area merchants with shops around Winchester, Whitehall, the Strand, the Universities, and Chancery Lane, etc., surely dreaded vacation days. For “vacation” referred to the closing and emptying (vacating) of all government offices. Governnent and universities only remained open “during term”. That's where our idiomatic phrases “spring term,” “fall term,” etc., come from.
In between terms, government agencies and schools only kept a skeleton crew of workers and officials available for emergencies. Otherwise, they were vacated. Thus these periods were called vacations. They were indeed quite long. Around Christmas and Easter they included Advent, Lent and the high holidays that followed.
When there was a summer term — at a given point in history (for there was not always one) — it was short and the vacation that followed was not for religious purposes. Following summer term (called “Trinity Term” because it generally began around Trinity Sunday in early June) all offices closed so the nation could concentrate on bringing in the annual harvest.
As I wrote, in my “A Thousand Years of English Terms”,
Trinity had no stated termination point. For practical purposes, it ended when the demands of the annual harvest made it impractical to pursue other business.1
Throughout the “summer vacation,” (often called the “long vacation”) be sure, all sturdy hands worked much harder than they did the rest of the year. Not only that, but, on more than one occasion, Queen Elizabeth issued orders to the nation's clergy to announce from the pulpit that God called upon the faithful to work on the sabbath during harvest season. The work week went from 6 to 7 days long.
During vacations the upper classes might be in a position enjoy an extended leisure. Even the officials of government and university, however, measured their wealth and success by their ownership of lands. Generally of farm lands. If they vacated London for their country estates they and/or their overseers likely spent considerable time attending to local business and repairs and upgrades to those estates.
As for the peasant farmers, they did have more fairs and festivals than Capitalist countries tend to celebrate. Otherwise, they had six days a week of work to tend throughout the rest of the year. They worked as much if not more during vacations.
Shop keepers large and small that served government or university workers surely found themselves with more time on their hands. More to the point, one assumes, they found themselves having to live on considerably less profit in spite of working the same or longer hours. It is likely that those shop keepers used the time to catch up on those tasks for which there otherwise never seemed to be enough time.
As for the women, at each societal level, as we know, “Man may work from sun to sun. But a woman's work is never done.”
1Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “A Thousand Years of English Terms.” Virtual Grub Street, 2, 2019. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-thousand-years-of-english-terms.html
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