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Loop Stitching.
Sometimes, when chatting about work in historical/medieval/prehistoric times, especially the very time-consuming textile work, somebody says "ah, well, but they did have more time back then".
Did they, though?
My usual answer to this comment is that back in history, days also only had 24 hours each. Not all of these hours were light, and there was less artificial lighting available than we're used to today, both in quality and in quantity. Some of the dark hours were, of course, spent sleeping - so let's just say, for simplicity's sake, that after 8 hours of sleep, there's 16 hours of time left to do things.
To do... all kinds of things. Especially those that were directly connected to sustaining yourself in some way, either by farming directly or by doing some other work to earn money to buy the things you'd need, or a mixture of both. Sounds familiar? Because that is, basically, what we're still doing today.
So depending on what your work is and how long it takes, you might have resources left over to spend on luxury goods in the wider sense, or you might not. That, again, is something that remains the same no matter what era we're in. There's people who have more resources and people who have less, and those with more resources can invest them in stuff that serves as status symbol, and those who don't... they have to make choices.
Time-consuming manufacture of things means that you either have the surplus time yourself and can spend it on making something fancy, or you have the money (or bartering means) to buy somebody else's time. If the rest of your social environment knows the worth of the item made, it can serve as a status symbol. (That won't work if you get something very pricey and fancy but nobody can appreciate it, because it's not common knowledge. A very fine hand-knit sweater would take a lot of time, but most people won't realise that when you pass them on the street - something like a fancy designer hand-bag, though, would be more widely recognisable.)
I am a firm believer that "back then", people did not have so much more time than we do have now. They'd also have had distractions, and days when things did not go as planned, and they'd have hung out with friends and family in their leisure time and not worked all the time on something. (Well, not more than modern people do.) That is also what I try to explain when the comment comes up.
Sometimes, though, I feel like going "oh my goodness, someone had waaaay too much time", too. Like now, when I am doing the stitching for the pile on the reconstruction of the Trindhøj cloak.
That is a lot of stitching. A LOT.
Don't get me wrong, it's a quite nice task, and each single stitch goes rather quickly, but a lot of quick actions will still take a long time. I also hope that the yarn I spun will be enough, and I won't run out before I finish the loops.
Maybe it helps to work faster? So I'm finished before the yarn realises that it's not enough?
Comments 5
I feel like people in the past had more headspace in their 24 hours than we do these days. Partly because a lot of their work was manual, leaving their minds free for processing whatever else was happening in their lives at the time, and partly because they didn't have radio/TV/internet/advertising/social media bombarding them all day every day.
I have taken to leaving my computer off until midafternoon, and I enjoy the calmer pace of doing practical work before that point (housework, gardening, mending...). But the lure of the screen is hard to resist.
Yes, that may well be the case - today's normal life is really a lot of information coming in at all points in time. We're also hyper-available with all the social media and mobile phones these days.
I remember back when you'd call "at" someone's place, while today you call someone, directly. It's nice to be able to reach people quickly and easily, but then, it's also a lure that is hard to resist, much like the screens.
Care is another factor: on average people lived shorter lives, but did they require more or less care overall? How much would really be getting done if you're also caring for a chronically unwell relative and six children aged under ten? Then as now there's a societal presumption that "grandma will help" which presumes she's not the relative needing the care.
Food preservation is also a factor I've always found fascinating- how long it would take, given the quantities required and facilities available, to last until the item was next naturally available.
There was also the societal expectation that the children would be contributing, and they wouldn't be away at school for much of the day. I think a lot of modern people (in the West, at least) tend to underestimate how much even a small child can do - particularly if the child has spent their whole life watching how it's done.
With healthcare being extremely limited (and not always helpful), I wonder how high the number of chronically unwell relatives who didn't either recover or die would have been.
When you think about it, the idea of a nuclear family in which the work of the household, childcare, and nursing all falls to one person is a fairly modern one and really quite unnatural.
It probably depends a lot on the individual situation - and, in regard to food and food preservation, on the year and how the harvest for the crops grown will fall out. There's good and bad years for different foods to grow, as everyone who's done gardening for more than one season will know...
Food preservation is definitely a fascinating topic too, and something that will take a bit of time out of daily life if you're doing it yourself. While not medieval, the first thing that comes to my mind when talking about food, and out-of-season food, is Audley End and its kitchen gardens - where different varieties of food plants were grown to have them available for as long as possible, and grapes were kept in a special grape house which stretched the season out immensely. With our cooled specialised warehouses, a lot of this has been forgotten. And of course it requires enough space in a garden, and knowledge, and time to care for the plants, also something that will not fit into many people's modern lifestyle.