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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3369155" data-attributes="member: 4937">The plight of the medieval peasant, while certainly not great, was - at least in the Western countries - not that bad.  They worked six days a week, but they could not be worked on the Sabbath and by tradition and right could take off all feasts days of the church - not merely just Easter, All-Saints, and Christmas but something like 80-120 days a year depending on the customs of the region.  In a sense, they probably had more rights to a vacation than you or I have.  In harvest, they'd work 16 hour days its true, but so do farmers everywhere even today.  In the winter work would come to basically a stop, and other than 3-4 hours of chores a day the big problem was staying warm and seeing in the dark.The manorial system was a form of slavery, but it was both less brutal than many of the slave systems it had replaced, less brutal than the plight faced elsewhere in the world (though the land was harder), and less brutal than the explicitly racial slavery that would come after it.  Serfs had rights, and while they lacked much power they had a force of tradition and religion protecting them.  If you read the doomsday book, one thing you will be struck by is how well to do some of the 'slaves' were.  They had businesses, they had assets, they for all practical purposes had land, they had livestock, and had obtained various 'rights' which ammounted to basically business transactions with thier Lord.  In some cases you have really unexpected things like the land and property being held in the woman's name because she was a higher caste serf than the husband.My point is not that it was some sort of idealic system, but rather that the truth of it was far more complicated in practice than any blanket statement you could make.</blockquote>

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