In fact, economist Juliet Shor found that during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th-century England, peasants might put in no more than days a year. As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually. So far, that forecast is not looking good. What happened? Go back , or years and you find that most people did not work very long hours at all. In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze.
Fast-forward to the 21st century, and the U. Many American workers must keep on working through public holidays, and vacation days often go unused. Some blame the American worker for not taking what is her due.
But in a period of consistently high unemployment, job insecurity and weak labor unions, employees may feel no choice but to accept the conditions set by the culture and the individual employer. For help in times of distress, whether periods of famine or illness, personal problems such as debt or conflict, loss of animals or oppression by local magnates, peasants made vows to their saints, which they then had to fulfill. These vows, private contracts as it were, between individuals and saints, were at the heart of local religion, and preserved the ancient sense of religio as that which bound the faithful to the divine.
Vows took many forms. Often, a peasant vowed, in return for a cure or the return of lost livestock to make a pilgrimage. The journey might be to the local saint or might be to a regional saint's shrine. The great, international pilgrimage sites such as Compostella, Rome, or Jerusalem, were hardly within the possibility of ordinary people, although some seem to have undertaken such trips, which were usually expected to be one-way. Vows often included the promise of a payment, in money or in kind, in return for, or in expectation of, a favor.
The decision of which saint should be chosen for a particular vow drew on many factors. Local tradition played an important role, with local saints known for certain types of miraculous interventions. Some were part of the wider Christian tradition and were encouraged by local and regional clergy.
Others were strictly local and even condemned by the wider Church, such as the appeal to Saint Guinefort for help with weak and ailing children in southeastern France, even though Guinefort happened not even to have been human but rather a martyred, saintly dog.
The coincidence of a natural disaster and a saint's day might also be a sign of the appropriate saint to handle a particular situation. When villagers near Madrid noticed that it hailed for several years in a row on St. Anne's day, they vowed to observe her vigil.
In another village Saint Barbara's Day was celebrated because on that day lightening had hit the village church and burned a number of people in it. To clerical elites, the ability of individuals to recite these prayers, along with their reception of the eucharist and annual confession, was a strong indication of the quality of their religious training and orthodoxy.
Thus, for example, in the early sixteenth century a Spanish peasant, Juan de Rabe, who explained that he maintained himself "by working, by digging, plowing, and herding sheep," was able to recite the Ave Maria and the Pater Noster, but not the Credo or the Ten Commandments. Other prayers, too, were indistinguishable from charms except for their invocation of apostles, prophets, and saints.
A fifteenth century rural artisan in England, Robert Reynes, who was somewhat literate, has left for example, a commonplace book that contains a prayer to St. Apollonia against the toothache and other prayer-charms against malaria and fever.
Spirits and Demons. Reynes' commonplace book also contains a formula for conjuring angels into a child's thumbnail for purposes of divination. Official Christianity taught that there was a heaven, earth, and hell, with an intermediate place of temporary punishment, Purgatory, developing an increasingly elaborate topography in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
However, in widespread popular belief there were other powers and beings that fit with great difficulty into these neat categories. There were the "good people," spirits who had best be called "good" because they could do such evil; fairy kings and ghosts; witches and evil beings that lay in wait for mortals. These beings lived in their worlds that did not quite conform to the topography of heaven or hell, and people might visit these realms at their own peril.
Peasant Religion in Medieval Europe Thus prayers could bind spirits, sacred symbols and rituals such as the sign of the cross could be used to protect people and livestock, and ritual objects, such as the Eucharist, could be employed to bind supernatural powers to the needs of mortals.
It is wrong to exclude such practices as charms, incantations, and manipulations of the sacred from an understanding of peasant religion, either dismissing them as "magic" or as a perversion of "true" Christianity. These practices were essential aspects of what peasants needed for security and protection in a world dominated by unseen forces, human, diabolical, and divine. In the particular communities of parishes across Europe, local traditions combined with the broader traditions of Christianity to produce meaningful if particular customs.
In some churches in the South of France, young men dressed in horse costumes and danced in church on the vigil of the local saint's feast. Through most of the Middle Ages, such practices seldom drew the attention of ecclesiastical authorities. However, other sorts of practices and beliefs did draw the attention of authorities and led to an increasing focus on the beliefs of ordinary people and their relationship to church discipline and practice.
In the South of France, an alternative form of religion, Catharism, spread apparently from the Balkans and took root in the regional aristocracy and in villages.
This dualistic tradition, propagated by "perfecti," emphasized the reality of a force of evil as well as one of good and the need to purify one's life. In peasant communities from Italy to the Pyrenees, this Catharism combined with an anticlericalism and a peasant materialism to gain adherents. Ordinary villagers were particularly impressed with the purity of life of the "perfecti" and the contrast with their own local clergy.
None of these movements were primarily peasant in origin. They all began among the educated elites and spread only later into the peasantry.
Likewise, none of these movements except perhaps Catharism in limited areas in the south of France were ever majority movements, but they presented a clear threat to the monopoly of the institutional church. In order to combat these movements, the Church established inquisitions in various regions of Europe to uncover heterodox belief, to correct it through preaching and instruction and, where necessary, through imprisonment or even, with the assistance of secular authorities, through physical punishment and execution.
Certain religious orders, particularly the Dominicans, were at the forefront of preaching against heresy, and it is through the collections of exempla or short, moral stories useful for preaching compiled by Dominicans and others that we learn much about heterodox belief and practice in medieval society.
Many of the practices and beliefs uncovered by inquisitorial courts were not related to any heretical movement, but nevertheless struck learned judges as deviant. These included various fertility rituals, incantations, and local practices they deemed superstitious or diabolical. Since Antiquity, deviation had been seen as the work of the devil, and popular attempts to bind spiritual powers without the intervention of the Church were increasingly seen as witchcraft, that it, working in a pact with the devil to gain supernatural power.
Across the continent, inquisitions uncovered witches, generally marginal women in small villages, and convicted them of an increasingly detailed series of crimes involving pacts with the devil.
By the end of the Middle Ages, witch hunts were increasingly popular, although the great witch craze would come in the sixteenth century. European peasant religion was fully integrated into Christianity from at least the eighth century.
However in its myriad local manifestations it emphasized the need to bind supernatural powers in the service of agrarian communities. Peasant worship focused on the parish church in which rituals of life and death were performed and on the local saints to whom one looked for protection. Peasants understood the basics of Christian teaching and knew some of the formal prayers and rituals of the wider church, but incorporated these into their daily lives.
Such practices were neither heterodox nor were they "pagan survivals" or "superstition. Works Cited. Angenendt, Arnold. Das Friihmittelalter. Die abendldndische Christenheit von bis Stuttgart, Heilige und Reliquien. Die Geschichte ihres Kultes von fruhen Christendum bis zur Gegenwart.
Munich, 1 Wollasch eds. Munich, Aubrun, Michel. Paris, Les Reliques, Objets, cultes, symboles. Turnhout, Brenon, Anne. Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. Oxford, Chapelot, J. The Village and the House in the Middle Ages.
London, Christian, William A. Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain. Princeton, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Clerck, Paul de. Paris, , 1: Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England New Haven, Emerton, Ephraim ed. The Letters of Saint Boniface. New York, Flint, Valerie I. Princeton, 1 99 1.
Fouracre, Paul. Ginzburg, Carlo. Baltimore, Goffart, Walter. Grundmann, Herbert. Notre Dame, Gurevich, Aron. Bak and Paul A. Cambridge, Hanawalt, Barbara. Hen, Yitzhak. Leiden, Herlihy, David. Medieval Households. Cambridge, MA, Christianity and Paganism, Philadelphia, Hudson, Ann.
Diocese, pievi, e parrochie. Atti della sesta Settimane internazionale di studio. Milano settembre Milan, Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Le Goff, Jacques. The birth of purgatory. Lewit, Tamara. Agricultural Production in the Roman Economy Louis, Cameron. Maisonneuve, H. Etudes sur les origines de l'inquisition. Manselli, Raoul. La religione popolare nel Medioevo secc. Turin, Mayr-Harting, Henry. University Park, Merlo, Grado G. Contro gli eretici. Bologna, McFarlane, K. John Wy cliff e and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity.
McNeill, John T. Mertens, Volker and Hans-Jochen Schiewer eds. Oktober Tubingen, Prinz, Friedrich. Jahrhundert 2nd edition. Darmstadt, The Peasantry of Europe. Peasants in the Middle Ages. Urbana, Rosener, Werner ed,. My family is large, there are four children.
We don't have a father - he died, fighting for the worker's cause, and my mother I want to study very much, but I cannot go to school. I had some old boots, but they are completely torn and no one can mend them. My mother is sick, we have no money and no bread, but I want to study very much That is what Vladimir Ilich Lenin said. But I have to stop going to school.
We have no relatives and there is no one to help us, so I have to go to work in a factory, to prevent the family from starving. Dear grandfather, I am 13,1 study well and have no bad reports. I am in Class Sokolov ed , Obshchestvo I Vlast, v ye gody Moscow, Source D Official view of the opposition to collectivisation and the government response 'From the second half of February of this year, in various regions of the Ukraine The greater part of the peasant insurrections have been linked with outright demands for the return of collectivised stocks of grain, livestock and tools Between 1st February and 15th March, 25, have been arrested
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