A Comm for Historymemes

They didn't get paid, most people were subsistence farmers meaning they supported themselves through their own farming. Under feudalism they didn't own their land, they technically rented it from the liege. To pay their rent they were obligated to work on the liege's land part of the time. These church "holidays" (generally saint's days) were just days they weren't obligated to work on the liege's land. This by no means meant they had that time off. They still had to work on their own land and do all of the endless chores life back then entailed such as making and repairing cloth, building and repairing buildings, animal care and slaughter, preserving food, etc, etc. It was 24/7. If you got injured you couldn't just sit and recover for long because the family depended on everyone's labor. There were constant peasant rebellions too which indicate that life among them wasn't a casual, happy one.

They made some money on the side, mainly from selling any excess they were able to produce from their own land. Many of the famous national dishes of Europe are peasant dishes from having to make the less desirable meats more palatable while the best cuts were sold to the wealthy for hard currency. The possibility of starvation in years of bad crops was always a possibility.

It varied wildly, but a good portion probably didn’t truly “own” their land, so the workdays they owed to the landowner were most likely their debt for the “privilege” of being able to live and work the land the rest of the time. In some instances though I imagine they were probably paid for harvests, then owed a certain amount of that to the landowner. Everything was pretty much local, so they would’ve had weekly markets where they traded whatever excess stuff they had for coin.

Given all the extra work they had to do for just regular things we don’t even think about, it’s hard to even compare peasant workdays to modern workdays. Yes, we spend more time in our workplaces, but we also don’t spend additional hours of manual labor on hunting, scavenging, collecting, or cutting down wood for having to cook our food or heat our homes. It’s kind of hard to compare the two lifestyles.