Life for the medieval peasant was certainly no picnic. His life was shadowed by fear of famine, disease and bursts of warfare. His diet and personal hygiene left much to be desired.
But despite his reputation as a miserable wretch, you might envy him one thing: his vacations.
Ploughing and harvesting were backbreaking toil, but the peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off.
The Church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent mandatory holidays. Weddings, wakes, and births might mean a week off quaffing ale to celebrate, and when wandering jugglers or sporting events came to town, the peasant expected time off for entertainment. There were labour-free Sundays, and when the ploughing and harvesting seasons were over, the peasant got time to rest, too.
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 150 days a year. As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually.
A history of dwindling vacation days
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way: John Maynard Keynes, one of the founders of modern economics, made a famous prediction that by 2030, advanced societies would be wealthy enough that leisure time, rather than work, would characterize national lifestyles. So far, that forecast is not looking good.
What happened? Some cite the victory of the modern eight-hour a day, 40-hour working week over the punishing 70 or 80 hours a 19th century worker spent toiling as proof that we’re moving in the right direction.
But Americans have long since kissed the 40-hour working week goodbye, and Shor’s examination of work patterns reveals that the 19th century was an aberration in the history of human labour. When workers fought for the eight-hour working day, they weren’t trying to get something radical and new, but rather to restore what their ancestors had enjoyed before industrial capitalists and the electric light bulb came on the scene.
Go back 200, 300, or 400 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.
“The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed,” notes Shor. “Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.”
Many American workers must keep on working through public holidays, and vacation days often go unused. Even when we finally carve out a holiday, many of us answer emails and “check in” whether we’re camping with the kids or trying to kick back on the beach.
Some blame the American worker for not taking what is her due. But in a period of consistently high unemployment, job insecurity and weak labour unions, employees may feel no choice but to accept the conditions set by the culture and the individual employer.
In a world of “at will” employment, where the work contract can be terminated at any time, it’s not easy to raise objections.
It’s true that the New Deal brought back some of the conditions that farm workers and artisans from the Middle Ages took for granted, but since the 1980s things have gone steadily downhill. With secure long-term employment slipping away, people jump from job to job, so seniority no longer offers the benefits of additional days off. The rising trend of hourly and part-time work, stoked by the Great Recession, means that for many, the idea of a guaranteed vacation is a dim memory.
The consequences of constantly working
Ironically, this cult of endless toil doesn’t really help the bottom line.
Study after study shows that overworking reduces productivity. On the other hand, performance increases after a vacation, and workers come back with restored energy and focus. The longer the vacation, the more relaxed and energised people feel upon returning to the office.
Economic crises give austerity-minded politicians excuses to talk of decreasing time off, increasing the retirement age and cutting into social insurance programs and safety nets that were supposed to allow us a fate better than working until we drop. In Europe, where workers average 25 to 30 days off per year, politicians like French President Francois Hollande and former Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras have sent signals that the culture of longer vacations is coming to an end.
But the belief that shorter vacations bring economic gains doesn’t appear to add up.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) the Greeks, who face a horrible economy, work more hours than any other Europeans. In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in productivity.
Beyond burnout, vanishing vacations make our relationships with families and friends suffer. Our health is deteriorating: depression and higher risk of death are among the outcomes for our no-vacation nation. Some forward-thinking people have tried to reverse this trend, like progressive economist Robert Reich, who has argued in favour of a mandatory three weeks off for all American workers. Congressman Alan Grayson proposed the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, but alas, the bill didn’t even make it to the floor of Congress.
Speaking of Congress, its members seem to be the only people in America getting as much down time as the medieval peasant. In recent years, they’ve gotten upward of 239 days in vacation time.
Not content with making millions landless in the 18th century through enclosure, a new Treasury unit is now stealing Britain’s remaining family farmland, for Blackrock
Five suggestions to Save British Farming:
set up a charitable fund to pay off distressed farmers’ inheritance bills;
institute a chain of collectively owned farm shops in every market town to act as a mini supermarket for seasonal produce;
demand boycotts of supermarkets and/or products where price fixing is taking place, robbing farmers;
blockade factory farms and mass mechanised greenhouses owned by front companies for private equity firms;
set up a direct action group to occupy and obstruct individuals and businesses which are destroying UK family farming.
How’s that for a start. Please email me or add your own suggestions in the comments at the bottom.
No Socialist distancing
Simon Fairlie’s Land Magazine follows the Socialist Workers Party and George Monbiot , dancing to the World Economic Forum’s global finance capitalism tune
STROUD: 02Jan24: Tony Gosling takes a look at UK Green ‘social justice’ campaigns’ extraordinary distancing themselves from farming’s grassroots, and unwitting sucking up to a Swiss-based oligopoly who want corporations to rule the world
2022 to 2024 were a terrible year for The Land Magazine. The two founding editors were evicted from their home at Monkton Wyld near Lyme Regis. Simon Fairlie through the kangaroo courts in the Autumn of 2024 while Gill Barron was bullied out of the same rural community the year before.
The screaming irony now is the four individuals who hoofed Simon out of Monkton Wylde as residents and trustees simply walked away from their roles and the community … just a couple of weeks after Simon drove his last van-load of belongings away from his, and the magazine’s beautiful old home.
But Gill and Simon did considerably better than ‘One Man and his Dogger’ Robin Page, author, journalist, national advocate for wildlife-friendly farming who was evicted in 2021 from the eight-figure valued Countryside Restoration Trust he founded and built up over decades. He died 18 months later, of cancer, and a broken heart.
Simon Fairlie founded The Land Magazine in 1996 which began, after The Land Is Ours successful six-month long Guinness occupation in Wandsworth. As ‘Land Essays’, the ‘long read’ version of The Land Is Ours newsletter, it was always, as now, an occasional publication but in the last decade or so it has failed to address the contradictions in the ‘zero carbon’ agenda, such as new forest burning power stations, soaring living costs and more recently the supermarket and energy price-fixing assault on Britain’s family farms.
In the 2020s, sadly, my contributions, even to the Land Mag’s. letters page, have been spiked. The editorial has turned decidedly anti-livestock, anti game-hunting or poaching, backing the WEF’s discredited Rewilding’ programme (now Robin’s CRT is conveniently out of the way) promoted by George Monbiot’s partner, Rebecca Wrigley. Keeping it, top-down and where possible foundation funded, in the Davos family.
No Charmer: Starmer The Farmer Harmer
November and December 2024 saw two unprecedented family farmer protests at Westminster with around 10,000 turning out to a lobby called by the NFU in November and 6-700 tractors filling Whitehall, as the DEFRA select committee asked why the Treasury hadn’t just ended business rollover relief where millionaires were using farmland as a tax dodge, in the run-up to Christmas.
Taking farms off families is against everything social justice or environmental campaigners believe in. Yet in the 2025 Land Magazine [see below] Simon argues that the demise of small farms since 1984 is because there hasn’t been inheritance tax on larger farms. One wonders if he actually talks to or knows any farmers, who will tell him that a whole raft of price and ever-changing ‘variety’ policies and punitive penalties, imposed by supermarkets, have been cutting deep into margins right across farming ever since Thatcherism.
Families, and the secure tenure, such as freehold and copyhold, they have passed down, have been the bedrock of national food security since hunter-gatherers began to establish farming in England 6,000 years ago. It was the increasing surpluses these families produced, as they honed their craft over countless generations, that allowed for towns to grow and civilisation to flourish.
Ideally smallholdings and market gardens should be viable but that’s not been the case roughly since the 1970s, again since Thatcher and the supermarkets took over. You could argue today’s bigger farms, over 750 acres say, should be taxed, over 1000 definitely … but not ONLY if they are in individual ownership. Families who intend to pass their land or homes on to their children are ALWAYS the best stewards of the land.
Taking it off families starts to sound like the son of the Nazi nuclear bomb scientist Klaus Schwab’s ‘You will own nothing, and be happy’ brigade again. The big institutional and feudal landowners, including Crown Estate, Duchys of Cornwall & Lancaster, Church of England, Ministry of Defence, Forestry England, Duke of Westminster etc etc all have their land in trust or Ltd companies so will avoid the tax these family farmers have to pay.
Rachel Reeves is not John McDonnell. When Jeremy Corbyn was bounced out of winning the 2017 General Election by Labour party apparatchiks and the London media, a new finance capitalism friendly Labour party under the iron grip of Starmer and Reeves arrived.
The good old 2003 illegal war party, with Blair and Campbell major figures behind the scenes, was approved fit to govern, by good King Charles and the City of London. When the high priest of finance capitalism Blackrock’s Larry Fink was schmoozed by Reeves and Starmer Downing Street in November 2024.
The Family Farm Tax is part of a much wider post-war attack by global finance capitalism, which accelerated under Thatcher, on people who work land they own, to feed us. Added to skyrocketing energy prices, ridiculous supermarket demands, etc, all brought about through fascist price-fixing, land put on the market to pay the tax or just to escape the ridiculous hours and negative margins, benefits…? Those who finance: solar farms, giant automated planting/harvesting greenhouses, factory farmers, industrial agriculture, carbon offset firms, those clear-cutting forestry as a biofuel. The list goes on and on as far as a speculator with pound signs in their eyes can dream.
But more importantly we are witnessing the beginning of a further wave of enclosure. This time, land is not being stolen from peasants by large farmers. Its beginning the move from private, into corporate hands. And The Land Magazine, and Land Workers Alliance, along with traditional left-wing workers groups such as the SWP are cheering it on. ‘You see those farmers all vote Tory’. ‘Why shouldn’t they pay inheritance tax just like everyone else’.
Simon Fairlie has become George Monbiot lite. Simon still clings to that cruel anti-vegan trope, meat-eating, and is therefore not 4th Reich WEF extremist enough for the Guardian. Which, while everything is done to keep Simon on side, remains the George Monbiot domain.
Nevertheless… I’m not here to sell you anything, I’m the sort of editor who will invite all sides to the dinner table. So, over to Simon…
The “Family Farm Tax”, might there be up-sides?
By Simon Fairlie, December 2024
In the Spring of 1920 Sir Nicholas Bacon of Raveningham Hall in Norfolk wrote to the tenants farming his land:
It has unfortunately become necessary for me to follow the course already pursued by many landowners — that is, of selling a considerable portion of my estate . . . Heavy war taxation, the great increase of Death Duties of last year’s budget, the increased cost of living, and the growing up of my family, for whom provision must be made, compel this step. I can only hope that many of my tenants may be able to purchase their farms, and so not leave their homes.
The four years that followed the First World War witnessed an unprecedented shift in landownership, something akin to land reform. “England is changing hands,” The Times observed. To counteract inheritance tax and other expenses, large numbers of aristocratic farming estates were sold off. No one knows exactly how many acres, and claims that “a quarter of England changed hands” may be exaggerated. What is known is that:
owner-occupation increased from 10.9 percent of the cultivated area of England and Wales in 1914, to 36 per cent of the cultivated area in 1927 . . . roughly one quarter of the cultivated area changed from being tenanted land to being land owned by the farmers.
Many of Britain’s independent family farms owe their existence to increased death duties, first introduced by the Liberal Lord Harcourt in 1894 and reinforced by Lloyd George twenty- five years later. It is somewhat ironic then, that many of these farmers are now vociferously opposed to parallel increases in Inheritance Tax, made in the Labour Government’s Autumn Budget. Agricultural property inheritance tax relief has been removed, theoretically from all farms valued at over £1 million, though after allowances for spouses etc this is more likely to equate to £3 million. The Government states that some three quarters of all farms will be unaffected, but nonetheless the National Farmers’ Union has dubbed the move “the Family Farm Tax”. Its President, Tom Bradshaw claims to have
heard about distressed elderly parents who are having to apologise to their children in tears for something that isn’t their fault, telling them they’re sorry because they feel they’re now a burden on the family.
Besides the need to plug the much vaunted £22 billion budget shortfall, some of the thinking behind the new Labour Government’s assault on Inheritance Tax relief can be traced to the work of the French economist Thomas Piketty and others, who have noted that rising wealth inequality is fuelled by the flow of inheritances from one generation to the next. The ratio of personal wealth to national income is rising and over the last 20 years the value of property and land has increased far faster than wages or inflation.
Nowhere is this tendency more noticeable than in the farming sector which is inherently dependent on land and property. A 200 acre farm worth in the region of million, might yield an annual net income of only £25,000, just one percent or even nothing at all other than the available subsidies. In such cases the real profit lies in the increasing value of the property, and many farm-owners are simultaneously underpaid workers and fat capitalists. Under these frankly bonkers economic conditions, failing farmers throw in the towel and cash in, while successful ones engross their holdings, leading to the consolidation of assets that is endemic to unregulated capitalism. As farms get bigger and economies of scale increase, the margins dictated by the supermarkets decline and another cohort of farms finds it impossible to make ends meet, and so it continues.
The National Farmers’ Union, which is at heart a landowners’ union, knows only too well how to exploit this schizoid role, posing to the public as the defender of the hard-pressed food producer, while advocating policies that benefit the engrossing landowner, and that is precisely what it is doing in respect of the “Family Farm Tax”. Since 1984 the regime of exemption from Inheritance Tax has accompanied the loss of around half of the farms under 100 hectares in England and Wales and an increase in those over 200 hectares. To claim that removing the exemption for the largest farms will threaten family farms is brazen hypocrisy.
How much impact this measure will actually have is hard to say, but if it goes any way towards breaking up large holdings, and releasing land onto the market that is cheaper and more accessible to new entrants, that is very much to be welcomed. The total area of land currently coming onto the market
around 150,000 acres in 2023 is less than a quarter of the area traded in 1950, and an even smaller proportion of the area that changed hands in 1920.
Only one caveat has been voiced by the Tenant Farmers’ Association, representing farmers whose hard work boosts the largest landowners’ incomes, and who may find the land they rent sold to pay off Inheritance Tax. Its Chief Executive, George Dunn has written:
“The £1 million tax-free exemption may help small owner occupiers, but it will not help small tenant farmers on large estates, particularly those occupying under insecure Farm Business Tenancies. The Chancellor of the Exchequer must think again. The 2026 legislation must include a provision to exempt land let for 10 or more years. Without this provision, we could see the loss of many small family farms”.
Alternatively some of the money raised could be used to help fund any such tenants who wished to buy the property.
Simon Fairlie is founder, now co-editor of TheLandMagazine.org.uk and the printed mag with Mike Hannis (Kingshill), Gill Barron and SM Parsons
SOURCES
J.Beckett and M.Turner “End of the Old Order? FML Thompson, the Land Question, and the Burden of Ownership in England” AgHR 55,11.
Anthony B Atkinson, “Wealth and Inheritance in Britain from 1896 to the Present”, LSE OnLine, 2018.
Ploughing and harvesting were backbreaking toil, but the peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way: John Maynard Keynes, one of the founders of modern economics, made a famous prediction that by 2030, advanced societies would be wealthy enough that leisure time, rather than work, would characterize national lifestyles. So far, that forecast is not looking good.
Go back 200, 300, or 400 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.
Study after study shows that overworking reduces productivity. On the other hand, performance increases after a vacation, and workers come back with restored energy and focus. The longer the vacation, the more relaxed and energised people feel upon returning to the office.
