Comparing asset distribution, wages, and working hours over the past thousand years
Medieval wealth distribution
In medieval England the crown, the church, and the leading 200 noblemen owned 75% of the land. Land was the chief asset in a time when the biggest city, London, had 35,000 inhabitants. The crown and church were the two arms of government, the church being responsible for moral and physical welfare and the crown dealing with the rest. The percentage is however disceptive, not ownly because the church was at its peak of influence, but much of the crown and church land was forest, when the real value was arable and pasture land which is 60% of the total, so they owned about 60% of the agricultural land. The crown and church also provided long leases to most of their land which gave effected ownership for several generations to noblemen.
Immediately below the nobility were knights and sokemen who owned the other 40% of arable land. Knighthood was not hereditary; instead, men were made knights as a reward or because they had become wealthy enough. By the 14th century, there were about 1,000 knights. Their land ownership was secure as long as they provided military service. The sokemen were roughly 18% of the population, and they owned about 20% of the arable and pasture land. They had security of tenure provided they carried out certain defined services often including light labor services and paying a fixed rent. Their land was inheritable. Effectively all land was therefore owned by 25% of the population.
75% of the two million population in the 11th century were bonded workers, 35% serfs or villeins: 30% cotters and borders: and 9% slaves.
Villeins did not own the land but farmed their own holdings, about 45% of all English land, which they were allowed to occupy in exchange for labor services on the landowner’s other lands. The exact services required from villeins varied, but a common arrangement was three days work each week (more in harvest time) in return for the rent of their land and ‘protection’ of their lord.
Cotters and bordars occupied very small plots of land for personal use, which like the villeins they did not own, but for which they had to pay rent and/or labor services. Although they were 30% of the population, bordars only occupied about 5% of the land.
The principal difference between a slave and bordars was that slaves could be bought and sold, and had no tenanted land. During the 12th Century many of these slaves were given holdings and became bordars.
All bonded labours obligations were passed to their children. These classes were far from fixed – villeins could buy free land, and freemen could slip into villeinage. In the course of the Middle Ages as the population climbed from 2 million to 5 million, reducing holding sizes and the price of hired labour, the tendency was for the peasants to become freer but poorer. Lords could find it more efficient to hire cheap labor (paid per task) than to enforce labor services on reluctant serfs/ villeins (paid per day).
The average holding of a peasant family during the 14th century was about 12 to 15 acres, but many poor cottars survived on less than five acres – supplementing their income by working as laborers. The king, or the Lord of the Manor, might have owned an estate, but the peasants enjoyed all sorts of rights of common usage with the forests and the arable land that do not exist today. These enabled them to graze stock, cut wood or peat, draw water or grow crops, on various plots of land at specified times of year.
Urban workers emerged during the Middle Ages. Merchant guilds completely controlled the trade in a town. To be expelled from a guild made it impossible to earn a living. Each guild looked after the health and welfare of the members and their families. Separate from the merchant guilds were the craft guilds, which regulated the quality, working hours and conditions of its members. Parents paid a fee to place a boy with a master craftsman as an apprentice for 2 – 7 years. There he received food, lodging, clothes, and instruction. All townsmen were ‘free’, and this provided some incentive for serfs to run away to the towns. If they could remain there for a year and a day they were considered free and could not be compelled to return to the manor. There is no data on the scale of urban assets in proportion to land values at this time.
Today’s wealth distribution
Currently in the UK over 50% of agricultural land is owned by 40,000 people or 0.06% of the population, equivalent to 1,200 people in 11th century Britain (neatly the number of nobles and knights). While 80% of land was owned by 0.06% of the population in medieval times, today enclosure of private land means noone, other than the owner can use the land. Early attempts to enforce enclosure in the 14th century led to mass riots among the peasants but, surprisingly, is largely accepted by the landless populace of today. These days the value of urban property far outstrips agricultural land. In the UK during the 20th century house ownership climbed from 20% to a peak of 70% in 2001 but has declined since. Also in the USA 67% of families are not renting their property. However most families have their properties heavily mortgaged so from a legal perspective the properties are owned by the banks. But about 20% of families in the US own their properties outright, and in England, 25%. However of this 25%, 60% are retirees, which means that owning a property during your working life is currently the privilege of 10% of the population which is lower than in medieval times when approximately 20% of the population owned their land and cottages outright.
By removing homes from the assets of US citizens we get the 2007 figures for the distribution of ‘financial wealth’. This is today’s equivalent of land ownership which, in the past, supplied income for the gentrys’ lavish lifestyle. When a gentleman was described to be worth 3000 guineas a year, this referred to the annual rental income from his lands. Today the yields of financial wealth allow the wealthy to live far beyond their ‘salary’ in much the same way. The top 1% in America now have 43% of the total financial wealth of the naton; the top 20% have 93%; the remaining 80% have 7%. As their house is usually the single largest asset for most families, if we include houses the figure for the assets owned by the bottom 80% doubles.
If we talk about ownership of shares in a business, the top 1% owns 61%. The top 10% own a staggering 96% of businesses and financial securities, leaving 90% of people with minimal ownership of businesses in the US. This again is a higher concentration of businesses in a few hands than in medieval times, and the distribution of financial wealth is more unequal than that of land, the core asset of the time, for our medieval ancestors. It is worth noting that between 1970 and 2010 this inequality has been steadily rising.
As an aside, in 1999, three men – Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Warren Buffet – had a net worth greater than the combined GDP of the 41 poorest nations and their 550 million people. In 2011 more than 20% of US households had negative net worth effectively owning nothing and burdened by debt. These are the key definitions of bonded labour.
Medieval working hours compared to today
Most shops opened at 6am, providing plenty of early morning shopping before the first meal of the day at 9am. Morning was also the most active time for markets, with shops closed at 3pm. Some kept open until light faded, and others, such as the barbers and blacksmiths, were open until 9pm. Foreign merchants had to wait two hours before they could enter the market, giving the locals the best of the business. On Saturday shops closed at noon. Some trades were allowed to work after Mass on Sunday, and some field work was allowed to be done before it. A few places even had the privilege of Sunday markets.
At the peak of the industrial revolution workers were putting in seventy or eighty hour weeks in comparison to today’s forty. But if we consider a typical working day in the medieval period it stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but work was intermittent with breaks for breakfast, lunch, afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the year, regular working hours were unusual. According to most research, the medieval workday averaged between eight and nine hours much like today. The battle for an eight-hour day in the late nineteenth century was simply an attempt to recover what had been the norm.
It was very unusual for servile laborers to be required to work a whole day for a lord. Three days work were in reality three half days, and if a serf worked an entire day, this was counted as two days. Detailed accounts of artisans’ workdays are available.
The biggest contrast between medieval and industrial work schedules is holidays. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Religious holidays included not only long “vacations” at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints’ and rest days. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks’ worth of ales, marking important life or season events, bride ales, wake ales, scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale. All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up about one-third of the year.
During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income, which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, or 1,440 hours annually. A thirteenth-century estimate finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England show an extremely short working year, 175 days, for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain holidays totaled five months per year.
| Time | Worker | Hours |
| 13th century | Rural worker UK | 1620 |
| 14th century | Rural worker UK | 1440 |
| 14th century | Urban UK | 2309 |
| 15th century | Miner UK | 1980 |
| 1840 | Factory worker UK | 3300 |
| 1850 | Factory worker US | 3400 |
| 1987 | Average worker US | 1949 |
| 1988 | Manufacturing worker UK | 1856 |
Medieval Income compared to today
Words like feudal and bonded labour tend to give a sense of slavery and hardship that today we look on with scorn and horror. But we fail to notice that the taxes to a modern government and obligations of today’s mortgager to the banks carry far more days of work to cover these tax bill and mortgage payments than obligations of serfs to their lords in medieval times. Recent research by economists at the University of Warwick shows that the average income per head in the 14th century was £638 in todays terms, double the average income of today’s poorest nations, with peasants able to eat a fairly mixed diet. We have detailed tax returns going back to the early 1500’s in Great Britain that indicate at that time a Gini co-efficient for income equality was 0.48 (lower is more equal). The Gini index for the entire world today has been estimated by various parties to be currently between 0.61 and 0.68, and to have been 0.43 in 1820.
Statistics for income distribution are more readily available for the USA. For income, the top 1% took 12.8% of income in 1984, but increased this to 21.3% in 2007. The bottom 80% taking into account inflation earn approximately the same as they did in 1980. The top 150,000 managers earned as much as the 60 million lower paid employees (40% of the workforce). Income distribution is more uneven today than it has been since 1917. The top 400 income earners in the United States tripled their income from 1990 to 2005, while factory worker pay rose 4.3% and the minimum wage, accounting for inflation, dropped 9.3%. By 2007, the top 400 CEOs, averaged $34.4 million PER person, with a strong showing from the finance sector.
The ratio of CEO pay to factory worker pay rose from 42:1 in 1960 to 531:1 in 2000, and was still 344:1 in 2007. These ratios are higher than those between knights and serfs in medieval times, and by way of comparison, the same ratio is about 25:1 in Europe today.
For OECD countries in general the Gini coefficient on pre-tax income for total population ranged between 0.34 to 0.53. Gini coefficient on after tax incomes for total population ranged between 0.25 to 0.48. Pretax Gini in US 1970 was 0.394 but has since climbed to 2009 to 0.469 which, you may recall, is almost the same as England in the first years of tax records in 1525 at 0.48.
Conclusion
Great progress has been made in the last 1000 years in reductions in child mortality, and the introduction of hot water and electricity to all. But lets not be fooled by the changing of labels and the introduction of technology. Power, wealth, and work are distributed the same as they were a thousand years ago. Education and democracy have not been able to break this ring of power and, in some ways, by giving the illusion of power sharing, they have given further impunity to the elite.
wildfry 