What did peasants and serfs do for fun?

Despite not having modern medicine, technology, or science, peasants still had many forms of entertainment: wrestling, shin-kicking, cock-fighting, among others. However, sometimes, entertainment could be certainly weird and downright bizarre.
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What do peasants do for fun?

People often came here to play games, to drink, to work on chores, or tell stories. Some played games such as skittles, which is like modern bowling. Occasionally, actors might come to town and put on plays and dramas. People also met here to enjoy holidays.
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What games did peasants play in the Middle Ages?

Medieval people were fond of rough and physically challenging games and sports such as jousts, tournaments, hawking and hunting. At times they used animals like bears, monkeys and dogs to amuse themselves.
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What did peasants do in a day?

For peasants, daily medieval life revolved around an agrarian calendar, with the majority of time spent working the land and trying to grow enough food to survive another year. Church feasts marked sowing and reaping days and occasions when peasant and lord could rest from their labors.
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What do serfs do daily?

While they were tending to their lord's fields, serfs also had their own chores to do. They raised vegetables and herbs, and maybe fattened a pig, for their own meals. Serfs provided for nearly all of their own daily needs. They made their own clothes from scratch, starting right from the sheep.
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What did peasants eat in medieval times?



What did peasants do?

Peasants worked the land to yield food, fuel, wool and other resources. The countryside was divided into estates, run by a lord or an institution, such as a monastery or college. A social hierarchy divided the peasantry: at the bottom of the structure were the serfs, who were legally tied to the land they worked.
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Did serfs eat lunch?

A typical noon meal consisted of stew made with cabbage, onions, peas and turnips, seasoned with a bone or perhaps a bit of meat. Male serfs worked in the fields most of the time. However, they were obligated to work part of the time for the lord of the manor.
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What did peasants do in their free time?

In what little leisure time they had due to the demanding agricultural work, peasants would often gather to tell stories and jokes. This pastime has been around since the hunter-gatherer days. Story-telling was commonly done by anyone in the town center or at the tavern. People also met here to enjoy the holidays.
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What time did serfs wake?

Although the serfs' The serf daily life starts off by waking up as an early as 3am. After they will eat breakfast, which was usually pottage. Working in the fields was than their main job. This includes reaping, which is cutting crops for harvest, sowing, ploughing, haymaking, threshing, hedging and more.
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What did peasants do in the morning?

Peasants would start the day with a small breakfast and proceed to work in the fields or land by sunrise. Breakfast was likely a bowl of thick stew with ingredients like peas, carrots, onions, oats, and herbs, called pottage.
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What did they do in the Middle Ages for fun?

Drama, Dance, and Tournaments

People would entertain themselves with song, dance, music and stories. Wandering entertainers, called minstrels or troubadours, would travel from village to village providing such entertainment – particularly music – for the local people. They were paid in food and sometimes coins.
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What did children do for fun in the Middle Ages?

Children played ball games, stick games, and sports, as well as what we'd now call board games like backgammon and chess. In the cloisters of Canterbury and Salisbury cathedrals, nine men's Morris boards carved into the benches by medieval children are still visible today.
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What did peasants do on Sundays?

For peasants, Sunday was supposed to be a day of rest, although harvest or other jobs could encroach on this time. In the same way other holy days or market days could also be holidays. It is estimated that medieval peasants had around 200–240 working days a year, that is, close to those of modern people.
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Did peasants have free time?

Peasants actually had a lot more free time than you might expect. They got every Sunday off, as well as special holidays mandated by the church, not to mention weeks off here and there for special events like weddings and births when they spent a lot of time getting drunk.
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What did nobles do for fun?

Article. Thanks to their favoured position in life and the labour of the peasants on their estates, nobles in an English medieval castle had plenty of leisure hours which could be frittered away by eating, drinking, dancing, playing games like chess, or reading romantic stories of daring-do.
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What did people do for fun in the 800s?

Medieval people did many of the things we do: they played in the snow, they enjoyed sledding, and ice skated (on pieces of polished wood or horse shin bones). Indoors, the most popular past times were games like chess and backgammon. If you were a noble, you might enjoy boar hunting.
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What happens if a serf ran away?

If a serf ran away to another part of the country there may have been no proof of their status. However serfdom could end legitimately. In 1470 Sir Gerrard Widdrington manumitted or freed his native serf William Atkinson, and gave him the manorial office of bailiff for Woodhorn manor.
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How long did peasants work a day?

Peasant in medieval England: eight hours a day, 150 days a year. Life was far from easy for peasants in England in the Middle Ages, but their lot did improve after the Black Death when available land and average wages increased.
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What time did peasants go to bed?

People would first sleep between around 9pm and 11pm, lying on rudimentary mattresses generally filled with straw or rags, unless they were particularly wealthy and could afford feathers.
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How much leisure time did peasants have?

But despite his reputation as a miserable wretch, you might envy him one thing: his vacations. Plowing 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.
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How did peasants make money?

The people who farmed the land around the castle were called peasants. The lord took some of the crops they grew and the peasants fed themselves on what remained. They sold any spare crops to make money.
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How many holidays did serfs have?

Schor writes, “All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancient règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays.
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Did peasants drink milk?

Peasants tended to keep cows, so their diets consisted largely of dairy produce such as buttermilk, cheese, or curds and whey.
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Did peasants drink water?

Many books and articles have repeated the notion that water was so polluted during this period that medieval men and women would only drink wine, ale or some other kind of beverage. However, there is plenty of evidence that people regularly drank water.
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How did peasants cook?

Medieval peasants mainly ate stews of meat and vegetables, along with dairy products such as cheese, according to a study of old cooking pots. Researchers analysed food residues from the remains of cooking pots found at the small medieval village of West Cotton in Northamptonshire.
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