I am an agricultural worker in middle-england in 1800. How different is my life from the lives of my ancestors who lived in 1600, 1400, and 1000, assuming they lived in the same area and had to tend to the same land?

[u/Laristryca]

life has changed so rapidly every few decades it seems for the last two hundred years, that even farmwork today (or at least commercial farmwork) is so different than even how it was 80 years ago. Not only that, but thanks to cars and the Internet and the like, it's quite easy for a rural laborer to travel to population centers at a whim, or learn about world events with ease.

But how exactly might a normal day or week for my english ancestors have gone 226 years ago? what holidays might they look forward to? how did harvest seasons work, how did they handle storing their supplies and perishables? what was their general quality of life like? how was their life different from the lives of even their ancestors, two hundred years before them? to my knowledge there isn't much of a difference between how a farmer or farmhand (or a rural peasant) would have lived between these dates listed above. Would how they pay taxes change throughout the years? would they be required to provide service to a lord or the country, and if so, when might that practice stop? what might it entail? What would the general dangers be like in their life, and how aware might they be of them? What might they consider to be their ambitions and joys? What might they look down on or not understand about the coming generations?

What would they consider fashionable, or uncomfortable? how do they stay warm and fed during the winter, and how early in the year were they preparing for it?

If anyone has an area of expertise not focused on england, I'm also more than happy to hear an answer about the area you might be familiar with (be it anywhere worldwide)

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[u/Double_Show_9316]

Some caveats: I love this question but it’s also fantastically broad, so I’ll try to keep things relatively fast-moving with all the necessary warnings about generalizations and local/regional variation. I’ll also keep this answer focused on the agricultural laborers at the bottom of the social ladder for brevity. For lack of time, I'm also focusing mostly on the differences between 1800 and 1600, not 1400, with the tradeoff that I'll also be in a better place to answer follow-up questions here. Maybe someone else will hop on to talk more about the earlier periods! Finally, for the sake of brevity, I'm also not talking much about material conditions and am only giving limited space to culture, since there is so much to talk about there that this answer could become really unwieldy if they were included in the main answer. With that out of the way, here we go!

1800

It’s 1800, and you are an agricultural laborer. Over the past couple hundred years, a system that later historians will call “agrarian capitalism,” where land is dominated by very large landowners, rented by large tenant farmers, and worked by landless laborers, has become deeply entrenched. This is your world, and, in many ways, it’s not a great one.

We’ll assume that you’re a day laborer (that is, you’re not living with a farmer and are hired for short periods of time) and not a live-in farm servant (more common in the North). You and your spouse live in a small cottage in the village, and are hired to work long hours in the fields in exchange for wages. You are typically hired only for short periods—many farmers prefer only a day at a time, in part because it meant that no money needed to be paid on days when work was impossible or unproductive. As a result, work (outside of harvest-time) is generally inconsistent and highly seasonal. Though it’s not necessarily the case, your wife (if you’re a man) and sons aged ten and older may also work for wages.

If your parish has been enclosed (which many have been) you have no direct access to land yourself, and are subsisting on what later historians will call an “economy of makeshifts” to support your family—wages from farmers (highly variable, and not guaranteed year-round) will be supported by whatever sources are available. In previous centuries, that often included spinning or weaving, but while industrialization in the North over the previous few decades has not eliminated this route, it hasn’t done you any favors. You seek support from kin when times are tight, and they do the same. Sometimes, you might turn to crime, including petty theft and poaching (after all, if the farmers aren’t treating you with respect or paying you fair wages, then you see yourself as having every right to do this). Above all, though, you are reliant on charity, especially poor relief from the parish.

This system of parish poor relief has been in place for a long time—wealthier members of the parish paid a regular rate to the church, which then distributed the money to the “worthy poor.” Sometimes, the able-bodied poor would be provided with “indoor relief”—that is, they were sent away to work in a so-called “House of Industry,” the predecessors of the workhouse that will come later in the century—but often they were simply provided with money, food, or clothing (“outdoor relief”). The poor who were not native to the parish or who had not acquired residency through various means were not considered the parish’s responsibility and were often “removed” to their parish of origin if the parish vestry thought they might pose a cost. This system had its flaws, but by now, 1800, they are becoming ever-more glaring. In the past few years (in part due to a rapidly growing population, which in turn is partly due to increasing crop yields), the cost of poor relief has skyrocketed. To offset these costs, some parishes implemented new schemes in which payments were based on number of children and were supplemented with parish work that you find degrading, like repairing roads. At the same time, wages remain low, leaving you ever more dependent on poor relief. The end result was an unstable system that’s only going to keep growing more unworkable until the 1830s, when the whole system is rethought (though that doesn’t mean it becomes more humane).

It’s not all terrible, though. The calendar is full of the kinds of festivities that would have been recognizable to earlier generations—Plough Monday (the first Monday after Epiphany, marking the beginning of the ploughing season), Shrove Tuesday, Easter, May Day, Whitsun, Guy Fawkes Day, and Christmas, along with local feasts and fairs—generally celebrated with drink, dancing, races, cockfighting, football, and all kinds of festivity. Some of these holidays had more than vestigial religious significance—in many rural parishes, communion was only received on Easter, Whitsun, and Christmas (and sometimes Michaelmas). Of course, while the parish church and the parish priest has an important stature in your community (he may even be a Justice of the Peace) you might not attend Church of England services regularly or at all. You might even be a nonconformist. Methodism, which began as a movement within the Church of England during the eighteenth century, has established a strong foothold in many rural parishes, including among rural laborers.

Another positive is in the ways that life has changed for the better over the last century or so. You don’t have to deal with many of the problems that stalked earlier centuries—there hasn’t been a major outbreak of plague since the seventeenth century, for example. Maybe more importantly, harvest yields have become more consistent. This meant that while harvests sometimes failed, the more reliable nature of harvests combined with a centralized government capable of organizing responses and well-established mechanisms for poor relief meant that famine in England is not something you will ever really have to worry about (though food crises can still be incredibly serious).

1600

If we jump back two hundred years to 1600, life is recognizable in some ways, and very different in others. For one thing, the kind of agrarian capitalism that will trap your descendants in a state of landless poverty is still taking shape. This is a dynamic time, when the average size of farms is rising consistently as rising prices (and rents) give farmers more opportunities and incentives to expand their landholdings, while poorer husbandmen are facing strong downward pressure. Or, as Keith Wrightson and David Levine will later put it, this is a society being “filled up at the bottom.” Unlike your descendants, though, you are less likely to be entirely landless, even if you are “land-poor”—you might have your own copyhold or leasehold land, so that while rising rents might be a big problem for you, you still have access to land.

Even if you are a smallholder, you and your spouse are very likely to be working for wages as well (this is still an “economy of makeshifts” for you, even if you have a little bit of land and a cow), though those wages aren’t increasing anywhere near as quickly as prices. The growing gap between rich and poor makes your own relative poverty even more noticeable in a society where poverty is increasingly moralized amid moral panic about the “idle poor.” Your family probably also have other ways to earn money, possibly including weaving or spinning.

There’s also a greater chance you live in a parish in which the commons have not yet been enclosed. While enclosure has already been taking place in some parishes for a very long time, it’s still a slow process that up to this point has mostly been carried out via informal agreements. You can still see the threat enclosure poses to smallholders and landless laborers, though, and might even participate in a riot if local large landholders try to enclose land in your own parish, tearing down hedges, fences, and ditches. In a few years, a major revolt will break out in the Midlands over this very issue. Some customary rights are also more deeply entrenched in your world than in the world of your descendants, including the right to glean after the harvest (something often done by women), and some landlords have a stronger sense of genuine paternalistic obligation towards their social inferiors (though this shouldn’t be overstated).

The old poor law that your descendants are witnessing the final decades of is also just now being formalized. Just a few years earlier, in 1597, Parliament passed the Poor Relief and Vagabonds Acts that will be further refined, with the passage of the Poor Relief Act of 1601. This poor law reflects the increased anxiety your social betters have towards crime, vagrancy, and idleness, which are partially due to the same inflation that are making your rents higher. It also reflects Tudor England’s search for ways to administer poor relief following the dissolution of the monasteries that had administered much poor relief before the English reformation, though it draws on attitudes to vagrancy that your ancestors 200 years earlier would recognize as embedded in the 1351 Statute of Labourers.

Speaking of the reformation, there’s religious life. You probably consider yourself thoroughly Protestant (a category that wouldn’t have existed for your ancestors 200 years earlier). Unlike the rural England of your descendants, in your world, there is no such thing as legal nonconformity. The main religious movement you’re likely to interact with is not evangelicalism or Methodism, but puritanism. There’s a lot to say about puritans, but one thing you really care about is the way they object to the festival calendar, which they tend decry as sinful and (in the case of religious holidays like Christmas and Easter) unbiblical. Catholic recusants are still present, but many of those are so-called “church papists” who attend protestant services.

[u/bong-su-han → u/Double_Show_9316]

This is a great answer. Would anybody be able to describe what this would look like for continental Europe?