I have to agree. My reading of the article isn’t “Wow! A peasant would work 12 hours a day 7 days a week for almost 6 weeks just to afford a single shirt.” My interpretation is “Either their calculations are radically off or peasants wore drastically simpler shirts”.
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Yeah this.
They had lower thread counts but thicker yarns with uneven thread which can when woven crimp into a stronger fabric. Wool was primary and compared to cotton it is boss for lasting usage. It’s elastic, can be felted, repairs more easily, it’s all season wear too.
They didn’t have washing & drying machines, dry-cleaners. Lye was used sparingly, articles were brushed far and away more often than washed.
I also question her sources & anecdotal experience as relative to comparison. A Dark Ages recreation site? Her own experience as a weaver?
BB just posted that Lars fellow with his archery.
I think there would very likely be a similar difference between the authors weaving and the recreational spinning and any other aspect of hand textile creation or manipulation compared to the farmers wives spinning throughout the winter and the farmers operating the looms throughout the winter to subsist in the off season. The proto-industrial labour of Medieval Europe & early industrial Europe were likely far more adept than today’s recreationalist.
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Well, a dollar was worth a lot more back then. 
And specifically these things would have gone anywhere from weeks to never between washes, and even freshly-washed would probably not look “clean” by our standards. That’s fine for work or casual wear, but it’s not totally unreasonable to want some things that look fresh and clean. (If a peasant had such a thing–and they might–it would be one or two garments that were kept put away and worn only on special occasions.)
It’s worth noting, as an aside, that medieval peasants were not universally filthy, starving, brutalized wretches. They all worked harder than most of us ever will, but depending on the time, place, culture, climate, and ruler, it wasn’t uncommon for peasants to be reasonably happy, well-fed, and well-treated.
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To get a grasp of medieval life and work, check out the BBC series Secrets of the Castle with Tom, Peter and Ruth, fortuitously found on YouTube. Unsurprisingly, medieval peasants didn’t look like the anarcho-syndicalists from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
In this first episode scroll to about 38:00 for a brief look at how a medieval peasant dressed. To my uneducated eye, that looks like wool and flax or hemp-based linen, rather than cotton, though as the project is about building a castle rather than a textile mill, it seems likely some modern materials and manufacturing may have crept in.
Here’s a thing, though, who pays the equivalent of six weeks of their own labour for a single item of clothing? I wouldn’t pay that for a whole suit including shirt, underwear and shoes. For everyday wear you buy what you can afford after paying for food, shelter and warmth, and if that’s wool and hemp, then that’s what you wear. A cotton shirt is for the upper middle and ruling classes, it seems to me, to whom it would cost a lot less of their labour.
Pixel-stained techno-peasants such as myself only buy cotton now because it’s the cheapest available to us (well, cotton/nylon/acrylic mixes, probably). And that seems to be the opposite lesson to what the author of this article wants us to learn, or at least a more nuanced lesson.
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Well ~150-200 years ago the benefits of automation in the textile industry WERE going to the owners rather than workers. The cotton gin made cotton MUCH cheaper than wool or linen. This made cotton a hugely profitable cash crop, and created huge amounts of wealth. This resulted in a big jump in the price of land suitable to grow cotton and the slaves used to pick it. In fact the biggest export from border states where slavery was legal, but the climate was unsuitable for cotton WAS slaves, sold “down the river.” This also led to a huge concentration of wealth (both land and human stock). The large plantation owners were the 1%ers of their day. In the North, this caused huge discontent among the majority who were competing against slaves, and saw a few plantation owners (and Northerners in the finance ans shipping industries) getting all the gains. You may recall, this led to some unpleasantness…
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The cost calculation also misses raising and ginning the cotton, raising and retting the flax, or raising, shearing, washing and carding the wool. All those took a substantial amount of time. They also required expenses, and the opportunity cost of not raising food on that parcel of land.
Hear, hear! I’ll start off by admitting that I haven’t read the article yet, but i suspect that the cost-accounting is a little spurious - the costs are probably all charged to the shirt, so all the other stuff (the mutton, the lamb, the horse manure, mud, and chalk used to make the walls, etc) that the farm provides is free, eh? So there’s lots of money left over to buy shirts.
/thinks Ruth Goodman’s attractive. Any brainy woman that can pluck a goose with gusto…!
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I know people who spin wool on a wheel and on a spindle and they can do a LOT more than 4 yards an hour. Maybe more like 40 yards.
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Yeah, that’s why the gold jewelry market is almost exclusively male.
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No comparison between then and now is going to be perfect. But this DOES get at the root truth that stuff incorporated more hours of labor back in the day and so most people owned far less in the way of material goods. Most people just didn’t have so much stuff that they needed to rent storage lockers for it. Rather a single wardrobe was probably enough to store a family’s clothes. The same is true today in the third world. When looking at old houses and material culture, people are often confused by “survivor bias.” For the most part, the houses and clothes that survive are those of the wealthy, so people get the impression that houses were bigger, and clothes nicer than they were for most people.
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But look at most of the older houses in America, not the top 1%, but places like historical districts. The one thing you won’t find in abundance is closet space. Even people who were more well off didn’t have tons of clothes, maybe a chest of drawers or armoire, but not literally a whole room full of clothes.
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Exactly. Anyone who pays $3,500 for a shirt nowadays is making a lot more than $2,400 a month.
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Yep, Built in closets are very much a modern thing. Even my house, built in 1949 has one, 3’ wide closet in the master bedroom.
But you don’t farm on land that sheep graze on because it’s not suitable for growing crops. The washing and carding is done by the women- and girl-folk – and can be done all winter long when outside work has subsided – while the tending to the sheep is done by the boy-folk. Wool hits the sweet spot of time/energy/cost to produce clothing.
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Hmm - can I get a cost benefit analysis of a leather shirt?
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You can tell the difference just by looking at the housing market currently available (for rent or own): the places built before the 1980’s have one small closet per bedroom, and a small front hall closet for coats. Newer construction has three to four times the storage space.
It’s a problematic we can easily disassemble.
The hours are more difficult to assess for inaccuracies.
But I’m not buying the time-frame.
Perhaps if we were talking about making a fine shirt for the upperclass (minority of the people), but the woman who is raising her kids, feeding the house, and making all their clothes is not going to be speing 480 hour making each article of clothing; there wasn’t that much time in the day. I can’t cite anything for this, but I think the assumptions are dealing with much finer end-products and materials than most people would wear.
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Indeed.
Here in Austria I can buy a white T-shirt for 3 EUR (currently 3.37 USD), if I don’t ask where it’s from. A sweatshop T-shirt. After subtracting tax and European profit margins, I guess the price is at about $1.25 US. Now, $1.25 US per day is a common definition for “absolute poverty”. India is no longer an “absolutely poor” country, so we can be sure that a T-shirt does not take more than 18 hours to make.
So, more research: This tells me that the official “minimum living wage” in india is equivalent to 58p (British) an hour, but the textile industry often pays as little as 22p (or about 30 US cents).
That’s at most 4 hours of work per T-shirt, including the cotton-picking.
Paying $7.25 minimum wage for those 4 hours, the price would be at $29 US.
That’s still a lot less than $3,472.75.
Compared to the past, we’re saving about $3,443.75 US due to technological advances. And a further $27.75 by being assholes towards the rest of the world.
Conclusion: Technological advance is totally worth it. The gains we can get from being assholes towards others pale in comparison.
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