Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

> I wonder how much of that leisure time came from being blocked

All evidence point to that being very high. e.g. famine was regular and routine, before the capitalism and before the industrial revolution. Humanity basically spent majority of the time before the capitalism and the modern agriculture fearing running out of food.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#Decline_of_famine

And, examples like de-collectivization of agriculture in China during their economic reform, or what happened in Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#Decline_of_famine make it very clear "capitalism" played an important role in reducing / eliminating the famine.

So, articles like this is really misleading - it implies somehow life was better like this paragraph from the article:

> The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official -- that is, church -- holidays included not only long "vacations" at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints' andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking.

The "feasting, drinking and merrymaking" was regularly followed by long periods of malnutrition and massive death.

>Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!*

They had tons of fan of several forms, including fabulous festival seasons, and public holidays, complete with dancing, drunkdness, singing and music, and several other things besides...

The idea of those "pour people" comes from lorded over overworked peasants in feudal societies, a small part of global history.

Even so, the same poor people post industrialization had it worse -- for one, they were forced in many ways (including laws destroying their lands and livelihood) to work in factories, didn't chose it as a lifestyle improvement. And many put up a great fight in the process too

Most of the time spent is preparing and harvesting. In between you watch things grow and maintain. When nothing is growing...at least, my in-laws in China...drink, gamble (mahjong, card games) and hang out with other villagers.

They all pooled their money together for some heavy machinery too...so even that has cut down a lot of time spent on prep & harvesting.

You could get jobs in the city when there's no farming to do, too. But you'd need a place to stay that doesn't eat up your wages. It's easy to do if you have family in the city already and just crash in their living room.

Another question to ask is what do you do when you're near retirement and too old to work? Well, you live with your kids and they take care of you with their income and chores. It's not like now where you're sent off to a nursing home and retirees need to be able to afford that.

> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!

They had some kind of holiday or celebration every month, often a few in one month. These were often similar to sports (for example Śmigus Dyngus where young boys run around the villages pouring water on girls they like as a pagan fertility custom). Or Noc Świętojańska where girls throw flowers into river and boys compete to get them and jumping over the campfires. Or Andrzejki where they danced whole night and played many kinds of "predict-the-future" games. Every wedding lasted a few days and after the midnight all guests played "wedding games" which were a combination of trivia, folk-song battles, guess what your partner thinks, and dexterity contests.

Each church had a saint patron or several of them, and on their days they had church market with traders from all around and various games and dances. Each person had a saint patron as well and their families celebrated on these "namedays". Every trade had their saint patron too, and they celebrated that. To this day it survived for farmers, miners, hunters and firefighters, but back then every possible job had its own holiday.

Basically the only time of year where there really was no entertainment was the 40-day fast (and even then there were exceptions - for example some villages to this day celebrate "half-fast-day" with various customs like painting walls of houses with water and calcium and dancing of course).

Also family back then was 20 people of all ages living near each other, not 4 like now. When a kid was born you had one party, another when it got baptized, another when it got first communion, then when it got confirmation, then when it married, built a house, bought some big animals and died. Add namedays each year and multiply by 20 people in extended family and you get every week busy.

That's just the stuff that survived to modern day in some form or another, there has been a lot more of this back then. Additionally every Sunday mass served partially as entertainment for peasants.

Absurd. "History" is not some kind of science done by weights and measures but the job of interpreting various things about the past into some sort of cohesive narrative. Of course the result of trying to recapture something about the past is often not very much alike -- I don't think the American Republic is really that much like the Roman Republic, despite consciously attempting to recreate it -- but the idea that that's "not what history for" is just not true as a descriptive statement. Perhaps you believe it should not be used that way, but if your only lens to look at things is the present, your imagination will be incredibly constrained.