Sorry, but the question is a misdirection. It presumes that the assumptions behind 'good quality of life' remain the same over time, and that the means of economic production (which control relationship to satisfaction) are the static. In either case, the answer is 'no'.

Comparing the schedule of the 'average' peasant of the 'middle ages' to the current average (office worker?) begs basic inverted questions: How long into the day are you prepared to thrash wheat when the right time comes? Will you get up at 2 am to calve? Does milking a cow seem uninteresting? Have you lived years waiting to see a cathedral raised? When was the threat of famine last resting on how your fields produced?

Moreover, the 'short, miserable lives' fails on two accounts:

1. 'Short' is a statistical issue of how you calculate average lifespan, it includes all the babies and children who died young; in the middle ages, assuming you make it past childhood you had a good chance at living a long life.

2. 'Miserable': this is a backwards projection of modern values. What might a peasant make of the godless day of paperwork behind a desk with two weeks vacation per year missing every community gathering?

The answer to all of the above: you can't compare the past to the present objectively, and attempts to doing so misses the point. The past is studied to understand it, not judge it. The past is not a tool to prove or disprove the conditions of the present. Judging is easy, understanding alternate ways to live is hard.

Finally, the article you linked to selects its sources by the argument it wants to prove. For example, the first quote has no context of the economic or class views of the source. It's shit history, starting with asking a fundamentally ideological question to prove a point, not a historical question answered through investigation.

I'd reccommend reading A Medieval Life, which uses both outside research and a very fortunate abundance of local court records to piece together the life of a single villain from England. http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Life-Penifader-Brigstock-1295-1344/dp/0072903317

The book makes it very clear several times that she isn't representative of all peasants simply because they were so diverse across Europe, but one thing I recall it pointing out is that there were indeed a substantial number of 'holidays', all based around the church calendar. Several large feasts around christmas and easter, as well as a long succession in the summer, along with a multitude of single day feasts throughout the year, plus you would have the sabbath.

It makes it clear that while she had hardships, it wasn't as bad as commonly imagined for many, if not most, in the lower class. If you made it past childhood you would likely live a fairly decent life (average lifespans are heavily skewed by the huge infant mortality rate), and the work itself wasn't for many as bad as commonly portrayed in modern fiction.

Following up on /u/idjet's points, the answer to your question also depends upon not only what you constitute as "good quality of life" but also which medieval period you're talking about.

Some historians have in fact made the argument that in the early medieval era, in the time frame between the breakdown of the strong Roman state and before the emergence of a hereditary class of landowning aristocrats, that peasants experienced a high degree of autonomy brought on by reduced coercion, which translated into reduced productivity requirements (i.e. peasants can choose to work less hard because no one's telling them otherwise).

There were pitfalls to this post-state world as well as benefits. Namely a reduction in access to diversified consumer goods, a greater threat of death by famine due to lower perceptions as to the needs for surpluses, reduced public/civil society (i.e. the social contract).

But, consider for a moment, how much modern job satisfaction is tied to the idea of autonomy. The freedom from micromanagement. The freedom to set your own deadlines. The freedom to associate with who you want. These could be mimic'd in medieval peasant freedoms from coercive landlord extraction and interaction, despite a loss in the pluses mentioned in the previous paragraphs.

This is why the case has been made for an intermediary period in the darkest of the dark age, for peasants possibly being better off, but I acknowledge this is of course, a value judgment of what constitutes "better."

Given those considerations, you can kind of boil it down to one of the many aphorisms in our society, over an essential choice over which is better: a shorter life with "freedom", or a longer life of "slavery"?

Now of course, this presumes that autonomy = good quality of life, and if you don't accept that premise (say you prefer comfort = good quality of life, or security = good quality of life), then parroting idjet, who are we to judge, whether with our culture or theirs?