There was not much room for hired work in the early flourishing periods of the mediæval cities, still less for individual hirelings. The work of the weavers, the archers, the smiths, the bakers, and so on, was performed for the craft and the city; and when craftsmen were hired in the building trades, they worked as temporary corporations (as they still do in the Russian artéls), whose work was paid en bloc. Work for a master began to multiply only later on; but even in this case the worker was paid better than he is paid now, even in this country, and very much better than he used to be paid all over Europe in the first half of this century. Thorold Rogers has familiarized English readers with this idea; but the same is true for the Continent as well, as is shown by the researches of Falke and Schönberg, and by many occasional indications. Even in the fifteenth century a mason, a carpenter, or a smith worker would be paid at Amiens four sols a day, which corresponded to forty-eight pounds of bread, or to the eighth part of a small ox (bouvard). In Saxony, the salary of the Geselle in the building trade was such that, to put it in Falke’s words, he could buy with his six days’ wages three sheep and one pair of shoes.[215] The donations of workers (Geselle) to cathedrals also bear testimony of their relative well-being, to say nothing of the glorious donations of certain craft guilds nor of what they used to spend in festivities and pageants.[216] In fact, the more we learn about the mediæval city, the more we are convinced that at no time has labour enjoyed such conditions of prosperity and such respect as when city life stood at its highest.
More than that; not only many aspirations of our modern radicals were already realized in the middle ages, but much of what is described now as Utopian was accepted then as a matter of fact. We are laughed at when we say that work must be pleasant, but — “every one must be pleased with his work,” a mediæval Kuttenberg ordinance says, “and no one shall, while doing nothing (mit nichts thun), appropriate for himself what others have produced by application and work, because laws must be a shield for application and work.”[217] And amidst all present talk about an eight hours’ day, it may be well to remember an ordinance of Ferdinand the First relative to the Imperial coal mines, which settled the miner’s day at eight hours, “as it used to be of old” (wie vor Alters herkommen), and work on Saturday afternoon was prohibited. Longer hours were very rare, we are told by Janssen, while shorter hours were of common occurrence. In this country, in the fifteenth century, Rogers says, “the workmen worked only forty-eight hours a week.“[218] The Saturday half-holiday, too, which we consider as a modern conquest, was in reality an old mediæval institution; it was bathing-time for a great part of the community, while Wednesday afternoon was bathing-time for the Geselle.[219] And although school meals did not exist — probably because no children went hungry to school — a distribution of bath-money to the children whose parents found difficulty in providing it was habitual in several places As to Labour Congresses, they also were a regular Feature of the middles ages. In some parts of Germany craftsmen of the same trade, belonging to different communes, used to come together every year to discuss questions relative to their trade, the years of apprenticeship, the wandering years, the wages, and so on; and in 1572, the Hanseatic towns formally recognized the right of the crafts to come together at periodical congresses, and to take any resolutions, so long as they were not contrary to the cities’ rolls, relative to the quality of goods. Such Labour Congresses, partly international like the Hansa itself, are known to have been held by bakers, founders, smiths, tanners, sword-makers and cask-makers.[220]
Some of that concerns the dignity of living conditions, which is hard to do firm apples to apples comparison on, but we do have data on diet and labor, which support Kropotkin's broad point.
I find myself struggling to improve on this passage from The Great Divergence by Kenneth Pomeranz.
there is abundant evidence that non-elite Europeans had more possessions in 1800 than in 1500, but they did not eat any better—in fact, they may have eaten less well.
We have already seen that per capita European meat consumption declined between the late Middle Ages and 1800. Meanwhile, per capita bread consumption in Paris showed no long-term trend between 1637 and 1854; evidence for other cities is similar. And as time went on, the amount of work required to earn that bread increased. In Strasbourg between 1400 and 1500 the amount of manual work needed to purchase a month’s worth of wheat for a family of four fluctuated between 40 and 100 hours; it was usually in the 60–80 hour range. By 1540, it was well above the 100-hour line and was not to dip below that level again for three centuries; data for France in general show that it was not until the 1880s that a month’s grain could again be bought with 100 hours’ work. Trends for German workers were roughly similar: the buying power of workers’ wages measured in grain fell roughly 50 percent between 1500 and 1650. In England, buying power began falling a bit later, and there was one peak (around 1740) at which builders’ wages again bought as much bread as in the sixteenth century; but otherwise they, too, only recovered their sixteenth-century grain-buying power well into the nineteenth century. Given how central grain was to people’s diets—over half the calories even for upper-class urbanites and perhaps 80 percent of the calories for the poor—it is likely that real per hour returns to people’s labor were falling during this period.
It's a striking set of data to look at, since it turns our common conception of industrialization being a straight increase in favorable-to-all production, though it is consistent with mercantilist oppression of labor policies.
There are definitely limitations to the data we have: meat proportions of diet is a really rough way of looking at quality of diet, for example.
Pomeranz is writing a broad history and mostly citing Abel, Braudel, and Clark for his empirical claims.
Abel, Wilhelm. 1980. Agrarian Fluctuations in Europe from the 13th to the 20th Centuries. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Braudel, Fernand. 1981. The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible. Trans. Sian Reynolds. New York: Harper and Row.
Clark, Gregory. 1991. “Yields Per Acre in English Agriculture, 1250–1860: Evidence from Labour Inputs.” Economic History Review 44:3. 445–60.
Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press