I've heard online (like in this blog post) that farmers in the past worked a lot less than our current standards. Is there any truth to this statement? Could this also have changed across regions?
Now, I know that my question is probably not specific enough, so let's take this quote as a starting point:
a 13th-century laborer could have up to 25 weeks off per year. For reference, the average American worker has 16 days of vacation per year.
I'm also quite interested in if this changes over time (until the industrial revolution) or outside Europe, but I understand if my question is too broad.
Allen & Weisdorf (Was there an "industrious revolution" before the industrial revolution?) estimate the average agricultural working year at under 200 days, but to characterise this as "up to 25 weeks off" neglects the negative side of rural under-employment through seasonality of agricultural workload and limited opportunities for waged side work: for many this wasn't time off, it was time when you couldn't earn an income.
Even with a fair range of contemporary peasant farming skills and techniques, low pre-modern crop yields mean that life for the average household was a struggle to get by. Smaller holdings made for less work on your own land, but also meant less output to share with the family after paying off the lord and the church, necessitating side employment for others to make ends meet. And the threat of crop failure, high food prices and hunger was never far away for those without an agricultural surplus over their needs.
It's problematical that most of our evidence dates from the period after the 14th-century population decline when higher per capita land availability (requiring less effort per acre) and improved real wages may well have allowed workers to take time off upon meeting their needs as Dyer suggests. The 13th century seems likely to have more in common with the 16th when population growth and rising prices reversed the intervening gains and lengthened the labouring year, a pattern repeated again in the classic period of the agricultural and industrial revolutions despite rising crop yields.
Whether non-working time brought ease or poverty thus depended on the period and on your economic position: if you enjoyed more land and produce than you needed, periods of population plenty, low wages and higher prices were a boon; but if your margin was at best slight, comfortable leisure was more likely to be an opportunity only when population was low, land abundant and real wages high.
Here are a couple similar questions to check out while waiting for a full answer: