This is factually and historically incorrect, but it's a common idea in capitalist propaganda.
Capitalism was so unpopular that landowners had to remove peasants from the land by force, crowding them into shitty disease-ridden city slums to work 6.5 days a week for factory owners. Quality of life and life expectancy plummeted. The cities were abattoirs in which the poor died early miserable deaths.
In contrast, a peasant working the fields had rights recognized by all and the means to produce everything they needed to live, including land held in common to grow their own food. On average feudal peasants were far healthier and had much more leisure time and respect than the miserable proletariat slum dwellers their descendants became.
“The brutal acts associated with the process of stripping the majority of the people of the means of producing for themselves might seem far removed from the laissez-faire reputation of classical political economy,” writes Perelman. “In reality, the dispossession of the majority of small-scale producers and the construction of laissez-faire are closely connected, so much so that Marx, or at least his translators, labeled this expropriation of the masses as ‘‘primitive accumulation.’’
Perelman outlines the many different policies through which peasants were forced off the land—from the enactment of so-called Game Laws that prohibited peasants from hunting, to the destruction of the peasant productivity by fencing the commons into smaller lots—but by far the most interesting parts of the book are where you get to read Adam Smith’s proto-capitalist colleagues complaining and whining about how peasants are too independent and comfortable to be properly exploited, and trying to figure out how to force them to accept a life of wage slavery.
This is factually and historically incorrect, but it's a common idea in capitalist propaganda.
Capitalism was so unpopular that landowners had to remove peasants from the land by force, crowding them into shitty disease-ridden city slums to work 6.5 days a week for factory owners. Quality of life and life expectancy plummeted. The cities were abattoirs in which the poor died early miserable deaths.
In contrast, a peasant working the fields had rights recognized by all and the means to produce everything they needed to live, including land held in common to grow their own food. On average feudal peasants were far healthier and had much more leisure time and respect than the miserable proletariat slum dwellers their descendants became.
The Invention of Capitalism by Michael Perelmen is a decent intro to this subject. Here's an overview: "“Everyone But an Idiot Knows That The Lower Classes Must Be Kept Poor, or They Will Never Be Industrious”" .
Here's a piece that suggests peasants had a 35 hour work week. Who gets that these days? The Anglo-Saxon Hide, Adam Smith, Karl Marx and the 35 Hour Work Week