What jobs are like in today's life compared to jobs in the tudor times?

Question

What jobs are like in today's life compared to jobs in the tudor times?

Answer 1

The main difference is that in Tudor times, society economics were more agriculturally based.  That meant that most people lived or made their livings directly on a farm of some sort.  They worked the fields, worked with livestock or other raw materials like wood, stone or metals.  

There was a what some call the merchant class.  This included trades people and those that owned trading import/export companies.    Trades people included bakers, textile makers (used various fibers and other materials to make cloth, such as wool, linen, velvet, furs, cotton); cobblers (shoe makers); coopers (makers of large containers like barrels, vats and kegs); blacksmiths (this varied, it could be for farm equipment (plows, scythes), transportation (carriages, wagons) industry (making of tools), or military (making of weapons); carpenters; shipbuilders; seamstresses; tailors; barbers; stockyard owners; bankers; inn owners.

The clergy, military, or bureaucrats were usually above people who worked for gentry or on farms, but not always.  

Then there was the gentry.  These people usually owned large swathes of land, and the land was farmed or worked for natural resources by large groups of people.  

Most people worked physically very hard.  They made most of their belongings themselves, including their own clothes.  It was a privilege to be a skilled tradesman.  Gentry led a relatively luxurious life employing people to perform services for them.  Usually the pay was meager.  Society as you can see was very class oriented in Tudor England.

Answer 2

Well there was a lot of physical stuff, just like in todays world... but of course that was done with spades rather than JCBs. There were clerks, which would have been rather like glorified secretaries today, and there were of course many servants to do the housework. Teaching was of course very different, it would have been a vicars. The clergy would have been dangerous, because the religion of England changed so much in the tudor dynasty. Medecin would have been very expensive, and primitive. There were no scientists, and those who came close were condemned for witchcraft. Most fo the jobs in the tudor period would have been physical; farming by hand, going into service. Of course there were shops, but no health and safety regulations, and everything would have been much more flexible. And then of course there were the nobles... there isn't really a comparison in todays world, but they basically made money from taxing people. Big landlords basically, and then there was the court. Most women there were content to marry into money.

Answer 3

In Tudor times few people had what we think of as 'jobs' nowadays, that is working a fixed set of hours for a fixed wage.

Most people in Tudor times lived by farming small plots of land (smallholdings as they were known.) They grew enough for their own needs and sold the surplus.  The farmers wives would normally raise the poultry, milk the cows, and make the butter and cheese.  They would sell their surplus goods at market.  women would spend a lot of their time spinning wool or flax into thread to make cloth, they would make enough for their own use and might sell the surplus to professional weavers.

People who lived in towns engaged in a variety of different trades, but they would mostly be self-employed, i.e. running their own business, rather than working for someone else.  A craftsman or tradesman would normally have apprentices learning the trade and assisting him.  Wives would normally help out in their husbands' business.  Everything was hand-made in those days.  A town would have weavers, leatherworkers, potters, metalworkers, butchers, bakers, brewers, tailors, seamstresses, bookbinders and printers, and traders of all kinds.

People would do most of their work in daylight hours, since there was little effective artificial light.  Winter, when days were shorter, tended to be the time of year when people did less work.  Nobody would work the kind of fixed hours that people work nowadays.

Answer 4

Well, let's see. There were no unions, no government safety standards, no pension plans, no regulated hours of work. Comparing the actual work done is somewhat difficult, because even farming today uses a lot of high tech stuff - even such a simple thing as a tractor was not available in Tudor times. Everything was done by hand. There were no computers, no engines, no electricity, and many of the jobs that exist today, were not even thought of in Tudor times.

Today's jobs are both more complex and yet physically less demanding, than they were in Tudor times.

Answer 5

The jobs were similar it is in the way each task was preformed that differed.  Everything was done by hand.  The muscle power was supplied by animals or humans.  If one needed a copy, the entire document had to be hand copied.I believe that people were more concerned with putting out a superior product so they did not have to make the item again.  And  of course the rich had servants to do the jobs for them.  Many of the large estates were self sufficient;  they had people who could make anything from shoes to furniture.

Also time was not as large an issue as it is today.  People expected the mail to take weeks and months to arrive even in a small country like England.  No instant anything.