• bouh@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There was some specialisation of tasks. The making of the bread especially for example. There would be a mill with a family responsible for it. There would be one or more bakers to make the bread. They made it for everyone in the village. It would be highly inefficient to have each house do it for itself, and the oven or mill were complex and expensive things. Likewise, there were people to make the iron tools and the horseshoes. There probably were specialized people for leather work, woodwork and woodcarving, stonework, masonry, etc. Brewery and wine making and other stuff like that were certainly also mutualised.

    It wasn’t necessarily a full time job, but it was not something anyone could do when someone knew the job well and had enough time to do it for everyone.

    Some of these tasks are still done this way where my parents live: in the area, my father know some people, so they help eachother to gather the wood, they know someone with a tractor to carry the wood home, and then with the machine to chop the wood in smaller pieces. They share expensive, specialized tools too, like tile cutter or that kind of stuff.