[bigstrat2003]

The majority of people today don't work as hard as the farmers of today. It is completely implausible that they work harder than the farmers of the middle ages, who almost certainly had to work harder than modern farmers (thanks to no mechanization).

[BriggyDwiggs42]

That’s not really a fair comparison when vastly more of the population worked as farmers. The article has a good bit of evidence though that the amount of food needed to feed laborers didn’t lower meaningfully during the period cited as having short work hours, while the economic record that statistic is based on is very spotty. They probably worked way more hours.