Bret Devereaux is going through the 'peasant experience' right now here:

https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...

It's not done yet, and I am eagerly awaiting the end results. That said, from what I can tell from his writings, jcrammer is mostly correct. The peasant life - the modal life - was just awful hard work for many decades. It was not nice and it was not better than the factories most of the time. Yes there were bad factories, a lot of them, but they lasted a brief time. The Factory Act in Britian was in 1833, only a few decades after the factories were even a thing.

Aside: We really need better education in labor laws overall.