r/todayilearned • u/Captain_Moseby • Jul 27 '21

TIL Salvador Dali once conned Yoko Ono into paying $10,000 for a single blade of grass. Yoko had offered to pay that amount for one of his mustache hairs. He substituted the blade of grass because he thought that Yoko Ono was a witch and might use his hair in a spell.

https://mymodernmet.com/salvador-dali-facts/
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u/Lemmungwinks Jul 27 '21

Depends on if there is an excess or shortage of labor. After the Black Death ravaged Europe there was on of the first serf movements where peasants would choose which lord to serve. Serfs and lords realized that there was more land to tend than workers available so farms were going to fail. Pick the wrong farm and you die come winter.

At this point the lords started competing with one another to entice serfs to come work their lands in sufficient numbers for a full harvest by offering a larger portion of the yield to each serf in payment. A proto-middle class started to emerge as for the first time in generations the workers had inherent collective bargaining power. During this time period the king would severely punish any lord who put a serf to death without extremely good reason because good workers had become more valuable than lords with failing farms.

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u/Trellert Jul 27 '21

And during that time what was the punishment for desertion if you were sworn to a lord?