Just an FYI: hunter gatherers haven't been a significant portion of the overall human population for thousands of years. Like it or not, humans uncovered an ecological niche in the form of agriculture that was vastly more successful than hunting and foraging. The cost of occupying this new ecological niche is that we started working all day, every day.
And it's nice that 14th century peasants didn't work much, but as the article you linked to says, that happened to be a time of particularly high wages because the Black Death greatly reduced the supply of labor. In other words, it was not at all representative of the general lifestyle of a peasant.
> The cost of occupying this new ecological niche is that we started working all day, every day.
That's not quite true. Farming is heavy, all day long work during sowing and harvest seasons, but other than these, which take a few weeks out of a year, it's not all that much work really. Keeping animals on the other hand requires some work every day (taking them in and out of the pasture, milking, cleaning sheds etc), but it's not all day long, it's really on the order of 1-2 hours a day.
Keep in mind also that for most of the history, farmers didn't really have all that much land to farm, and each farmer would work on much smaller plot than he and his family was physically able to. The reason for this is really Malthusian. If there's excess food, you have population growth, which makes you hit the carrying capacity only in a handful of generations. Look at American colonies for example. After they were founded, the population grew mostly through natural growth, further immigration being relatively unimportant -- foreign born population rarely exceeded 10%. Yet the population increased 20-fold in only 100 years.
This means that throughout most of the history, the farmer parents only had barely enough land to sustain themselves and 2 children -- only 2 children of each parent reproduced on average, otherwise you'd have population growth, which meant war or famine (or both). The farmer didn't have a lot of farming to do, because he just didn't have enough land to plow and sow.
If you are European, talk to some old people who grew up farming. My mother grew up on a farm in Eastern Europe, and her village only got electricity in early 1980s. When I talk to her, or my grandparents, or their neighbors, and I ask them if the life was poor back then, and what was the thing they needed the most, everyone always says that they had too little land. In America it was of course much different, for obvious reasons.
My father-in-law grew up on a very small farm in Poland. I know from my wife that when she would visit her uncle (who inherited the farm) in the summer, they would work long, hard days. I'll ask my father-in-law about winters. Something tells me there was plenty of work to be done in the winter as well.
This thread is getting pretty stale at this point, but I talked to my father in law about winters on a small farm and figured I’d relay the information here.
He said that winters are definitely less work than summers, but that means that work days are more like 10 hours instead of 14. He said they still have to tend to the animals (milk cows, feed chickens, feed and cleanup after cows, horses and pigs), gather firewood, pump water from the well, clear snow, etc. Plus they do stuff that they simply don’t have time for in the summer. Repair things, spin wool and hemp, pluck geese for down, etc.
That being said, when he was growing up in Eastern Poland, 7 years of school were mandatory and he said basically all families adhered to this requirement. This indicates that there was some level of surplus generated by this lifestyle, because children become pretty useful by 5-6 years old, so having them spend 7 years being non-productive at school is a big deal.
And it's nice that 14th century peasants didn't work much, but as the article you linked to says, that happened to be a time of particularly high wages because the Black Death greatly reduced the supply of labor. In other words, it was not at all representative of the general lifestyle of a peasant.