Peasant


Costume of a Vilain or Peasant, Fifteenth Century, from a Miniature of "La Danse Macabre," Manuscript 7310 of the National Library of Paris. A peasant, from 15th century French paļsant meaning one from the pays, the countryside or region, (from Latin pagus, country district) is an agricultural worker with roots in the countryside in which he dwells, either working for others or, more specifically, owning or renting and working by his own labour a small plot of ground, in England a "cottager". Peasants depend on the cultivation of their land; without stockpiles of provision they thrive or starve according to the most recent harvest. Peasants live to agricultural time; the "world-time", in Fernand Braudel's term, of politics and economics does not directly affect the peasant. Peasants typically make up the majority of the agricultural labour force in a pre-industrial society. Though a word of not very strict application, once a market economy has taken universal root, it is now frequently used of the traditionalist rural population in countries where the land is chiefly held by smallholders, peasant proprietors. In the great majority of pre-industrial societies, peasants constitute the bulk of the population, the authentic "silent majority". A rural peasant population differs enormously in its values and economic behaviour from an urban worker population. Peasants tend to be more conservative than urbanites, and are often very loyal to inherited power structures that define their rights and privileges and protect them from interlopers, despite their generally low status within them. Peasant societies generally have very well developed social support networks. Especially in harder climates, members of the community who have a poor harvest or suffer some form of hardship will be taken care of by the rest of the community. Loyalties and vengeance both run very deep. Peasant communities are extremely tight, and are often difficult to access or understand by outsiders. Peasant societies can often have very stratified social hierarchies within them. Sedentary Occupations of the Peasauts.--Fac-simile from an Engraving on Wood, attributed to Holbein, in the "Cosmographie" of Munster (Basle, 1552, folio). In a barter economy, peasants characteristically have a different attitude to work than peasants— or towndwellers— in a money economy would. Most of them are content to live at a subsistence level and will not expend unnecessary labour raising their standard of living. Traditionally many non-peasants have viewed this as laziness. However, it does make sense from their perspective, since there would rarely be any point in producing more than could be consumed. Fernand Braudel devoted the first volume of his major work, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century to the largely silent and invisible world that existed below the market economy, in The Structures of Everyday Life. That "peasant" is sometimes used as an insult by those townsfolk who consider themselves superior to rural labourers should not affect the sturdy usefulness of an old term..

Peasant Sayings

---- This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopędia Britannica.Category:1911 Britannica Category:Feudalism

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