peasants

(noun)

Members of the lowest social class, who toil on the land. This social class consisted of small farmers and tenants, sharecroppers, farmhands, and other laborers on the land, forming the main labor force in agriculture and horticulture.

Related Terms

Examples of peasants in the following topics:

  • Society Under the Shang Dynasty

    • It was a society that followed a class system of land-owners, soldiers, bronze workers, and peasants.
    • It featured a stratified social system made up of aristocrats, soldiers, artisans and craftsmen, and peasants.
    • At the bottom of the social ladder were the peasants, the poorest of Chinese citizens.
    • Archaeological findings have shown that masses of peasants were buried with aristocrats, leading some scholars to believe that they were the equivalent of slaves.
    • Peasants were governed directly by local aristocrats.

  • Daily Medieval Life

    • As much as 90% of the European population remained rural peasants.
    • Each peasant family had its own strips of land; however, the peasants worked cooperatively on tasks such as plowing and haying.
    • Peasants usually ate warm porridges made of wheat, oats, and barley.
    • Peasants drank wine and ale, never water.
    • Even though peasant households were significantly smaller than aristocratic ones, the wealthiest peasants would also employ servants.

  • The Economy Under the Ming Dynasty

    • Large numbers of peasants abandoned the land to become artisans.
    • As the Hongwu Emperor came from a peasant family, he was aware of how peasants used to suffer under the oppression of the scholar-bureaucrats and the wealthy.
    • However, the reforms did not eliminate the threat of the bureaucrats to peasants.
    • The peasants often became either tenants or workers, or sought employment elsewhere.
    • Since the beginning of the Ming dynasty in 1357, great care was taken by the Hongwu Emperor to distribute land to peasants.

  • The Ancien Regime

    • The rural included peasants who owned their own land (and could be prosperous) and peasants who worked on nobles' or wealthier peasants' land.
    • The peasants paid disproportionately high taxes compared to the other Estates and simultaneously had very limited rights.
    • Despite regional differences and French peasants' generally better economic status than that of their Eastern European counterparts, hunger was a daily problem and the condition of most French peasants was poor.
    • The fundamental issue of poverty was aggravated by social inequality as all peasants were liable to pay taxes, from which the nobility could claim immunity, and feudal dues payable to a local lord.
    • Similarly, the tithes (a form of obligatory tax, at the time often paid in kind), which the peasants were obliged to pay to their local churches, was a cause of grievance as it was known that the majority of parish priests were poor and the contribution was being paid to an aristocratic, and usually absentee, abbot.

  • Fall of the Ming Dynasty

    • For peasants this was an economic disaster, since they paid taxes in silver while conducting local trade and selling their crops with copper coins.
    • At the same time, the Ming dynasty was fighting for its survival against fiscal turmoil and peasant rebellions.
    • The Chinese military, caught between fruitless efforts to defeat the Manchu raiders from the north and huge peasant revolts in the provinces, essentially fell apart.
    • On April 24, 1644, Beijing fell to a rebel army led by Li Zicheng, a former minor Ming official who became the leader of the peasant revolt, who then proclaimed the Shun dynasty.
    • Contributing further to the chaos was a peasant rebellion in Beijing in 1644 and a series of weak emperors.

  • Rise of the Ming Dynasty

    • The Ming dynasty was founded by a peasant rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang.
    • The Ming dynasty (January 23, 1368 – April 25, 1644), officially the Great Ming, founded by the peasant rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang (known posthumously as Emperor Taizu), was an imperial dynasty of China.
    • Zhu Yuanzhang was a penniless peasant and Buddhist monk who joined the Red Turbans in 1352, but soon gained a reputation after marrying the foster daughter of a rebel commander.
    • Zhu was a born into a desperately poor peasant tenant farmer family in Zhongli Village in the Huai River plain, which is in present-day Fengyang, Anhui Province.
    • Born a poor peasant, he later rose through the ranks of a rebel army and eventually overthrew the Yuan leaders and established the Ming dynasty.

  • Impact of the Protestant Reformation

    • For example, Bruegel's Wedding Feast portrays a Flemish-peasant wedding dinner in a barn.
    • It makes no reference to any religious, historical, or classical events, and merely gives insight into the everyday life of the Flemish peasant.
    • Bruegael's Peasant Wedding is a painting that captures the Protestant Reformation artistic tradition: focusing on scenes from modern life rather than religious or classical themes.

  • The Black Death

    • The great population loss wrought by the plague brought favourable results to the surviving peasants in England and Western Europe.
    • There was increased social mobility, as depopulation further eroded the peasants' already weakened obligations to remain on their traditional holdings.
    • These regulated what people (particularly of the peasant class) could wear, so that nobles could ensure that peasants did not begin to dress and act as a higher class member with their increased wealth.
    • Another tactic was to fix prices and wages so that peasants could not demand more with increasing value.
    • In England, Statute of Labourers 1351 was enforced, meaning no peasant could ask for more wages than in 1346.

  • Taxes and the Three Estates

    • In practice, this meant mostly the peasants because many bourgeois obtained exemptions.
    • Peasants and nobles alike were required to pay one-tenth of their income or produce to the church (the tithe).
    • In the decades leading to the French Revolution, peasants paid a land tax to the state (the taille) and a 5% property tax (the vingtième; see below).
    • Peasants were also obligated to their landlords for: rent in cash, a payment related to their amount of annual production, and taxes on the use of the nobles' mills, wine-presses, and bakeries.
    • The tax burden, therefore, devolved to the peasants, wage-earners, and the professional and business classes, also known as the Third Estate.

  • Catherine's Domestic Policies

    • The unrest intensified as the 18th century wore on, with more than fifty peasant revolts occurring between 1762 and 1769.
    • These culminated in Pugachev's Rebellion, when, between 1773 and 1775, Yemelyan Pugachev rallied the peasants and Cossacks and promised the serfs land of their own and freedom from their lords.
    • While she eliminated some ways for people to become serfs, culminating in a 1775 manifesto that prohibited a serf who had once been freed from becoming a serf again, she also restricted the freedoms of many peasants.
    • During her reign, Catherine gave away many state-owned peasants to become private serfs (owned by a landowner).
    • He had a substantial force composed of Cossacks, Russian peasants, factory serfs, and non-Russians.