And when in your entire area all the peasants were serfs serving mostly foreign lords for several centuries, you kinda forget other types of peasants existed.
The dependency of manoralism and vassalage is a little more complex.
Working for the lord was often a necessity if your land alone couldn’t feed your family. Sharecroppers would get (as the name implies) a share of the crops they harvest. Other forms of labour might be paid in kind (food, resources) or in money (which might also be required to pay taxes).
The lord was expected to help out in times of crisis. If the harvest sucked, he would have been able to procure surplus food from elsewhere and help you out (putting you in his debt, of course). If there was danger from a belligerent neighbour, he would have been able to call on his liege to defend his holdings.
That in turn came with the expectation that, should your lord call on you to help, you would oblige. Your town might be expected to supply a few men, for instance, who would fight with that lord. That lord might in turn be answering the summons of his liege to defend some other lord’s lands, or wage some other war for some other nobles wealth and glory
So the lord wouldn’t fight alone, but use his own relationships to secure help for you, in exchange for your own service to him. In theory, that’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. In practice, you didn’t get much choice about arranging it.
“Peasant” was basically a farmer. Some peasants had land, many didn’t. If you were a tenant farmer not only did you not own the land, in many cases the land owned you. In many cases you were born on the land and you “rented” it from the manor lord. That meant that you were allowed to grow crops on that land, but you owed the lord for letting you use his land. You’d pay that back with shares of your crop and/or labour on his crops. In return, he was responsible for defending you… but that meant he’d conscript you into his army and you’d fight the invaders.
If you didn’t like that deal, too bad, if you were a villein you couldn’t leave the land without the lord’s permission. You weren’t a slave exactly, but you weren’t free to go find work elsewhere.
There were peasants who did own land, but it wasn’t common. The equivalent today would be if you rented from a landlord, but you had to use a uber-jobs app that required you to do odd jobs for your landlord for free for 1-2 days a week.
There’s nuance here: a peasant may have owned some land, but often not enough to live off of, which made them dependent on additional labour on the land of some landlord to supplement their own land’s harvest.
As I understand the term, it generally refers to the agricultural class in pre-industrial societies. I thought it obvious that this was the comparison made by the post. I’m not aware of any more modern application of the term aside from using it as an insult.
That’s a silly thing to say.
Peasants have land.
Pretty sure they usually worked/lived on the land owned by lords, no?
That would be serf, right?
Serfs were a subset of peasants from what i understand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasant
And when in your entire area all the peasants were serfs serving mostly foreign lords for several centuries, you kinda forget other types of peasants existed.
and those are a type of government surveillance drone if i understand ornithology correctly, which i don’t
Mmmm tasty government surveillance drones
But they’d work a couple days out of the year and their lord was expected to fight to protect his people and land
And the peasants who leased the land were his foot soldiers
The dependency of manoralism and vassalage is a little more complex.
Working for the lord was often a necessity if your land alone couldn’t feed your family. Sharecroppers would get (as the name implies) a share of the crops they harvest. Other forms of labour might be paid in kind (food, resources) or in money (which might also be required to pay taxes).
The lord was expected to help out in times of crisis. If the harvest sucked, he would have been able to procure surplus food from elsewhere and help you out (putting you in his debt, of course). If there was danger from a belligerent neighbour, he would have been able to call on his liege to defend his holdings.
That in turn came with the expectation that, should your lord call on you to help, you would oblige. Your town might be expected to supply a few men, for instance, who would fight with that lord. That lord might in turn be answering the summons of his liege to defend some other lord’s lands, or wage some other war for some other nobles wealth and glory
So the lord wouldn’t fight alone, but use his own relationships to secure help for you, in exchange for your own service to him. In theory, that’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. In practice, you didn’t get much choice about arranging it.
“Peasant” was basically a farmer. Some peasants had land, many didn’t. If you were a tenant farmer not only did you not own the land, in many cases the land owned you. In many cases you were born on the land and you “rented” it from the manor lord. That meant that you were allowed to grow crops on that land, but you owed the lord for letting you use his land. You’d pay that back with shares of your crop and/or labour on his crops. In return, he was responsible for defending you… but that meant he’d conscript you into his army and you’d fight the invaders.
If you didn’t like that deal, too bad, if you were a villein you couldn’t leave the land without the lord’s permission. You weren’t a slave exactly, but you weren’t free to go find work elsewhere.
There were peasants who did own land, but it wasn’t common. The equivalent today would be if you rented from a landlord, but you had to use a uber-jobs app that required you to do odd jobs for your landlord for free for 1-2 days a week.
No they don’t. They’re landless labourers.
There’s nuance here: a peasant may have owned some land, but often not enough to live off of, which made them dependent on additional labour on the land of some landlord to supplement their own land’s harvest.
I recommend reading this historian’s analysis of life as a peasant.
Thanks for the recommendation but I’m pretty sure peasants still exist.
As I understand the term, it generally refers to the agricultural class in pre-industrial societies. I thought it obvious that this was the comparison made by the post. I’m not aware of any more modern application of the term aside from using it as an insult.
https://magazines.odisha.gov.in/Orissareview/2021/August/engpdf/page-56-60.pdf
Often not enough to sustain their family, which means they had to supplement it by working for some landlord.
I recommend reading this historian’s analysis of life as a peasant.