peasant
Sign in to savethumb|upright=1.5|Young women offer berries to visitors to their izba home, 1909. Those who had been serfs among the Russian peasantry were officially emancipated in 1861. Photograph by [[Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.]] A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants existed: non-free slaves, semi-free serfs, and free tenants. Peasants might hold title to land outright (fee simple), or by any of several forms
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A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or small-scale farmer who typically worked land owned by someone else and paid rent or services to a landlord, with their status ranging from enslaved to semi-free to free. Peasants matter historically because they formed the vast majority of Europe's population for centuries, particularly under feudalism, and their labor and relationships to land shaped the entire social and economic structure of medieval and early modern societies.
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Article
15 sectionsContents
- Etymology
- Social position
- Medieval European peasants
- Early modern Germany
- France
- Chinese farmers
- Latin American farmers
- Historiography
- See also
- Related terms
- References
- Cited sources
- Bibliography
- Recent
- External links
thumb|upright=1.5|Young women offer berries to visitors to their izba home, 1909. Those who had been serfs among the Russian peasantry were officially emancipated in 1861. Photograph by [[Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.]] A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants existed: non-free slaves, semi-free serfs, and free tenants. Peasants might hold title to land outright (fee simple), or by any of several forms of land tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and copyhold.
In some contexts, "peasant" has a pejorative meaning, even when referring to farm laborers. As early as in 13th-century Germany, the concept of "peasant" could imply "rustic" as well as "robber", as the English term villain/villein. In 21st-century English, the word "peasant" can mean "an ignorant, rude, or unsophisticated person". The word rose to renewed popularity in the 1940s–1960s as a collective term, often referring to rural populations of developing countries in general, as the "semantic successor to 'native', incorporating all its condescending and racial overtones".