peasantry

noun

Etymology: From peasant + -ry, from Middle English paissaunt.

1. Impoverished rural farm workers, either as serfs, small freeholders or hired hands.

   “They distressed her. They were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks. But the older people, Yankees as well as Norwegians, Germans, Finns, Canucks, had settled into submission to poverty. They were peasants, she groaned.”

2. Ignorant people of the lowest social status; bumpkins, rustics.

   “Such strange lingering echoes of the old demon worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent listener among the gray-haired peasantry; for the rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity.”

3. The condition of being a peasant; the position, rank, conduct, or quality of a peasant.

   “How much low pezantry would then be gleaned / From the true ſeede of honor? And how much honor, / Pickt from the chaffe and ruine of the times / To be new verniſh’d?”

   “He ſhall be armed at all peeces from the mid-thigh vpward with a faire Sword by his ſide, and his Captaines Colours or Enſigne in his hand, which Colours if they belong to a priuate Captaine ought to bee mixt equally of two ſeuerall colours, that is to ſay (according to the rules of Herauldry) of Colour and Mettall, and not colour on colour, as Greene and Red, or Blacke and Blew, or ſuch like, nor yet mettall on mettall as White and Yellow, or Orangetawny and White: for colours ſo borne, ſhew Baſtardy, peaſantry, or diſhonor.”