A Peasant’s Life

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Recommended: Peasants and lower classes in the middle ages in England

A Peasant’s Life The peasant has always been looked upon as an object of pity, an underclass citizen who worked to provide for the higher classes. A passage from Pierce the Ploughman’s Creed gives the perfect description of a day in the life of a peasant: As I went by the way, weeping for sorrow, I saw a poor man hanging on to the plough. His coat was of a coarse stuff which was called cary; his hood was full of holes and his hair stuck out of it. As he trod the soil his toes stuck out of his worn shoes with their thick soles; his hocks on all sides and he was all bedaubed with muck as he followed the plough. He had two mittens, scantily made of rough stuff, with worn-out fingers and thick with muck. This man bemired himself in mud almost to the ankle, and drove four heifers before him that had become feeble, so that men might count their every rib as sorry-looking they were. His wife walked beside him with a long goad in a shortened cote-hardy looped up full high and wrapped in a winnowing-sheet to protect her from the weather. She went barefoot on the ice so that the blood flowed. And at the end of the row there lay a little crumb-bowl, and therein a little child covered with rags, and two two-year-olds were on the other side, and they all sang one song that was pitiful to hear: they all cried the same cry - a miserable note. The poor man sighed sorely, and said, ‘Children be still!’1 As individuals within a greater society, the peasants of the seventeenth century provided themselves and the remainder of the community with economic and agricultural sustenance in accordance to their constant backbreaking labor and pitifully inferior lifestyle. According to J.F.C. Harrison, “Peasants are small-scale agricultural produ... ... middle of paper ... ...c stability and daily living requirements. Though this class was considered inferior and on average lived like the animals it raised, the upper parts of the community would never have prospered without it. Notes 1. J.F.C. Harrison, The Common People of Great Britain (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1985) , 49. 2. Harrison, Common People, 27. 3. Harrison, Common People, 27. 4. Edit Fel and Tamas Hofer, Proper Peasants (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969) , 15. 5. Harrison, Common People, 31. 6. Harrison, Common People, 32. 7. Harrison, Common People, 33. 8. Harrison, Common People, 33. 9. Harrison, Common People, 45. 10. Harrison, Common People, 50. 11. Harrison, Common People, 32. 12. Harrison, Common People, 46 13. Harrison, Common People, 47. 14. Harrison, Common People, 48.

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