A Peasant’s Life

1141 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

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.

Show More
Related

  • Peasant Lifestyle In Davis´ The Return of Martin Guerre

    1599 Words  | 4 Pages

    Davis addresses various important factors in a peasant’s life. She highlights many components of peasant society, including their social classes and how their society values property in different ways. Davis also includes the peasants’ culture. She elaborates on the importance of children and the consequences of not being able to produce children. She also explains typical marriage procedures and customs. Lastly, Davis talks about some of the laws and common uses of the judicial system by peasants. By incorporating these factors into her book Davis is successful at recreating life for peasants in France during the sixteenth century.

    Read More

  • John Sayles' Men With Guns (Hombres Armados)

    740 Words  | 2 Pages

    Unless the peasants work on the feudal plantations, they will starve. The army ensures their reliance on the plantations by kicking them off of all arable land, leaving them with no food and no employment. Committing themselves to the only employers in the region, the peasants are forced into a feudal relationship. They are held in this relationship by the army, which goes to extreme measures to maintain control of the peasants.

    Read More

  • Peasants Revolt Dbq

    627 Words  | 2 Pages

    The causes of the peasants’ revolt included lack of compensation for services, feelings of spiritual inequality, lords refusing peasant freedom without reimbursement, and the peasants’ manipulation of Lutheran principles; while the responses to the revolt incorporated negativity, violence, and authority

    Read More

  • Isbister Chapter Summary

    1409 Words  | 3 Pages

    The life of the peasant is a series of ritual occasions, planting and harvesting, being born, coming of age, begetting, dying. . . . All are one family, interrelated if not in this generation, in the last or the next. All give unquestioned obedience to the great mother goddess, the earth mother, who can easily be made to wear a Christian

    Read More

  • The Village Of Cannibals Analysis

    1227 Words  | 3 Pages

    Essentially, the rural bourgeoisie attempted to shift social hostility away from issues of wealth and land, but rather focuses such hostilities towards individuals and the aristocratic “caste”. “[The rural bourgeoisie] exaggerated the importance of genealogy; it caricatured the pride and insolence of the noble, which were no doubt a crueler torture for the bourgeois than for the peasant; it criticized the ways in which the aristocracy strove to maintain social distance; and it sought to persuade peasants, who also hated the aristocracy, that the nobility’s arrogance was the chief source of social conflict.” Although anti-noble attitudes existed long before the Revolution, the rumors started by the rural bourgeoisie began to remind the peasantry of the caste system that was in place under the First Republic. The fear that resulted in this believed renewal of the caste system only strengthened the peasantry’s anti-noble ideology into hatred. Corbin argues that the importance of rumor was imperative to the murder of Monéy claiming, “they highlight the contrast between the depth of the social tensions, the intensity of the anxiety, and the restraint of violence.” It is no surprise then that with such heavy issues weighing on the minds of the peasantry, that there was such a surge of violence with

    Read More

  • The Feudal System In Lanval By Mari De France

    1719 Words  | 4 Pages

    The importance and job of each class fail to function optimally. The castles were rooted economically in the countryside which was intimately connected with the villagers. These villagers were the “social and economic units of rural Europe” (147) which illustrates the importance of the various classes in medieval Europe. Undermining the lower social classes will cause political and social upheaval as they collectively dominate the economic force in the feudal system. Few individual commoners mask the

    Read More

  • The Bracero Program

    1181 Words  | 3 Pages

    As mentioned previously war time creates hardships and sometimes those hardships are difficult to recover from. The outcome of the Mexican Revolution included millions of peasants being killed. Marentes describes peasants as hard-working, highly skilled agricultural labors. With the loss of so many peasants the harvest became scarce and many were lacking work. The Mexican government was unable to replenish resources and improve the way of life in Mexico causing ...

    Read More

  • The Knight's Tale: Social Classes In Medieval Times

    580 Words  | 2 Pages

    During the medieval times the social status and the rank of the citizens where very important in determining the obligations and restrictions of the people. When citizens jumped social class or stepped out of line, it was looked down upon by the other citizens. In the Knights tale some of the social class stereotypes are broken by characters such as Kate, William and Joselyn.

    Read More

  • Was Industrial Revolution good or bad for the level of life of english workers?

    1793 Words  | 4 Pages

    Traditionally, the goods were produced by families: women took care of the family while men were the main labor forces; and tasks of less importance were given to children according to their age. In this familiar productive unit, the leisure time was mixed with the working time. Moreover, the production pace is flexible. Peasants worked for aristocracy’ and had to pay taxes. Their sustenance depended on the harvest which varied with the season and weather. Artisans were more independents as they relied on their own skill and were supported by the guild. In addition, luxury products allowed a higher income.

    Read More

  • The Life Of A Peasant By Sarz Davis Analysis

    2053 Words  | 5 Pages

    The most intriguing article within the stimulating documents was William Stearns Davis’ “The Life of a Peasant” (Davis, 1922). Which offers an unaltered view of the lives of peasants in the middle ages. In his article, Davis introduces the idea of deadly bacteria through a description of the Black Plague, a disease caused by the bacterium named Yersinia Pestis. The Black Plague devastated the kingdoms of the middle ages. Yersinia Pestis was able to do this as at the time of its major outbreak, poor hygiene was commonplace, and antibiotics were non-existent. The question that stood out from the article was “To what extent, would it be possible for superbugs to create an environment today absent of effective antibiotics?”

    Read More

  • Elizabethan Poor Law

    728 Words  | 2 Pages

    Queen Elizabeth I notices the growing number of paupers in Great Britain. She and the Parliament had responsibility over these people and tried to figure out what to do. Parliament tried to avoid starvation and are struggling to have the authority over the public. Unfortunately, Great Britain suffered through economic situations. There were inflation of food prices. Prices in grain rose about 70% in the 17th percent. There was famine throughout the land. The workers’, especially the farmers, wages declined about 60%. Unfortunately, there was no source of relief because of the disintegrating feudal system (Boyer). The rest of the population mostly moved to provinces and towns. Only a few of the paupers had the ability to earn their own wages. Parliament sought help from numeral parishes. Although, there were misunderstandings within the paupers wandering place to place with no occupation. An act was issued later for this problem to punish the vagabonds and offer some poor relief. They were usually hanged (Bliss).

    Read More

  • The American Civil War

    1805 Words  | 4 Pages

    Kulikoff, A. (2000). From British peasants to colonial American farmers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

    Read More

  • Injustice In A Tale Of Two Cities

    930 Words  | 2 Pages

    When Dickens describes the peasants he makes sure their plight is made clear to all. The nobles consistently take advantage of them and do not show any compassion. The peasants are starving to death to the extent where when a wine casket breaks on the ground they “...suspended their business or idleness to run to the spot and drink the wine”(31). The peasants are starving to death and a sincere lack of compassion is shown to them. The nobles have no regard to peasant life. After the Marquis

    Read More

  • Social Stratification And Social Class

    1029 Words  | 3 Pages

    The commoners were the masses. They spent their lives engaged in hard physical labor, with virtually no chance of moving up in society.

    Read More

  • Russian Revolution Essay

    873 Words  | 2 Pages

    “The social causes by the Russian revolution mainly became of centuries of domination over the lower classes by the Tsarist regime, and Nicholas’s failures in World War one.”5 As the rural agricultural peasants had been limitless from serfdom in the year 1861, the peasants still refused paying redemption payments to the state and demanded to be the private owner of the land that they worked. The only problem was further compounded by the never lasting failure of Sergei Witte’s land reforms during the early twentieth century. Peasant disturbances increased which sometimes ended up becoming revolts, with only the goal of securing the ownership of the land they worked. At that time Russia consisted mainly of poor farming peasants, which made up one and a half percent of the population owning twenty-five percent of the land.

    Read More

More about A Peasant’s Life

Open Document