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Position of peasants in early modern Europe
Peasant life and the middle ages
Position of peasants in early modern Europe
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About nine tenths of the people were peasants--farmers or village laborers. Hardly any of these were freemen--peasants who were not obligated to a lord and who rewarded only a fixed rent for their land. The very large plurality were slaves and farmers. In theory, the farmers had expansive legal rights than the slaves and fewer responsibilities to the lords. There was little real dissimilarity, nevertheless. A peasant village housed possibly ten to 60 families. Each family lived in a black, dank hut made of wood or straw-woven coat with mud and thatched with straw or rushes. Coating of straw or reeds covered the floor, disgusting by the boars, chickens, and other animals housed with the family. The one bed was a heap of drained leaves or straw.
(Document E) The conditions that these farmers’ families lived in were disgusting, and were described in a poorly written letter from a farmer’s wife to the governor of Kansas. “we are starving to death.
... insight into how the peasant judicial system attempted to benefit the peasants but was mostly filled with inadequacies.
Others were more like slaves. They owned nothing and were pledged to their local lord. They worked long days, 6 days a week, and often barely had enough food to survive”(“Middle Ages History”). Knights were above the peasants and they were given land granted by the barons in exchange for their military services if the king needed it. They were responsible for protecting the baron who granted them land as well as the baron’s family and the manor they lived at. The knights were able to keep any amount of land they were given, and they gave out the rest to the serfs. The lord, or baron, was above the knight in the social class divide. They were given land by the king and in return they showed loyalty to the monarch. They provided the king with fully equipped knights if the king needed some to serve. If the baron “did not have an army, sometimes they would pay the king a tax instead. This tax was called shield money”(“Middle Ages History”). The king was at the top of the feudal system and held the most power and wealth. The king could not maintain control over all the land in England so he divided the land up to the barons which eventually
cold, harsh, wintry days, when my brothers and sister and I trudged home from school burdened down by the silence and frigidity of our long trek from the main road, down the hill to our shabby-looking house. More rundown than any of our classmates’ houses. In winter my mother’s riotous flowers would be absent, and the shack stood revealed for what it was. A gray, decaying...
It seems like a fairytale-like utopia until the narrator’s tour of the city takes a dark turn. Underneath the beauty, there is a dirty, broom-closet-sized room. A small, feeble-minded, naked ten year old child sits there in its own excrement. Subject to malnutrition and neglect, the child is only given just enough food for subsistence.
”Families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless — restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do — to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut — anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land. “
and the settlement set up will include a meeting house, a village commons, large open lots which is very large and it contains kitchens and places where animals are kept and agricultural highland. The highlands were beautiful fields divided into segments and planting and harvesting were done together as a family.
The country was a feudal aristocracy. A few wealthy people owned the land, and therefore held all the power. The aristocrats doled out their land to their vassals and serfs so they could work the land and return most of the profits back to the land-owner, or lord. The king ruled above them all, exerting his power over the nobility to keep them in line. During feudalism, there was no way to move up the social ladder, castes were hereditary and immutable. The people learned to be satisfied with their lot in life simply because there was no hope or opportunity to move up in society. The castes co-existed because of their ingrained beliefs; serfs believed that they would never be able to equal the power that the nobility held, and the nobility looked down on the peasants as if they were shepherds attending to a flock of sheep. They also believed that the power they held was legitimate, and no one could rightfully take it from them (8). The distance in between the two social classes only reinforced those beliefs, and there was too large a gap to even hope of crossing it to equality. There was only one way that power could exchange hands, and that was through force. Then, Tocqueville noted, the power seemed to begin shifting in favor of the lower classes as time progressed. The aristocratic government was crumbling in favor of a more democratic one, based
A main factor in the storyline is the way the writer portrays society's attitude to poverty in the 18th century. The poor people were treated tremendously different to higher classed people. A lot of people were even living on the streets. For example, "He picked his way through the hordes of homeless children who congregated at evening, like the starlings, to look for the most sheltered niche into which they could huddle for the night." The writer uses immense detail to help the reader visualise the scene. She also uses a simile to help the reader compare the circumstances in which the children are in. This shows that the poor children had to live on the streets and fend for themselves during the 18th century. Another example involves a brief description of the city in which the poor people lived in. This is "nor when he smelt the stench of open sewers and foraging pigs, and the manure of horses and mules" This gives a clear example of the state of the city. It is unclean and rancid and the writer includes this whilst keeping to her fictional storyline.
It was a village on a hill, all joyous and fun where there was a meadow full of blossomed flowers. The folks there walked with humble smiles and greeted everyone they passed. The smell of baked bread and ginger took over the market. At the playing grounds the children ran around, flipped and did tricks. Mama would sing and Alice would hum. Papa went to work but was always home just in time to grab John for dinner. But Alice’s friend by the port soon fell ill, almost like weeds of a garden that takes over, all around her went unwell. Grave yards soon became over populated and overwhelmed with corpse.
The furnishings found in each hut also provide indications of how the people lived. In the centre of all the huts lay a fireplace that is thought to be the only source of heat and light in the entire hou...
dived between the merchants and the upper class. The peasants had to work day day to
The main classes were nobles (landowners and priests) they were the most powerful before the emperor came into play. After that was the artisans and merchants they made up the intermediate class. After that came the commoners this group was the largest group of them all they were mostly farmers, craftspeople, soldiers and serfs. Slaves were at the bottom of the classes.
During the French Revolution, there were many controversies between the peasants and the aristocracy. In A Tale Of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, most of the peasants are revolutionaries fighting against their nobility. Dickens’ use of imagery throughout the novel tries to sway the reader’s opinions about the peasants. Charles Dickens depicts the French Revolution well with the images of the novel as well as the tone he uses. Throughout the novel, Dickens illustrates through his imagery how the peasants change from poor, secretive, and then on to vicious.