Who Were the Peasantry?

The peasantry of the Early Middle Ages comprised the great majority of the population of Western Europe - probably more than ninety percent of the inhabitants of most regions. Peasants were the people who worked the land for a living, and they were the foundation of the entire social and economic order. They were not, however, a single class. The early medieval countryside was inhabited by free peasants, by people of partial freedom, by unfree tenants and serfs, and by outright slaves, and the boundaries between these groups were often blurred. The position of the peasantry varied by region, by period, and by the local balance of lordly and royal power, but in most places the mass of rural producers lived in conditions that were hard, precarious, and largely outside the written record.

For the economic system in which they worked, see the Feudalism and Manorialism in the Early Middle Ages. For the agricultural regime, see the Agriculture and Rural Life. For the estate on which they lived, see the What Was a Medieval Manor?. For the elite that ruled them, see the Who Were Medieval Nobles?.

Who counted as a peasant?

The word “peasant” (from the Latin paganus, originally meaning a person of the countryside) was not used in the Early Middle Ages. The categories of the period were different. The Latin vocabulary of the law codes distinguished between the ingenuus (the freeborn), the liber (the free, including the freed), the servus (the slave), and the colonus (the tenant farmer). The Germanic vocabulary distinguished between the friling (the free man), the liti (the semi-free), and the servus (the unfree). The Anglo-Saxon vocabulary distinguished between the ceorl (the free peasant) and the theow (the unfree). The vocabulary of the Slavic languages, the Scandinavian languages, and the Celtic languages had their own distinctions, often quite different from those of the Latin and Germanic world.

The common feature of all these categories is that the people in them worked the land for a living, in return for some combination of rent, labor service, and customary dues to a lord. In this sense, the “peasantry” included a wide range of people, from the prosperous free landowner who had his own oxen and his own household to the slave who worked in the lord’s kitchen. Between these two poles lay a vast range of intermediate statuses, many of them inherited, all of them subject to local variation.

The free peasant

The free peasant was the most respected and (often) the most prosperous member of the rural population. He held his land in his own right, paid a small rent to a lord (often a religious house or the king), and owed a few days of labor service or a small military obligation. In the Salic Law and the other early Germanic codes, the free peasant had a substantial wergeld - a sixth or an eighth of that of a noble - and he had the right to attend the local court, to bear witness in legal cases, and to participate in the assemblies of the hundred. The free peasant was the backbone of the older Germanic society, and the survival of a substantial class of free peasants in many regions (especially in Scandinavia, in the Slavic world, in the highland zones of Britain and Ireland, and in some parts of the Frankish heartland) was an important brake on the development of a fully manorial system.

The free peasant’s position, however, was never entirely secure. He could be reduced to dependence by debt, by crime, by the loss of his protector, or by the encroachment of a powerful neighbor. The pressures on the free peasantry were especially strong in the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the rise of the great aristocratic dynasties and the development of the more intensive manorial system led to the reduction of many free peasants to a condition of serfdom.

The serf and the slave

The serf, a term that came to prominence in the central and later Middle Ages, was an unfree peasant whose status was hereditary, who was bound to the lord’s court, and who could not leave the manor without the lord’s permission. The serf was subject to tallagia (arbitrary payments), to merchet (a fine on the marriage of his daughter), to heriot (a payment to the lord on the death of the head of household), and to the lord’s monopoly of the mill and the oven. The rise of serfdom in the tenth and eleventh centuries was one of the most important social changes of the period, driven by the pressure of the great lords and by the demographic recovery, which gave the lords more leverage over the rural population.

The slave was the lowest of the social categories. The slave was the property of his master, with no legal rights, no right to own property, and no right to marry without the master’s consent. He could be bought, sold, given away, or freed at the master’s will. Slavery in the early Middle Ages was not, however, the same as the chattel slavery of the Roman or the modern plantation. Many early medieval slaves were domestic servants, working in the lord’s household, the kitchen, the stables, or the textile workshop. Others were skilled craftsmen, with responsibilities that gave them a substantial measure of autonomy. The sources of slavery were several: the descendants of the slaves of the late Roman world, captives of war (especially the Slavic prisoners who gave the Latin word sclavus to the European vocabulary), and the victims of debt or famine. The manumission of slaves was a regular feature of early medieval life, and the Church encouraged it as a work of charity. By the central Middle Ages, the number of outright slaves had declined sharply in Western Europe, and most of the unfree had been absorbed into the serf class.

The work of the peasant

The work of the peasant was governed by the rhythm of the agricultural year. Plowing, sowing, weeding, harvesting, hay-making, shearing, threshing, and the care of the animals were the chief tasks, and they filled almost every day of the working year. The work was hard, and it was done with simple tools: the heavy plough, the harrow, the scythe, the sickle, the flail, the spade, the axe. The work was also highly skilled: a good ploughman, thatcher, or wheelwright required years of training.

The work was shared between men and women, but in different ways. Men did most of the heavy plowing, hay-making, and harvesting; women did most of the dairy work, the spinning and weaving, the gardening, and the poultry. The labor services owed to the lord were typically performed by the men, but women contributed in many other ways. The household was the basic unit of production, and the labor of all its members was needed to keep the family fed, clothed, and housed.

The peasant household was also a center of social life. The great feasts of the year - Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, the feast of the local saint - were times of communal celebration, with special foods, special dress, and special rituals. The Sunday mass, the parish festival, the meeting of the local court, the village ale, the storytelling of the long winter evenings: these were the social occasions of the early medieval village. The full picture is in the Agriculture and Rural Life and Daily Life and Society in the Early Middle Ages.

The peasant in the wider world

The peasant was not just a member of the village community; he was also a member of larger social units. He was a subject of the king, liable for military service and (increasingly) for royal taxation. He was a member of the Christian Church, obliged to attend mass, to pay the tithe, to receive the sacraments, and to observe the feasts and fasts of the liturgical year. He was a participant in the local court, and he could bring cases, serve as a witness, and be fined for his offenses. He was a member of a kin-group, bound to his relatives by ties of mutual aid, and liable to be called upon to support them in their feuds, their marriages, and their disputes.

The position of the peasant improved, in some respects, over the course of the Early Middle Ages. The Church’s protection of the unarmed, the Peace of God movement of the late tenth century, and the growth of royal and seigneurial courts gave the peasant some protection against the violence of the great lords. The commutation of labor services into money rents, which was well advanced by the twelfth century, gave the peasant more control over his own time and a stronger incentive to work for the market. The rise of the towns, with their demand for food and raw materials, gave the peasant access to a wider world. The freeing of many slaves, especially in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was a further reduction in the burden of unfreedom. The result was a slow but real improvement in the position of the peasantry, an improvement that would, in the central and later Middle Ages, transform the rural world of the early Middle Ages into something new. For the longer version, see the Family and Social Structure.

Related articles

• Feudalism and Manorialism in the Early Middle Ages
• Agriculture and Rural Life
• What Was a Medieval Manor?
• Who Were Medieval Nobles?
• Daily Life and Society in the Early Middle Ages