https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-v-life-in-cycles/ Skip to content A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry A look at history and popular culture Menu * Home * Resources for Teachers * Resources for World-Builders * Book Recommendation List * Contact * About the Pedant Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part V: Life In Cycles Bret Devereaux Collections, The Peasant October 17, 2025 38 Minutes This is the fifth and final part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd, IVe) looking at the structures of life for pre-modern peasant farmers and showing how historical modeling can help us explore the experiences of people who rarely leave much evidence of their day-to-day personal lives. I've been stressing this over and over again, but it is worth repeating, peasant farmers make up a simply majority of all humans who have ever lived, and yet we generally have very little evidence for their lives, because they were rarely literate and thus do not typically write to us. We've talked about the patterns of marriage, of birth, of death, of subsistence in farming and spinning and weaving, the innumerable maintenance tasks that keep the household running and the pressures that elite extraction - omnipresent for our peasants - exert on the system. This week I want to try to put it all together, taking our models and transmuting them into a sense of what life in these communities was like, with its hardships and its joys. In particular, this is an effort to take our models - which exist mostly as numbers - and turn them into something approaching a narrative, a digital-to-analog conversion that I hope can capture a bit more of the nature of life for these people. That narrative is going to follow one of the dominant ways early agrarian societies thought about time: not as a linear progression, but as a sequence of cycles, from the smallest to the largest. But first, if you like what you are reading, please share it and if you really like it, you can support this project on Patreon! While I do teach as the academic equivalent of a tenant farmer, tilling the Big Man's classes, this project is my little plot of freeheld land which enables me to keep working as a writers and scholar. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter and Bluesky and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter. Email Address [ ] Subscribe! Before we launch in, I am going to be referring to the members of our model households a bunch, so if you need the reference, here is the table showing who is who (by relationship to the householder, whose name is in bold): The Smalls (4 The Middles (6 members) The Biggs (10 members) members) Mr. Smalls (M. 40) Widow Middles (F. 46) Widow Biggs (F. 50) Householder Mother Mother Mrs. Smalls (F. 32) Mr. Middles Jr. (M. 27) Mr. Matt Biggs (M. 43) Wife Householder Householder John (M. 14) Mrs. Middles Jr. (F. 22) Mrs. Maddie Biggs (F. Son Wife 33) Wife Jane (F. 6) Fanny Middles (F. 4) Mark Biggs (M. 16) Daughter Daughter Son Freida Middles (F. Matilda Biggs (F. 12) newborn) Daughter Daughter Freddie Middles (M. 16) Mary Biggs (F. 8) Brother Daughter Mr. Martin Biggs (M. 28) Brother Mrs. Martha Biggs (F. 22) Sister-in-Law Michael Biggs (M. 4) Nephew Melanie Biggs (F. 1) Niece The Shortest Cycles As you may have already teased out of our models, the lives of these peasants work in a series of cycles. There's a reason agrarian societies of these sort often do not think in terms of time as a linear progression, but instead as a set of 'ages' or 'cycles,' with the present, in a sense, endlessly repeating in a static sort of rhythm. For these societies technological and social progress, while real is often so slow as to be almost or entirely imperceptible on a normal human lifespan. For instance, we can see that between 1000 and 1800, changes in spinning and loom technology are going to radically change the labor efficiency of that task, but for a peasant in c. 1100, for whom the technology of spinning and weaving has been constant for centuries, that is not obvious. Indeed, consider the peasant woman in c. 1500 working a non-treadle spinning wheel - things might seem almost as static. For a society with limited literacy, she relies on 'living memory' to understand change and that technology, introduced in Europe in the 1200s, hasn't changed massively in three centuries, so that woman's mother, grandmother, great-grandmother (we've already well passed the limit of living memory here), great-great-grandmother, great-great-great-grandmother, and on for close to fifteen generations have been using basically the same device. Change in these societies isn't always that slow - though when it is faster, it is often traumatic for communities that simply are not built to handle rapid change - but it frequently is. So time doesn't seem like a march endlessly into the future, but like a wheel spinning. Or more correctly, wheels within wheels, like a clock: there is the spin of seconds, minutes, hours, days and so on - smaller cycles within larger ones, with the largest cycle our peasants, as humans, can observe being their own lifetimes. But let's start with the smallest cycle: the day. The day begins early, a bit before true sunrise. Contrary to what one might imagine from pop-culture, artificial light, such as is available, is provided by lamps and candles, not torches and is, in any event, expensive. Our peasants rely almost entirely on sunlight instead, so sunlight defines much of this daily cycle. The women are likely to be moving earliest, as they're expected to prepare breakfast for the men before they set out into the fields or to other tasks. For Mrs. Smalls, the daily set of chores is going to be especially packed as she has to shoulder most of the burden for the household, but by this point little Jane Smalls is an extra helping hand - not old enough yet to do many tasks fully on her own, but already well into the task of learning them. [1614039966]From the British Museum (1922,0410,306) a print (c. 1690-1742) from a series showing activities in the hours of the day. This one shows morning activities. Note the women warming the room (lower left, and another woman cooking (back center). One thing to be cautious about is that these sorts of illustrations of common life can be heavily idealizing (the description below speaks of infants, fathers, mothers waking with contented airs, if I read it correctly, which is certainly not how I'd describe infants waking). By contrast in the larger households, there's likely a bit of a division of the morning's labor between the grown women. Widow Middles might start preparing breakfast - something simple, like pottage - while Mrs. Middles Jr nurses tiny Freida Middles and prepares to head out to fetch water from the well. For The Biggs, water-fetching is one of Matilda Biggs' chores, while Mary Biggs helps her mother stoke the hearthfire and start warming breakfast. Martha Biggs, of course, has two children, one nursing, to rouse and look after. In all three households, the women work something like a team, directed typically by the eldest matron, dividing tasks. They are rarely alone, nor do they stay forever sedentary in the house. Instead, with children in tow, they are on the move quiet a lot, moving to different parts of the farmhouse - which, recall, includes working and storage spaces as well - as well as heading out to pick up water, heading into the village to check on neighbors and so on. Remember that horizontal social relations in this society aren't just a nice bit of socializing - maintaining those ties is crucial to the household. If there's a lot of field work distant from the house, it wouldn't be unusual for them to also plan to bring lunch out to the men in the field (though equally the men might carry lunch out with them or, if working close to home, return for a hot lunch). As the sun comes up, the men are dressing, gathering tools and eating breakfast. Their work during the day won't be isolated either: they'll head out in groups and work in the fields effectively as a team. My best sense is that around seven or eight is when we'd expect to start seeing these boys supporting the farming tasks of their fathers and be expected to function as adults, performing the full range of tasks around fourteen or so, though the exact ages here will vary culture to culture. Just as with the women of the household, the senior adult male is likely to direct the collective labor of the men and boys in his household. For the Smalls, that is simple enough: John is learning how to be a farmer by helping his father, but you can easily imagine these relationships being a bit more complex for Mr. Middles Jr. and Mr. Matt Biggs, both of whom have a grown brother still in the household who is likely to chafe to some degree at the control exerted by the householder (something we'll come back to). The work day in the fields is likely a full one - in farming, there is always more that could be done, but our farmers are setting their own pace and schedule, with rests as necessary (or at least, as deemed necessary by the head of household). Village farming would often be itself a cooperative effort not only within households but between them, so we might very well see multiple households working together on shared or adjoining plots as well. It is worth remembering that the topography of these villages is not spread out like homesteads: for the most part the farmhouses are nucleated in the village itself, with the fields spread out around them, so walking from one house to the next to visit, ask favors or coordinate group labor is quick enough. [93859001]From the British Museum (E,9.169), a print by Gyles Godet (c. 1580) showing haymaking in July, from a series showing agricultural activities by the month (though keep in mind the timing of those activities varies by the primary cereal crop and climate). You can see peasants both working but also resting, a good reminder that agricultural workers could certainly take breaks during the day and did so. In all of these activities - men working in the fields, women working in the home, getting water, moving through the village - our peasants are rarely alone, for better and for worse. For the better, the social aspect of these activities are very strong: they chat with each other while working, they might sing together, they certainly pray together. Horizontal ties are also important to survival - perhaps while going through the village to fetch water, Mrs. Smalls might stop by at the Biggs to speak to Maddie Biggs (a sister, or perhaps a cousin, in these close-knit communities) to see if she can't get some extra spun thread, perhaps in exchange for some grain, vegetables or such. On the other hand, eyes are always watching and these are societies which expect the individual to place the community first, with individuals valued to the degree that they fill a communal role. There's very little space for self-expression here and throughout the day, every day our peasants exist within a hierarchy beneath the male head of household. The older women direct the other women and girls, the men direct the boys and the male householder, who by law is the one that owns (or has claim to) the productive asset (land) that enables the household is the final decider on basically everything. But those heads of household are hardly able to make all of their own decisions either, constrained by the need to remain 'respectable' in a community that demands conformity and by debt or peonage to the Big Man. There might be a break in the field work around midday. While women in these societies work more hours overall, the physical demands in strength and endurance in field labor are very high, so that midday rest - siesta - is an important way to conserve strength. Artists looking to capture 'pastoral simplicity' often seem to depict these sorts of breaks, which can give a deceptive sense of what the farming day is like: periods of rest alternated with periods of quite intense physical labor. While the men are in the fields, the women are working through the myriad maintenance tasks necessary to keep the farm running: storing and preparing food, watching children, cleaning living and work spaces, maintaining the hearthfire and such. The diet was heavily based on grains - wheat, barley and the like would be providing a majority of the calories for most peasants - but that doesn't mean that other types of food (legumes, meat, vegetables, fruits) were entirely absent, simply that they existed within grain-based system. The proportion of calories coming from grains would have always been high, but varied based on time and place, with wealthier societies having marginally more varied diets; a good ballpark for the calorie proportion of grains is around 75%, higher in some places, lower in others.^1 [372178001]From the British Museum (1978,0624.42.66) a drawing by Adriaen van de Venne (1620s) of two women talking, with one holding a spindle and winding frame, while the other holds a lace collar - perhaps negotiating an exchange. A third figure, a thief, attempts to steal one of the purse of one of the women. That grain might take the form of bread, of course, which once baked could be taken into the field and eaten cold, but equally it could be made into porridge or (thinner) gruel). In all of these societies I've investigated, the task of managing food stores fell to women, who had to figure out how to make a meal out of whatever was available. Many foods would thus naturally be seasonal, especially with limited options to preserve meats, fruits or vegetables.^2 The frequent recourse was to stews, which could be made with essentially whatever was available, especially if anything was liable to spoil if not eaten soon - 'perpetual stews' kept over relatively long periods with new ingredients added regularly as they became available were one option to 'use up' any odd bits of food. It is easy to over-idealize 'home cooking' - some peasant women, doubtless, were clever and creative cooks, but when you make all women cook, naturally you are going to have some indifferent or ineffective cooks as well (the same way that when you make all men farm, chances are some of them are not very good farmers). Almost regardless of cooking skill, peasant cuisine would have been mostly remarkably bland by modern standards, based heavily in grains, with few options to add sweet or savory flavors. Alongside the actual cooking of the meals, there's quite a bit of work involved in cleaning cooking and eating surfaces, as it all has to be done by hand and without the aid of modern cleaning supplies that can loosen things like grease. Our peasant women are also engaged in a mix of childcare activities. Matilda Biggs, at 12 is likely working along side her mother or grandmother effective as an adult; childhood doesn't last long in these societies and by her age Matilda is already likely a relatively proficient spinner and more than able to help with cooking and other household tasks. Our three households also have a number of teenage boys (John Smalls, 14, Freddie Middles and Mark Biggs, both 16). While they probably aren't yet legal adults (ages of majority in these societies for young men range from 15 to 21), by those ages these boys are expected to work like adults, so they would be in the fields alongside their fathers and older brothers (and would have been helping out in the fields in some capacity probably since around age 7). Likewise, as noted above, little Jane Smalls is probably transitioning into this state and so while she is with her mother, Mrs. Smalls is increasingly expecting Jane to be an active worker alongside her. For the younger children, the two nursing infants (Freida Middles and Melanie Biggs) are going to need to be with their mothers. However for children in the age 4-7 bracket - too young to really start working, but old enough not to need constant supervision - the parenting style was, somewhat necessarily substantially 'free range.' Fanny Middles and Michael Biggs (both 4) might be in this period of their life, which really was the last gasp of 'childhood' as we understand it, as a period of play and learning rather than labor. The women (and older girls) of their households will be keeping an eye on them, in between the necessary work tasks the day demands. Throughout all of these activities - cooking, cleaning spaces in the home, cleaning cooking and eating surfaces, watching children - our women are working textiles. For much of Eurasia, that will mean primarily wool, though linen and other fabrics are certainly used. With more capacity for spinning than strictly required, the women of the Middles and the Biggs might focus some of their efforts on producing modestly nicer clothes, while poor harried Mrs. Smalls will have to struggle just to replace worn out clothing. Nothing spun and wove will be wasted: worn out clothes are turned into children's clothes, patchworks, rags or whatever else they can be used for, until they basically disintegrate. [1614039969]From the British Museum (1922,0410.308), a print (c. 1690-1742) from a series showing activities in the hours of the day. This shows the evening, as the peasants, their carts loaded and animals in tow, make their way with tools back to their farm houses. As the sun begins to set, the farming work parties in the fields will start heading back home, while their wives, sisters and daughters prepare the evening meal. The day has had its cycle, from morning tasks, to the main of the work day, to evening tasks and finally, as the sun sets and work is no longer possible without artificial light that is simply too expensive for our peasants to use in any kind of quantity, to sleep. There is almost no dedicated leisure time during the day. There is a regularity to the cycle, a monotony - each day more or less like the one before it and the one after - one imagines it was comforting to some peasants and deeply constricting to others, shaped by the continuing demands of peasant labor (itself structured by the heavy extraction regime they operate under, which consumes the leisure time they might otherwise have). The next day, they'll rise and repeat the cycle. The Year If that monotony was all there was, one might imagine most peasants would give into despair, but while most days were just like the ones before and after, the peasant calendar had all sorts of cyclical changes. The cyclical nature here is worth stressing: most of the events that broke up the yearly cycle happened every year at roughly the same time, so they too became part of the routine of life. Peasants wouldn't go 'on vacation' (though they might go to war, more on that below) or do other things that we do to disrupt the cycle, but the cycle had its breaks. The next smallest cycle was a more-or-less weekly cycle of days, with a day of rest or religious observance at the week's end. The Abrahamic faiths all have a weekly day of religious observance on which work is to be avoided or at least limited by religious activity, while the Romans had the nundinae ('ninth-days') every eight days (they're counting inclusively) which were days for rest or attending local markets. So while that tends to mean these societies had six work days out of seven (or seven out of eight) there was, for our peasants, a day that offered, if not a rest, at least a change of pace and a chance to gather for larger social events on a regular schedule. Beyond this was the annual cycle, all-important for farmers whose crops had to be planted and harvested at the correct times. That cycle isn't universal, but depends on the planting and harvest times for the local major cereal crop. Spring wheat is planted in spring (usually around April) and harvested in late summer or early fall (often in August) while winter wheat is typically planted in early Fall (sometime between late September and November) and harvested in early Summer (typically June or July). These dates shift around a bit depending on local climate as well, which is why I'm offering rough ranges. Using a winter wheat schedule, since that's what I'm a bit more familiar with, and I am going to follow roughly a Roman agricultural calendar, the Menologium Rusticum Colatianum, but note that the exact timings here would vary depending on local climate and such. Plowing would begin in September; this was hard, backbreaking work (even with a plow-team of animals) but requires relatively few hands and has a decent amount of time for it in the calendar. It's worth noting that fallowed fields also need to be plowed, usually once each in the fall, spring and summer. October, just before the plants go in the ground, another plowing and manuring. November brings the first labor peak in the planting season (done at the last plowing) and in some cultures we'll see women in the fields helping get the seed into the ground at this point.^3 Beans - an important food in Roman crop rotation and also simply to provide a source of protein - are planted in December. [CIL_VI_2305_-_Menologium_Rusticum_Colotianum_05_Iul-Sep_Oct-Dec]Via Wikipedia, the Menologium Rusticum Colotianum (now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples), a four-sided marble pillar, inscribed with the months, with various information for each month, including its chief festivals and important agricultural tasks. I went with this for the calendar I present here because I know the Roman sequence fairly well. The exact sequence would differ by region and chief crop, but this mostly means moving the activities around, not a change in what activities are done. The calendar then lightens a little bit while the plants are in the ground, but this isn't necessarily 'spare time' as months without major pressing agricultural jobs are when our peasants need to do all of the gathering, fixing, preparing and such they can't do during the hard months. January is a good time for repairing tools, cutting trees, fixing buildings and such (note this is a warmer climate; in a colder one, you'd want your firewood gathering done before winter). Hoeing is done in February. March is a slower month (and not an accident then, that it is the traditional month for the Roman dilectus - if you must call everyone to Rome for the draft, do it in a month that doesn't have heavy labor demands). April is when sheep are washed and shorn and also when weeding might begin, although on the Roman calendar weeding more properly belongs to May. The big task in June is haymaking (although that may begin in May according to Columella) and then in July comes the harvest, the highest labor-demand part of the year, running into August. As we've noted, the harvest brings everyone available out into the fields to reap, thresh and winnow the grain so that it is ready for storage.^4 The rest of August is often a break from all of that work - another chance to repair tools, buildings, fences and so on - and then the cycle starts again. That annual calendar, of course, structured agricultural work, determining the kind of labor that our peasants (mostly the men, in this case) but it was also a calendar of anxiety for our peasants. After all, roughly three-quarters of the households annual calories came in during a single month - July in in a winter-wheat region, August if you've planted spring wheat. Remember our quote of Theophrastus, "the year bears the harvest, not the field."^5 Meaning harvests were significantly variable one year to the next and as we've seen our peasants do not have large margins of error in terms of their production. Most of our model households were already falling short of their 'respectability' requirements, but a year where the harvest was, say, 75% (or worse yet, 50%) of its expected yield could put them in serious danger of shortage. The margin of error here is actually tighter than our model suggests: we haven't accounted, for instance, for spoilage of grain in storage over the year. [219871001]From the British Museum (1884,0726.38), a drawing (1654) of a few small cottages (background) and peasants walking and resting in the foreground. So our peasants have Janus-like worries, looking forward and looking back. Looking forward, once the seed is in the ground, while our peasants can weed and watch as carefully as they can most of the process is out of their control. Too much rain or too little, weather too hot or too cold, can ruin the harvest (while ideal conditions might produce a 'bumper crop' and a good year), but the farmer can only sit and watch and work on other tasks and desperately hope. Hope, because if the harvest is poor and food is short, someone needs to be underfed. The household has to survive and that means the working adults need to have enough strength to do the farming and the household cannot shortchange the seed set aside for the next year. So the first people to tighten their belts and go with less in a shortage are the very old and the very young. Reduced nutrition in turn renders them vulnerable to sickness or injuries that in another year might be easily overcome, with the greatest vulnerability for very young children (for whom sickness can be a significant concern even with modern medicine). The Smalls are perhaps the least vulnerable household here - a bad year might stunt Jane's growth, leaving her a bit shorter or with other developmental problems, but it probably won't kill her. But for the Middles and the Biggs, a poorly timed bad year is quite possibly a death sentence for little Freida Middles and Melanie Biggs; it has a distressing chance of claiming Widows Middles and Biggs too. So the peasant farmers plow their fields and plant their seeds and hope. Meanwhile, of course, there is the food from last year's harvest. Grain is hard to keep in the conditions these peasants can create much longer than a year or two, but it wouldn't matter too much if they had radically better storage given that they're barely producing enough for their own needs anyway. The task of preserving, preparing and if necessary, rationing that food generally falls to the women of the household. And they don't lack for worries either: because the grain all comes in at once, should anything happen to it, the result could still be shortage. And there are a lot of things that can happen to it: pests, spoilage, theft or fire, for instance. So our peasant woman are, each week, keeping track of how much food remains in storage and measuring it out accordingly. If they've got more food than necessary, that might allow them to banquet their neighbors or to sell some grain to get tastier foods (e.g. meats) they might not normally have. But if the harvest was poor, or there's an unwelcome surprise (say, a sack of grain develops mold), then the job suddenly becomes trying desperately to stretch what is there to the next harvest, filling gaps as much as can be done with whatever crops and produce become available in the meantime. And if necessary, knowingly shortchanging the elderly or the little ones to make sure there is enough for the rest. (Of course there is also the peasant woman's own nutrition to think about. Remember, she is very often pregnant or nursing, which produces substantial nutritional demands on her body, which can endanger her health, potentially cause a pregnancy to miscarry or reduce the amount of nutrients she can pass through nursing to her child, endangering the child's health. There's no way out of the calorie calculus: someone has to go short and both our families and mother nature will tend to prioritize health adults over children and the elderly.) So the calendar is a cycle of anxiety, relief and despair: anxiety as the family waits for the harvest, watching the skies for weather and the pantry for its steady depletion. Glorious relief if the harvest is good, the pantry restocked, another year survived and despair if it is poor, which at best likely means seeking aid - with many strings attached - from the Big Man with his Big Estate and at worst means the household loses some of its most vulnerable members, the "vacant seat...and a crutch without an owner."^6 But the yearly calendar is not just the harbinger of threat and anxiety: it is also the bringer of joy and society, because the year is studded with festivals, days of rest and social gathering, joy and merry-making. Of course we still have holidays too, but I wonder if we don't miss their potency to pre-modern farmers because - with, at least for some of us, eight-hour-work-days, two-day weekends and built-in vacation days - they are not our only escape from labor. [372301001]From the British Museum (1978,0624.42.70), a drawing by Adriaen van de Venne (1620s) showing two older peasants (presumably a man and his wife) dancing; the couple have, somewhat playfully, exchanged hats. In any case, for those long days in the fields or the long hours of spinning thread while keeping one eye on the large pot and the other on the tiny tot, our peasants would be looking forward to the next festival, the next feast day, the next major event which might have music and dance and special foods. The break in the monotony of food is a significant one: in addition to peasant families putting in extra effort and deploying their relatively limited access to tastier meats, dairy and such, festivals often served as an opportunity for the 'Big Men' to engage in conspicuous wealth display by providing finer foods. In ancient polytheistic cultures, religious festivals generally involved animal sacrifices at scale, paid for by either the state or the very wealthy (often a bit of both) with the meat from those sacrifices cooked and given out to the celebrants, a chance for the elite to cement their hold over the community. In the Middle Ages, certain holidays might include similar traditions, where the local lord or other big man might throw a feast for the commons. Many of these festivals were single-day affairs, but some could be multi-day events, a period for rest, socializing, singing, story-telling, and general merry-making. One very common festival motif was a 'fool's feast,' - a festival predicated around brief social inversion, like the Roman Saturnalia (celebrated in December) or various 'Feasts of Fools' in the Middle Ages. These sorts of festivals often created a space for a kind of tongue-in-cheek parody and mockery of authority and thus potentially a space for the lower classes to 'let off steam' in a way that didn't threaten elite power, reducing the strain created on a society with such tremendous and conspicuous inequality and functionally no social mobility. So our peasants, doing their work, have a lot to look forward to, good and bad. Mrs. Smalls, terribly overworked, might be spinning at home while Jane sweeps out the kitchen and the stew slowly boils, thinking about a coming festival - her household has food to spare so perhaps she'll sell or exchange some for some fancier foods (perhaps to bake some cakes) to impress her neighbors (though she worries her good kirtle - that's the top layer of the typical European medieval dress - is getting a born worn, but she's short on fabric and needs to replace her husband's work tunic before she can work on a new kirtle). Meanwhile, Mr. Matt and Martin Biggs are nervously watching the sky: everyone in their household has worked as hard as they can, but they need so much land and the tenancy terms for some of it were not good, so they need a good harvest to avoid a shortfall. Everyone adores little Melanie but at just one year old, she's certainly not out of danger yet for a bad year. [219673001]From the British Museum (1895,0915.1215), a drawing (c. 1625-1668), showing peasants relaxing and merrymaking in a tavern. A woman in the foreground is dancing to the music, while men play what looks to be dice behind her. Again, peasant life was hard, it involved a lot of work and a fair bit of grief, but it was not relentless misery. John Smalls and Mark Biggs, both young men, are looking forward to that coming festival too, but for the chance to play some games and attend some dances and perhaps try to catch the eyes of some of the eligible girls in the village. Of course they'll also need to impress those girls' families - it will be their fathers, in this society, who decide who they marry - but John and Mark both stand to eventually inherit their farms and so have a fair bit to recommend them as matches. Freddie Middles, the same age, is not so fortunate - his brother's farm, on which he works, is likely to go to a son if Mr. Middles has one and in many of these societies, might still go to his daughters - and so he thoughts drift a little further into the future, as he has relatively little chance of being marriageable in the village (the same, in a decade's time, will be true of little Michael Biggs, but right now he is still of the playing age). Which leads us now to the larger cycles. The Family Cycles The bigger cycle is the generational cycle. If we think of these households in the long term, they tend to go through broad cycles. The foundational work on this idea is by Alexander Chayanov from work on Russian peasants,^7 but as we've seen the precise family formation and household structure do vary depending on when peasants marry, mortality rates and also when they form new households (in particular, extended kin-groups and social relationships across multiple households soften the sharp transitions in Chayanov's basic model).^8So the exact cycle is going to vary a bit, but the basic ideas are a good framework. We can think about it very simply thinking in terms of our smallest, simplest household: the Smalls. We can start imagining the Smalls household perhaps 10 years ago when Mr. Smalls is 30 and Mrs. Smalls is 22. John is, at that point, 4 - too young to work - and Jane is not yet born. But as you'll recall from our childrearing model, while John and Jane are Mrs. Smalls only surviving children in the present, they are unlikely to have been her only children. That age gap between John and Jane is likely to be 'filled' by a child - James Smalls - who died at age 2 but 10 years ago is still living (one and a half). Mr. Smalls' father was still alive then too - 62 years of age - but increasingly limited in his ability to work. When Old Man Smalls died, that left a household with two adults, but 2 small children and thus quite vulnerable, with a low ratio of workers to dependents. That might explain why poor James Smalls didn't survive and also Mrs. Smalls' repeated miscarriages: in the bad years, with Mr. Smalls only able to work so much land, food ran short and the children suffered. But now, now John is of working age and Jane will be as well soon. If we imagine the Smalls' household over the next, say, five years, we might expect Mr. Smalls is likely to be alive and able to work all five years, and John the same, but John Smalls won't marry and start having his own children for quite some time. Meanwhile, Jane will be more and more helpful for her mother until she hits marriageable age which, as we've seen, varies by culture. These are the 'peak' years for the household in terms of labor-per-dependent. And while Mrs. Smalls, remembering well how the generosity of neighbors got Jane through a bad year when she was young, is thinking about how to use their increased labor to pay back favors, Mr. Smalls is thinking that he has a chance, in these years, if he works hard, of pulling together just enough money (or other resources) to maybe buy an extra field or two and thereby make the family more secure for generations to come. That aim is possible, but the odds are stacked against him. For one, remember: the yield is born by the year, not the land. So while Mr. Smalls might want a boom harvest year to get a lot of grain to sell to pull together the capital he needs to expand, that bumper year is likely to be a good year for everyone and to cause grain prices to fall accordingly. But of course in a bad year, even the Smalls' don't have the wide margin for error to benefit from rising grain prices (unlike the Big Man in his estate). Moreover, most of these peasant societies are dowry societies, meaning that the father of the bride is expected to lay down money, resources or land when his daughter marries and of course Jane must - by the rules of these societies (which we are describing, not endorsing) - must eventually marry. That time is quite a ways off, but Mr. Smalls has to think that in the next 10-15 years he needs to have put together enough of a reserve to provide that dowry, otherwise his failure of foresight will harm her marriage prospects. At the same time, in a decade, John will also be looking to potentially marry. That might bring in a dowry, but it will also in short order mean more children and the family shifting back to that first phase again. Mr. Smalls might seek to delay that marriage, but he can hardly do so forever. So while his household right now is reasonably secure, as peasants go, he is scrimping and saving with the hope that over the next few years he can just barely thread that needle in order to get those extra fields while the family is at its peak productivity...so that John won't need to suffer through losing four very much wanted children (two to miscarriage, two to infant mortality) like he and Mrs. Smalls did. [1613260128]From the British Museum (1850,0713.137), another scene from a smaller peasant wedding, with the newly weds dancing outside a tavern during the celebrations. As an aside, there is a tendency for modern folks and especially modern popular culture to assume that people in the past dreaded the sort of frequently arranged marriages they had, but this isn't the impression we get. People in the past, after all, tended to share their societies values, and in these societies a lot of value was placed on marriage and the legitimate children it produced. Marriage was, for women especially, but also for most men, a necessary step towards adulthood and status in the community and so in most cases seems to have been anticipated, yearned for and welcomed when it came. So while the Biggs brothers look, worried at the sky and the lack of rain clouds, worried about this year, Mr. Smalls is right there with them, worrying about the future. As humans are wont. All of these households are going through similar cycles: periods where they are more vulnerable and less vulnerable. Though they mostly don't see it in those terms. Instead, they see it in terms of generational events: the celebration of marriages (always a good occasion for a party), of births and of course of deaths. Alongside the annual festivals, these too create a cycle of anticipations and moments (of both joy and grief). None of our households have an unmarried child of marriageable age (an oversight of mine in plotting them out), but we might well imagine that all three households know that one of the other village households is anticipating the marriage of their daughter to a boy from the next village over and everyone is looking forward to the party that will entail. And, of course, just a few months ago the Middles were celebrating the arrival of little Freida. For most of these peasants, there is no real escape from these cycles : one generation of Smalls, Middles and Biggs after another, each mostly the same as the last. And that is often the cultural ideal of these societies: people are born into roles and the expectation is that they will fill those roles. One day after another, one year after another, one generation after another. And within the vision permitted by a single human life, that pattern mostly holds. John Smalls and Mark Biggs can expect to marry in another 10 or 15 years; that their fathers will pass away perhaps in another 15 to 25 years and that they will then absorb the role of head of household, their wives taking the place their aging mothers held, with a new generation on the way behind them.^9 Students sometimes find it odd to the point of absurd that these societies often concieve of time generally as cyclical rather than progressive, imagining that time can kind of loop back on itself if you wait long enough. But from this vantage, it doesn't seem so absurd: the technology and conditions that shape these farmer's lives largely don't appear to change without the benefit of longue duree history that they (and even the aristocrats who lord over them) lack. They are so incredibly distant from their pre-farming roots (far more distant from them than they are from us) that they do not remember a time before this kind of living and cannot imagine a time after it. Instead the cycles of their lives seem to stretch out endlessly into the past beyond living memory and into the future beyond imagination. For most of them, at least. For Freddie Middles, the picture is different: his brother inherited the farm and now has children. In societies where girls cannot inherit, Freddie might hope that his brother and sister-in-law will remain without a son - and the odds on that aren't terrible given the high infant mortality - but in societies where daughters do inherit, he is pretty much already likely out of luck. He can probably remain in his brother's household and be reasonably safe from want - he's a good source of labor, so unless his relationship with his brother is really bad Mr. Middles is going to want to keep him around - but as he looks at his future, he'll never be head of this household and will struggle to marry. A cautious fellow might stay in his place regardless. but Freddie isn't a cautious fellow. Because the supply of men like Freddie is virtually guaranteed in societies that have such static structures - far too static for the fluid family formation dynamics underneath them - they have 'release valves' for this sort of thing - which these societies understand (not entirely unreasonably) as 'land scarcity'. One very common release valve is military service. If these were families in the Roman Republic, we might expect Freddie to be the sort of fellow who volunteers for additional military service - which both removes his mouth-to-feed from the household, but also offers him the opportunity (however narrow) of getting enough loot and pay to be able to form his own household. Likewise in the Middle Ages and especially in the early modern period, Freddie is the sort of fellow we might see enlist as a mercenary or professional soldier. Alternately, Freddie is precisely the sort of fellow we might see showing up to do some Greek or Phoenician style colonization. In a decade or so, Michael Biggs is likely to be in a similar spot: his Uncle Matt and father Martin had enough of an arrangement to try to squeeze two family units into a single household (which is part of why the Biggs' are more tightly economically constrained than the other households), but that sort of thing isn't likely to continue forever. Chances are Mark Biggs, when he becomes the head of the household, would be happy enough to keep Michael on as a worker, but probably not to play host to Michael forming a family with yet more dependents in a household that is already too big. Of course either of these young men might 'luck out' with a marriage to a young woman with no brothers who is thus set to inherit her father's farm (in societies where that inheritance pattern can happen), but some significant number of young men are going to be 'thrown off' by this system, providing a small but meaningful 'floating' workforce of young men with dim futures in the countryside, to do day-labor in the cities or service in the armies.^10 It is notable that of the peasants, if we hear about any of them, it is often the peasants shunted through these 'release values' to become something else that arrive in our history. But of course I feel the need to note that the future for most such members of the peasantry was pretty grim: most would die poor and frequently young, compared to the tiny handful of unusual successes that make it into our books. But of course, even for Freddie Middles and Michael Biggs, those disappointments are in the future. In the present Freddie has work and Michael has play and both are looking forward to that festival, mostly because they heard tell that Mrs. Smalls is planning to make her village-famous cakes and they remember those fondly from last year. [202668001]From the British Museum (1946,0713.956), a drawing by Jan de Bisschop (1643-1671) showing a peasant wedding. These were joyous occasions in these societies, a chance for revelry and celebration, which you can see here. For whatever reason, popular culture tends to have a very dour take on pre-modern marriages, but for the most part our sources do not: getting married was a key step towards adulthood and status and so a thing normally to be welcomed both by the newlywed and the community. Conclusions This final post in the series is, of course, a bit more 'made up' than the rest: I am doing my best to 'fill in' the color between the black and white lines of our models. But I think there is value in that, so long as we are reminded that the color is not original, these are 'colorized' pictures, not color pictures, to get a sense of what it was like to be a human in these societies. On the one hand you do not work more than a medieval peasant. These households - both the men and women - worked under conditions of extremely low (by modern standards) productivity, meaning they had to put in a ton of labor to get out a fairly small amount of production. We can see that in how limited the surplus they generate under ideal conditions is and even more so just how much labor it takes to keep these families clothed. But we can also see they are also pressed down under the weight of extraction, a regime that squeezes them as hard as it can without quite ever crushing them. That extraction goes to provide for everything else these societies do. It is how the build monuments and temples, how they maintain the lifestyles of the elite, how they provide the time to develop literature, to invent philosophy and mathematics. It is how they feed soldiers, form armies, produce weapons. Everything else that these societies do is done on the backs of these peasants. And from that list, you can easily see great injustice - our peasants could be much better off if our aristocrats were modestly less comfortable. But of course then we also don't get the Epic of Gilgamesh or innovations in mathematics or engineering, or Greek sculpture, or preserved Greek and Roman literature, painstakingly copied by hand over and over again (mostly by monks being fed off of the produce of - of course - our peasants). And the brutal reality of competition in the pre-industrial world is that agrarian societies which do not find some way to extract resources from their peasants to fund warfare end up conquered by societies which do. There are better and worse ways to do that extraction: it is not the case that the most brutal extraction regimes are the most militarily effective (more on this in my book project; the Roman extraction regime in Italy in the Middle Republic was actually relatively light in terms of taxes, but expected citizen-farmers to support the cost of warfare themselves, which turned out to work really well). But it is the case that the sharp edge of military necessity meant 'no extraction' wasn't a realistic option. So you do not work as much or as hard or with as much difficulty as a medieval or ancient peasant, at least if you are a typical person reading this from an industrialized country.^11 But that also doesn't mean that these peasants lives were nothing but grim starvation. They were humans. They loved and cared about people, they made plans (which often fall through), had hopes and desires tailored to the constraints of the situation they were born into. It is true that, for the most part, they weren't going anywhere - at least, not on the time scale of a single generation - but that wasn't typically what they or their society valued. Indeed, major disruptions - which we haven't dealt with here - were generally of the bad kind. That lifestyle might feel to us to be stultifying and it certainly felt that way for many of our peasants: when factories and jobs in the cities at last did appear, peasants did not have to be chased into them, large numbers of them voluntarily quit the countryside for new horizons and opportunities (to the point that their landlord overseers sometimes scrambled to find ways to prevent them from leaving). But like humans, within the confines of the structures we've laid out, they had their full share of joy and grief, of success and hardship, of anxiety and relief. And they liked to have nice things: a nice meal, a carefully made piece of clothing and so on. One of the most striking misconceptions about ancient and medieval peasants is how our popular culture dresses them in brown rags, when these folks made their own clothes and liked to look nice. Their clothes, tools, housewares and homes might have been a lot more worn than ours, perhaps a little thin in places, but they were made and kept with care. It is important not to overcorrect in either direction: the average American closet represents a concentration of wealth that would shock even a rich peasant, but that doesn't mean peasants went around wearing rags. Likewise, it seems abundantly clear from the evidence we do have that they felt the grief and anxiety every bit as keenly as we do and that they had more of it. But that doesn't mean their lives were without joy. Indeed, the regular predictable cycles of life left them almost always with something - the next Sunday, the next festival, the next harvest, the next generation - to look forward to with joy and anticipation. If we are shocked by how poor their lives were, they might be shocked by how terrifyingly unstable our lives are - how many people work jobs that effectively didn't exist a century ago? Or have grandparents who once worked jobs that effectively no longer exist? They might well wonder how we coped with the anxiety of that. At least they knew that their jobs would be there for them, one day after the next, one year after the next, one generation after the next. Perhaps most of all, I hope this sort of project helps to reorient the way some of us think about the past. We're used to thinking about the past in terms of kings and soldiers, because that is who write to us and thus whose history gets written, to the point that we need to engage in this kind of round-a-bout modeling sometimes to get a solid picture of the structures of pre-modern life. Yet these structures make up the largest part - the majority! - of the entire human experience. Most of humanity lived not like us, nor like our more distant hunter-gatherer ancestors, but as agrarian peasant communities, in societies with very low productivity and high extraction, which changed so slowly the effect was usually imperceptible within a human lifetime. Because of course these peasants were people too, their place in the human story no smaller than yours or mine - but far more numerous. Share this: * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * 1. We can, for instance, see meat, fish and such becoming a more prominent part of the rural Roman diet from the late Republic onwards, on this see Bowes et al. "Diet, Dining and Subsistence" in The Roman Peasant Project 2009-2014 (2021). My ballpark figure is extrapolated roughly from the estimated Roman military diet suggested by Roth, The Logistics of the Roman Army at War (2012), which is about 60% grain by calories and probably represents something like an upper-limit for non-grains in typical rural peasant diets, given how relatively well paid Roman soldiers in the imperial period were. 2. Of course, limited doesn't mean none: fruit preserves are known since antiquity and meat can be dried or smoked to enable it to last longer. 3. November on the MRC, but it's worth noting the agronomists have earlier dates - October in Columella and Palladius. For the full rundown of the Roman agricultural calendar, see K.D. White, Roman Farming (1970), 194-5, but note that White expects you to know some Latin to fully read his appendix (he does not translate the activity labels in the MRC and only summarizes some of them). 4. For heavy wine producing regions, the vintage - the bringing in of the grapes to make wine - is a similar 'all hands on deck' season. For the Romans, the vintage (vindemiae) came in October, or September for particularly warm regions. 5. Theophr. Caus. pl. 3.23.5 6. Of course I must note that the Cratchits of A Christmas Carol are not peasants, but the emotion evoked here is the same. Bob Cratchit is a clerk, in A Christmas Carol, a member, albeit quite a poor one, of the urban middle class (of, I should note, an industrializing society, not a pre-industrial one). But I find this story is one of the few ones modern readers in wealthy countries know that connects to this sort of parent's grief, of realizing that unless economic conditions improve, your little one will wither away and die. What Dickens treats as a unique, striking example of poverty would have been the common experience of almost every peasant household at one time or another. 7. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, ed. D. Thorner, et al. (1966) 8. For instance, note this study by E A Hammel. 9. A father dying early leaving a son inheriting the household early is one thing that could make these young fellows marriageable a lot sooner than the normal social convention, while in some societies the marriage of a son might be delayed while his father lives (which, as you might imagine, can create some tensions!). 10. Folks will sometimes ask here 'what about the clergy' and the answer for most of these societies is that if there is a professional clergy (the Greeks and Romans do not have one) that is where the 'excess' sons and daughters of the elite go, but those doors are often at least partially if not entirely closed to our peasants. 11. Of course there are still countries - a shrinking number - with subsistence economies and also people in wealthy countries who are nevertheless very poor. But 'some (few) countries' and 'some (few) people' is a far cry from 'functionally everyone all the time everywhere.' We're talking averages and medians here. Like this: Like Loading... * Tagged * Agriculture * Ancient * Customs * Daily Life * Households * Medieval * Organic Economy * Peasant Economies * Peasant Households * Peasants * Rome * Social History [7295d49534] Published by Bret Devereaux View all posts by Bret Devereaux Published October 17, 2025 Post navigation Previous Post Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVe: The No-Rest Of It 94 thoughts on "Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part V: Life In Cycles" 1. [58e55] Adam says: October 17, 2025 at 8:43 pm I haven't made too many comments in this series. I just don't know enough about the subject to even ask intelligent questions, let alone provide something more interesting very often. But I did enjoy reading this, and I just want to say bravo for creating this. Loading... Reply 1. [bc408] TeacherHsu says: October 18, 2025 at 2:18 pm This series was fabulous. Thanks so much! Loading... Reply 2. [ca3c6] orbitalbuzzsaw says: October 17, 2025 at 9:29 pm I think, now it's finished, this series should go in "Resources for World-Builders" Loading... Reply 1. [17dca] Emily Riposte says: October 18, 2025 at 4:22 am I know I'm using it for a thing I'm writing. Loading... Reply 3. [0b7a9] 60guilders says: October 17, 2025 at 9:35 pm "As an aside, there is a tendency for modern folks and especially modern popular culture to assume that people in the past dreaded the sort of frequently arranged marriages they had, but this isn't the impression we get." I think part of the reason that we 21st-century Westerners have this assumption is that most of the stories we get involving arranged marriages involve them being unwanted. The problem is that of course the arranged marriages in stories will be unwanted-it's a fantastic source of conflict, which is necessary for a good story. Of course, that's not to say that arranged marriages always worked out or weren't sometimes made with more of an eye towards familial advantage than the good or interest of the parties involved, particularly at the elite level (yet another reason why we have this assumption-most of the stories we hear about arranged marriages involve the aristocracy or wealthy commoners, where making a political/economic/social alliance became a major consideration). But especially for the peasantry, I suspect that 90% of the time an "arranged" marriage really meant that a young man and a young woman would start seeing each other, their fathers would notice (possibly with a bit of prompting from their wives) and have a man-to-man talk about whether it would probably work out over the long haul and whether the young couple would be able to support themselves and their eventual children (almost certainly involving some consultation with their wives), and then would announce to the village that they'd arranged a marriage between their children. Because realistically, most parents love their children and want what's best for them and want them to be happy, and aren't going to consign them to misery if they can possibly avoid it. Loading... Reply 1. [7295d] Bret Devereaux says: October 17, 2025 at 10:36 pm There's also typically a strong expectation that the father's role in arranging these marriages, at least in the sources I've read, is focused on ensuring that the child is going to be in a stable economic position. That's why you get the frequent story structure where the young man, having already fallen for a girl, has to prove himself in some way or establish himself in some way in order to marry her - he needs to establish the kind of position in society that renders him marriageable. That said, I would also note that these societies often view romantic, passionate love as quite a separate thing from marriage. Marriage is often a practical, economic arrangement, more like a business partnership between spouses. It certainly *can* involve love - and ancients and medievals think that is ideal - but a good marriage doesn't have to in their view, so long as it involves a kind of concord or harmony. Whereas we'd generally view a purely transactional marriage as failing, if not failed, the ancients view that as a perfectly valid, honorable and acceptable arrangement where neither spouse really likes - or dislikes - the other, but they both do their duty and the arrangement basically works. So there are a pretty wide range of views about marriage in these societies. I need to hunt someone down who works on this to write something up in more detail. Loading... Reply 1. [541bb] Gamereg says: October 17, 2025 at 11:34 pm I've likewise noticed that the popular negative stories of arranged marriages tend to be about the aristocracy, where Daddy sets his daughter up with someone she hasn't even met yet. Contrast that with the eager daughters in "Fiddler on the Roof": "Matchmaker matchmaker make me a match..." Loading... Reply 1. [d2b3b] Roscoe Mathieu says: October 18, 2025 at 1:21 am I was thinking of Fiddler, specifically the conversations about Tzeitl. Loading... Reply 2. [2447d] Etv13 says: October 18, 2025 at 4:15 am But one of Te ye's daughters actually enters into an arranged marriage. That's sort of the point of the play. Tzeitl marries the tailor, not the butcher the matchmaker arranges for her. The next two daughters don't even get to the point of rejecting an arranged match. The only principal characters in an arranged marriage are Golde and Tevye himself. Loading... Reply 3. [2447d] Etv13 says: October 18, 2025 at 4:20 am Have you listened all the way to the end of that song? "Up to this minute I misunderstood that I could get stuck for good." Loading... Reply 4. [99560] Alien@System says: October 18, 2025 at 5:10 am While we usually focus on the rebelliousness of young men and their eagerness to prove their status as adult men, I think it's also important to note that for young women, marriage was also a way to improve her status, and to prove herself as an adult. When a young woman has been labouring under the command of her mother, having to follow her instructions of how to weave, how to cook, how not to waste things and so on, is offered the prospect to be able to determine these things by herself, I think that is something that we can understand her looking towards with eagerness. (We can of course be cynical and note that some of that is a "the grass is always greener on the other side situation", in which the young woman is of course not seeing all the constraints that her mother had to labour under, but the same is true for young men wanting to establish themselves.) Loading... Reply 1. [28b27] Jolly Roger says: October 18, 2025 at 9:38 am In Chinese sources, at least, the wife just goes on to be oppressed by her mother-in-law instead. Loading... 2. [cb4b0] Arilou says: October 18, 2025 at 11:24 am Jolly Roger: And that's one of the differences between a patrilocal and neolocal family formation system. Loading... 3. [18755] ey81 says: October 18, 2025 at 3:09 pm Yes, there are also a number of stories where the young woman's desperate desire to get out of her mother's household is a major theme. For example, the protagonists aren't quite peasants, and you have to read with a bit of sensitivity, but it's clear that Laura in Little House is very eager to escape from her mother. Loading... 5. [e3cc2] abystander says: October 18, 2025 at 12:41 pm In the matchmaker song the younger daughters start off eager for marriage. However when the eldest daughters informs them of the reality that as children of poor peasants the matches are not going to be like their imaginations they become reluctant. Hodel, oh Hodel, Have I made a match for you! He's handsome, he's young! Alright, he's 62. But he's a nice man, a good catch, true? True. I promise you'll be happy, And even if you're not, There's more to life than that-- Don't ask me what. Chava, I found him. Won't you be a lucky bride! He's handsome, he's tall, That is from side to side. But he's a nice man, a good catch, right? Right. You heard he has a temper. He'll beat you every night, But only when he's sober, So you'll alright. Did you think you'd get a prince? Well I do the best I can. With no dowry, no money, no family background Be glad you got a man! Chava: Matchmaker, Matchmaker, You know that I'm Still very young. Please, take your time. Hodel: Up to this minute, I misunderstood That I could get stuck for good. https://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/fiddlerontheroof/ matchmaker.htm Loading... Reply 2. [75f44] NVA says: October 18, 2025 at 12:05 am I imagine people back then viewed marriage as a "work" that require two people to do together, not an act of finding a soulmate. Loading... Reply 3. [94982] Hector says: October 18, 2025 at 10:17 am That said, I would also note that these societies often view romantic, passionate love as quite a separate thing from marriage. Marriage is often a practical, economic arrangement, more like a business partnership between spouses. It certainly *can* involve love - and ancients and medievals think that is ideal - but a good marriage doesn't have to in their view, so long as it involves a kind of concord or harmony. It's interesting for me to read this as framed as the way people thought "in the past". Because it seems to me that this is (largely, though not completely) the way that people think about marriage in a lot of non-western societies *today*, as well. For anyone with roots in South Asia that mindset would be totally normal and understandable, even if you don't share it yourself. Loading... Reply 4. [cb4b0] Arilou says: October 18, 2025 at 12:15 pm One thing of note is that for peasants a big chunk of the "being a good match" thing is going to be *your personal skills and character*. While some people come with land of course, a lot of the time the land parcels aren't the main thing but rather "Can she cook? How good is she at sewing? Is he sober? Does he work hard?" The *person themselves* is a good chunk of the economic calculations going on. Not neccessarily their positions (though they also matter) and that easily flows into other stuff ("Does he have a temper?" "Is she lazy?" etc.) Loading... Reply 1. [5ae42] mindstalk0 says: October 18, 2025 at 4:28 pm 'Can she cook? How good is she at sewing?' It's been a while, but I think this crops up in the manga A Bride's Tale, set in 1800s central Asia. Weaving and embroidery are a major skill for women, obviously (even more so than just making clothing: carpets are ubiquitous, and the nomads need tents). One of the girls is not very good at these skills, and worries about it for her prospects. But I think her cooking/banking are above par. (Also possible I got her weaving cooking swapped.) Of course, that's all filtered through the storytelling of a 2000s Japanese woman. Loading... Reply 2. [6f21a] holdthebreach says: October 18, 2025 at 7:15 am There are other considerations too. These are societies where the expectations of love and marriage are very different to ours, we shouldn't expect people in those to react to those life events as if they had our expectations. What a young adult looking for a spouse finds desirable is likely to overlap significantly with what their matriarch/ patriarch finds acceptable in a match. If your main anxiety in life is "not underfeeding your babies to death" then the neighbour who threw a banquet this year and had the time to make themselves nice clothes is going to look more attractive than the pauper with a rogueish smile. On top of that, people take their obligation to their families seriously, and fulfilling them as a source of pride, rather than an obligation to chafe under. Secondly, the "dating" pool was tiny. If you narrow down by age, sex, remove close relatives or people of very different status, there might only be a few dozen eligible. Include neighbouring villages and it might be a hundred. And those are people you've known since babies. Of course as hormones change the way you think about them will change too, but this is very different to (eg) an 18 year old today going to university and seeing thousands of new potential dates all at once. Put those two together and the whole concept of finding self fulfilment by marrying your perfect soul mate who you fall in love with at first sight basically falls apart. Loading... Reply 1. [1eeac] Finnish reader says: October 18, 2025 at 9:56 am And even then, that happened, but when it happened, the decision was often quite drastic. A Finnish book I have records a conversation by two rural Eastern Karelians around 1910 (the man a local peasant, the hunting guide of the author, and the woman a farmer's wife at whose place the author and his guide are staying overnight, as there is no commercial accomodation): -Do you remember a dark man from Antrea who came to this house 19 years ago, asking to stay overnight? -Well, do I? It was that man married who married our Santra, taking her away. -Oh, it it I who is that man. -Really? Is my daughter still alive? -She is well at home, and we have five children. The point is that the daughter, who had fallen in love with the stranger from a village maybe 70 km away and married him, had not come home ever since, and most likely, had never sent a letter, as Eastern Karelians, being Orthodox, didn't learn to read, let alone write. (A Lutheran would know how to read, even if they would not necessarily know how to write.) Loading... Reply 1. [6f21a] holdthebreach says: October 18, 2025 at 10:29 am Of course, there are always exceptions but those are, well, exceptional. Just like some teenagers dream of marrying their favourite supermodel / pop star, but few use that benchmark to set their expectations for life. Incidentally, this reminds me of something I read years ago that the introduction of the bicycle in the mid 19th century drastically changed "dating" in rural France. Simply because you could comfortably travel 5x as far in a day, meaning you could visit 25x as many people. That's a big enough increase that it would now include people you didn't grow up with. Loading... Reply 1. [23aec] Subbak says: October 18, 2025 at 5:02 pm In the 1940s, my then teenage grandmother would go to the ball meet my grandfather on her bike. This was also the bike she used to get to the bus that took her every two weeks back to her parents' farm from boarding school in the city, where she would sometimes meet my grandfather in the free afternoons they had, although the school kids tended to be chaperoned. Loading... 2. [cb4b0] Arilou says: October 18, 2025 at 12:20 pm At least from what I see from Sweden there also seems to have been a kind of semi-formalized dating and courtship scene: Generally around Michelsmass when contracts expired, different youths would have oppportunities to meet each other from other villages. There were also all sorts of formalized exchanges of gifts (spoons, shirts, etc.) that latter on provided quite a bit of the trade for itinerant peddlers. There was also a custom of "sleepovers" (clothed, and under adult supervision, so no hanky panky... hopefully) People in their youth seems to have been a bit more mobile (they'd often spend a few years working somewhere outside of their own household) and being able to meet potential spouses seems to have been a part of that. Loading... Reply 3. [bc408] TeacherHsu says: October 18, 2025 at 2:17 pm Even in the 21st Century, my single female friends are likely to connect attractiveness to how responsible, dependable, and well-employed (or employable) a fellow is. (The converse is also true - irresponsible, poorly employed, feckless guys are not considered very attractive.) Sure, they also like roguish smiles and nice physiques, but between the ages of, say, 16 to 26, the appeal of the bad boy diminishes drastically for a lot of us! To offer more scientific data, one of my students did research on dating apps, and female college students looking at men's profiles always looked up their job/ education info immediately, and it was a big component of what they saw as a "good option." At least in this study, the college men did not pay nearly as much attention go job/education information. But my unscientific sampling of single male friends shows that older guys also want a woman who is responsible, dependable, etc, rather than a manic pixie dream girl. Loading... Reply 3. [cbab9] Isator Levi says: October 18, 2025 at 11:03 am Honestly, I wouldn't mind seeing more relevant stories in which a married couple is depicted as not particularly passionate about one another, but extremely capable as a partnership for managing life. Loading... Reply 4. [0c527] ad9 says: October 18, 2025 at 11:50 am " most of the stories we get involving arranged marriages involve them being unwanted." There is not much of a story in X if X makes things easier. If X is in a story, it's probably making things harder. Loading... Reply 4. [b2085] Bullseye says: October 17, 2025 at 10:47 pm Why do fallowed fields need to be plowed? Loading... Reply 1. [541bb] Gamereg says: October 17, 2025 at 11:37 pm Because the soil gets hard over the year, as it gets soaked in the rain and baked in the sun. My parents had a big vegetable garden growing up, and my father would go over it with a rototiller every year before planting. Loading... Reply 1. [0c527] ad9 says: October 18, 2025 at 5:26 am Typical. Never a weed when you want one. Loading... Reply 1. [4a3de] cptbutton says: October 18, 2025 at 6:02 am I think some of the value here was that the plowing killed whatever weeds had grown there so their remains enriched the soil. Loading... Reply 1. [da6fd] Ken says: October 18, 2025 at 7:49 am Also the field might have been planted with a cover crop, which would be plowed under, possibly after harvesting seeds. The crop would enrich the soil, prevent erosion, and compete with weeds. Loading... 2. [14789] MB says: October 18, 2025 at 5:22 am Because they will be full of weeds. Loading... Reply 1. [7295d] Bret Devereaux says: October 18, 2025 at 12:16 pm You also want to plow the plant matter under, so that when it decays you get those nutrients through the whole soil, rather than in a thin, fragile layer on the top. Loading... Reply 3. [bf44f] M says: October 18, 2025 at 9:09 am A fallow field that doesn't have something planted on it will be covered in weeds (or grass, or both) by the time it can be planted again. So you plant it with something, but you maybe don't have to weed it quite as much. The planted crop would be something that will replenish the soil. Loading... Reply 4. [baa26] C Baker says: October 18, 2025 at 1:53 pm In addition to what's been said, rocks seem to grow in untended land overnight. You really need to spend all your time getting rid of them if you're going to grow anything. There's some scientific reason for this, but it's also possible that the devil entertains himself by tossing them there whenever he passes by. Loading... Reply 1. [18755] ey81 says: October 18, 2025 at 3:17 pm My understanding is that the stirring that affects the soil from freezing, thawing, wetting, and drying causes smaller particles to percolate down, leaving the larger particles (i.e., rocks) at the top. Sort of like how the small particles sink to the bottom of a cereal box or a bag of nuts. Loading... Reply 5. [541bb] Gamereg says: October 17, 2025 at 11:44 pm Who would Mr. Smalls buy the new field from, besides the Big Man? Where there circumstances where a peasant household would have land to sell (as opposed to giving in a dowry)? I'd think even when a peasant household was "downsized" through deaths, sons leaving, or daughters getting married, they'd want to hold on to that extra land for the extra food. Loading... Reply 1. [f5a7b] Simon_Jester says: October 18, 2025 at 1:36 am They'd want to, but sometimes the situation is messy and you don't get what you want. There might be some kind of catastrophe that cannot be planned for. There might be an opportunity to buy land that is not suitable for cultivation but that the household can, in future generations, laboriously clear and prepare for that purpose. The idea of buying more land is probably speculative, but that doesn't stop people from at least thinking about it. Loading... Reply 2. [247b7] Peter T says: October 18, 2025 at 6:53 am As medieval Europe recovered from the post-Roman low, there was a lot of land that could be reclaimed from forest or marsh. Lords would offer remission of rent and other incentives to lure peasants to take it up, clear, ditch and drain. East Anglia in England, the forests of Saxony ..Further afield there was Ireland or Poland or Spain - all places looking for peasants. Then land fell vacant in villages as families left or died out, or as families shrank. Medieval serfs could exchange or rent fields or take over a vacancy under negotiated terms (a family could hold some land under servile tenure, other bits as freehold or lease). It depended on place - sometimes land was communally managed, so re-allocated as families changed, sometimes the lord had the right to do this, sometimes by individual agreement. Loading... Reply 3. [cb4b0] Arilou says: October 18, 2025 at 12:11 pm Circumstances could change, yeah. There could be an option to cultivate new lands, there could be a household that just straight up dies off. The Big Man might want to sell off some of his lands to afford something else, etc. Sometimes inheritance would leave openings (say, someone inherits a parcel of land but lives in another village) The chance of getting new land was small, but there were circumstances. For all that we've talked about this being a static society it's not entirely so. Loading... Reply 4. [8318e] onodera says: October 18, 2025 at 5:55 pm From a less fortunate household, for example. Imagine another household like their own, let's call them Littles. Lewis Little, Linda Little, their two children Liam and Laura. To supplement a poor harvest, they buy some rye flour from a passing merchant and are stricken with Saint Anthony's fire. Only Linda Little survives. She can't plow her field alone, so she strikes a deal with the Smalls: she bequeaths her field to them, they farm it like their own and in exchange she gets her fair share of food while she lives. Loading... Reply 6. [2275f] Paul says: October 17, 2025 at 11:45 pm Gosh I love reading stuff like this. And while I am sure it exists in my library, or at least my local university library or my state library loan program, I do not have the expertise to discover this information. I love how following this blog gives me knowledge I would never have otherwise. And of course I miss the golden age of blogs. But oh well. There are still blogs and blogs are still worth reading. Loading... Reply 7. [d2b3b] R. Jean Mathieu says: October 18, 2025 at 12:54 am As far as ACOUP is concerned, this is probably your magnum opus. I will be assigning this to my daughter for her history lessons. Loading... Reply 8. [dfe9a] Si says: October 18, 2025 at 3:49 am To me this series also shows how easy it will have been for the Big Man to get the complacency and often loyalty of his peasants. With the amount he is extracting giving back just a small portion (maybe even with some efficiency of scale gains attached) at the right time is enough to turn a bad cycle into a good one and win the loyalty of a family for a generation. A pair of oxen for the villagers use on their own land (after they've used them on his land obviously), a well laid festival table after a bad harvest, some nice thread for Freida Middles' christening outfit, a delay (with modest interest) on some of the Biggs' taxes so Melanie can have time to grow instead of starving, etc... That's all stuff in the capability of a local Big Man, considering the layers above him (in the Middle Ages probably a Baron and then the King) the concept that people genuinely delivered in monarchical divinity isn't so far fetched anymore. It would be interesting to have an addendum looking at how the local Big Man/men would appear in these cycles, what were the typical kind and cruel cycle disruptions that the Big Man made and what role was expected of him within the cycles as standard (obvious one being collecting taxes, the Big Man clergy performing weddings, overseeing the release valves for young unmarried men but I imagine there are more). Loading... Reply 1. [247b7] Peter T says: October 18, 2025 at 6:55 am Yes. Plus one mark of a benevolent state was remission of taxes, maybe distribution of stored grain, in bad years. When Bengal went from Mughal management to British the state was much less benevolent in these ways - and mortality increased. Loading... Reply 2. [81c7a] James says: October 18, 2025 at 12:19 pm It's occurred to me more than once that to a medieval peasant, a god and a monarch have really identical functional attributes - you have never met or seen them and you never will, but people who claim to derive their authority from them will, at the very least, start asking very hard questions if you dispute that authority, at certain times of year will claim some portion of your income based on their existence, etc. Given that, "The King is appointed by God" seems pretty reasonable. Loading... Reply 1. [92f7b] YARD says: October 18, 2025 at 12:52 pm This very point was actually made in one of the earliest series on here. https://acoup.blog/2019/11/15/ collections-practical-polytheism-part-iv-little-gods-and-big-people / And all of that brings us around to the main topic I wanted to discuss here: divinized kings and emperors. Nothing in ancient religion strikes my students as so utterly strange and foreign as that idea. The usual first response of the modern student is to treat the thing like a sham - surely the king knows he is not divine or invested with some mystical power, so this most all be a con-job aimed at shoring up the legitimacy of the king. But as we've seen, the line between great humans and minor gods is blurry, and it is possible to cross that line... Now think about people in the provinces. The emperor is remote and distant, much like a god, and his power is vast. Augustus (the first emperor and thus the model for imperial cult) could with a nod destroy your town, or greatly improve your life. An order from him might double your taxes - or cancel them. It might raise your town up in status, or order it razed or relocated. For someone in the provinces, facing that vast power imbalance and the same sort of ineffable with-a-nod kind of influence over human affairs, applying the rubric of cult observance isn't a huge leap of logic to make. After all, if it works with other Powers-That-Be, why not with Augustus? As we noted before, the tense of do ut des was variable - you might offer something to a god in advance, or in later recognition of a good turn done to you before. And that's precisely the pattern we see in many cases of imperial cult: a town might send the emperor a letter, asking politely for some favor - remission in taxes, some new status or privlege, or even just restraining the local soldiers - along with a happy note that they had just established a new observance of the cult of his genius, or requesting permission to dedicate some ritual to him directly. Or perhaps the emperor had already done something that greatly benefited the town - then you dedicate your imperial cult in response. ...Now that gets to the second question tied up in these ideas: did these god-kings believe their own spin? Certainly, they do not seem to have thought that being elevated to a divinity or receiving divine honors made their bodies indestructible of immortal - but remember: many of the gods were not indestructible or immortal either. Being a god wasn't about immortality, but about the power to shape the world summed up by that concept of the numen. For a ruler who was fantastically successful in war or politics, it was not inherently insane for them to think they had some sort of special mojo - some minor numinous element - to them. Loading... Reply 9. [763a4] Tracy W says: October 18, 2025 at 4:31 am Thank you for this narrative focus. One thing I'm thinking about is the burden that illness could put on a household, even if the ill person survived. Also the intellectual demands of farming. And the experimentation that must have gone on, to develop ideas like three-field and four-field crop rotation. Loading... Reply 1. [5ae42] mindstalk0 says: October 18, 2025 at 4:39 pm " the experimentation that must have gone on, to develop ideas like three-field and four-field crop rotation." A lot of that might have happened on big estates, like monasteries or Big Men, people who could afford to risk some fields in a novel technique because failure wouldn't kill them. Loading... Reply 10. [c0d83] pontifex says: October 18, 2025 at 5:01 am Concerning the cold equations of peasant survival, one thing I have been somewhat morbidly fascinated with is the alleged practice of killing (or leaving off to die) the elderly. Mentions range from attestupa in Scandinavia (throwing off a cliff) through fables of Slavic parts of Europe (leaving off to die in a forest) all the way to ubasute in Japan (leaving off to die in the mountains). Even assuming all of these are sensationalist exaggerations or literary inventions, it does show such a thing at least crossed a few people's minds even if never as a real concern. I don't have any genuine example to speak of, but as far as fictional literary examples go, elderly people may have had such prospects as leaving on their own during harder parts of the year to go begging in the cities, etc. (Children did not have such a choice, but in a pinch, in societies where that was allowed they could have been sold off for some quick cash.) Loading... Reply 1. [4a3de] cptbutton says: October 18, 2025 at 6:00 am Back in 2020 crueldwarf commented that: "Two of my great grandfather sisters were literally 'left in the forest' to die because there was a famine.It happened in 1896 I think and both of them were less than 6 years old. Subsistence farming lifestyle is merciless sometimes." https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/ collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/ comment-page-1/#comment-7976 Loading... Reply 1. [45a80] Richard Pamplin says: October 18, 2025 at 7:33 am Darwin, in 'Voyage of the Beagle' (Chap. 9) describes Tierra del Fuegans eating their old women. Also (though I cannot quickly find the reference) to islanders leaving their old-folks buried up to their necks... Loading... Reply 2. [247b7] Peter T says: October 18, 2025 at 7:11 am I think Brett's picture is of a society close to its demographic maximum. So a couple of caveats: for a lot of time these societies were below this threshold, sometimes because of demographic catastrophe (plague, war etc) but also because recovery from these was slow, sometimes taking centuries. This meant that uncultivated land provided a crucial reserve against bad grain years - you could glean mast, game, greens and such to see you through. A second caveat is that lordly extraction was a game in which the peasants did hold some hands - they could evade, delay, hide stuff (peasant obstinacy and cunning are a stock theme) or just make life unpleasant.Chris Wickham shows that in the mid-medieval Mediterranean in a number of areas (Sicily, Spain, the Aegean, Egypt) peasants were far enough above subsistence to afford modest luxuries. A final note: manual work is a standard part of the Benedictine Rule - monasteries provided a lot of their own labour (while also extracting rents) and were an outlet for the peasantry. Roughly ten per cent of medieval popes were of humble origin, and the proportion was surely larger lower in the religious hierarchy. Loading... Reply 1. [cb4b0] Arilou says: October 18, 2025 at 11:55 am This is also a point where it could definitely be in the Big Man's interest to be generous: Having your fee-paying peasants die is, at least in the long term, not good for your revenue. And you often can see this in that the most cruelly extractive regimes tends to be ones where there are absentee landlords, short term positions or other similar structures, where the extractor does not see when it is a good idea to slack off some if only to make sure you have a better time next year. At least from swedish sources it seems to be that peasant tenants on noble estates (which meant legal disabilities, you were not technically represented in the swedish parliament for instance, and the lord had rights over you that did not apply to a self-owned peasant, including a slightly weaker inheritance right, though in practice it seems to mostly have been respected) was often *economically* an advantage: Noble fees were often less than the taxes self-owning peasants paid. (though this varied over time and between nobles of course) while peasants on crown land were worse off. Loading... Reply 2. [62db3] Endymionologist says: October 18, 2025 at 5:28 pm No, societies don't stay below a demographic maximum for long periods of slow recovery after a mass death. Farmland reverts to wild in the span of a childhood, and will need to be expensively reclaimed before it can support the people it would have supported before the catastrophe. Each field is in a 'use it' or 'lose it' situation, having to be plowed even when not planted; there is never some long-term bank of farmland waiting patiently for the plow, you can as you say gather wild greens in abandoned fields but soon you'll be gathering bramble-berries instead. Loading... Reply 3. [94982] Hector says: October 18, 2025 at 4:38 pm Jared Diamond in The World Until Yesterday describes a bunch of real life examples of that, across a variety of cultures. I know he receives quite a bit of flak on this blog, but here he's not doing analysis, just listing examples drawn either from the anthropological literature or from (IIRC) his own experience with 'primitive' societies in New Guinea. Loading... Reply 11. [f7dae] Somic says: October 18, 2025 at 6:55 am > If we are shocked by how poor their lives were, they might be shocked by how terrifyingly unstable our lives are - how many people work jobs that effectively didn't exist a century ago? Or have grandparents who once worked jobs that effectively no longer exist? They might well wonder how we coped with the anxiety of that. Oh god, this hit me right in the anxiety. Thank you for that lol. Jokes aside, great article and great series! Loading... Reply 1. [94982] Hector says: October 18, 2025 at 4:42 pm > If we are shocked by how poor their lives were, they might be shocked by how terrifyingly unstable our lives are - how many people work jobs that effectively didn't exist a century ago? Or have grandparents who once worked jobs that effectively no longer exist? They might well wonder how we coped with the anxiety of that. There's probably going to be individual differences here in terms of our psychology and temperament. As someone who has a pretty strong drive to work, but also has a strong fear/ dislike of change and instability, this is the kind of thing that *really* terrifies me and fills me with anxiety. Loading... Reply 12. [2a9c1] Donald says: October 18, 2025 at 7:52 am > Almost regardless of cooking skill, peasant cuisine would have been mostly remarkably bland by modern standards, based heavily in grains, with few options to add sweet or savory flavors. Is this actually true? They certainly lack a lot of the flavoring options we might now use. But I was under the impression that they would often have salt. And depending on the climate/season they might have mint, garlic, etc. And various other herbs that we don't use so often. In the parts of Scotland where I am, sweet Cicely grows in copious quantities by the roadside, and has a fairly nice licorice-ish taste. So I would expect a rather limited choice of flavors, but that doesn't mean bland. Loading... Reply 1. [94982] Hector says: October 18, 2025 at 12:02 pm @Donald, In the parts of Scotland where I am, sweet Cicely grows in copious quantities by the roadside, and has a fairly nice licorice-ish taste. From the wikipedia article, that sounds tasty and the kind of thing I would definitely go for! I tend to like parsley-family herbs in general. Modernity has of course made food much more easily available and cheaper than it was in the past, but one tradeoff I regret is that the pressures of efficiency, specialization and optimization mean that a lot of the more unusual herbs, fruits, vegetables, meats and fishes, etc. that people used to eat in the past have fallen by the wayside. That said, you can still find edible "weeds" in the parts of the US that I've lived and worked in: purslane and lambsquarters are common ones you find in mid-summer. Loading... Reply 2. [cb4b0] Arilou says: October 18, 2025 at 12:06 pm Fennel, Anise, dill, various onions, parsnip, cummin, corainder etc. was cultivated fairly widely (though a lot of those were introduced to northern europe in the middle ages) Salt was a crucial import good and probably the one thing even peasants were purchasing regularly. There's also various pickling, fermentation, etc. techniques that could give food... interesting, taste. What would be lacking would be sweet flavours (jam and fruit occasioanlly, but basically no sugar and honey was a luxury, a lot of medieval recipes used onions for sweetening which *kinda* works but is obviously nothing like sugar) there's a reason europeans went mad for sugar (to the point of committing some of the worst atrocities in history for it) and nothing in the way of "hot" spices: No Chilis at all, and pepper being an insane luxury for europeans. Mustard and horseradish being the closest thing. A lot of food would be bland simple for convenience, but there were options for special occasions. Loading... Reply 1. [08e34] gerard says: October 18, 2025 at 4:13 pm 'honey was a luxury' reminds me that I learned recently that in medieval Korea honey was reserved for the bigwigs but Koreans being resourceful fellows invented rice syrup. I bought some from my neighbourly Korean shop and it's not so bad. Not as tasteful as expensive artisanal honey, but about as good as supermarket low cost stuff (that may actually include rice syrup :-)) Loading... Reply 2. [5ae42] mindstalk0 says: October 18, 2025 at 4:46 pm But, particularly as Bret focuses on Mediterranean families, grapes were common and raisins would have been too. I think some earlier comment told me that even small farms would have their own olive trees and grapevines. So that's one source of sweetness. Further north, well, depends how well you can keep apples in a cellar, or if you can dry local fruit with summer/autumn sun. Loading... Reply 13. [525dc] Thag Simmons says: October 18, 2025 at 7:55 am I would be very curious to know your thoughts on Pentiment and how well that game handles these ideas, because I think of the historical media I've read/played/watched it's the one that's most interested in how Peasants actually lived, loved and died. Loading... Reply 1. [cb4b0] Arilou says: October 18, 2025 at 1:06 pm The thing I thought when I played Pentiment was that it was, for obvious gameplay/story reasons so not a criticism per se, a bit too diverse in a bit of an odd way. In the sense that while none of the NPC's are implausible in a medieval village, them all being *in the same village* feels a bit weird. It ends up being an entire community of exceptions, if that makes sense. Loading... Reply 14. [e4fd0] chornedsnorkack says: October 18, 2025 at 8:11 am "Likewise in the Middle Ages and especially in the early modern period, Freddie is the sort of fellow we might see enlist as a mercenary or professional soldier. Alternately, Freddie is precisely the sort of fellow we might see showing up to do some Greek or Phoenician style colonization." "providing a small but meaningful 'floating' workforce of young men with dim futures in the countryside, to do day-labor in the cities or service in the armies."10 10''Folks will sometimes ask here 'what about the clergy' and the answer for most of these societies is that if there is a professional clergy (the Greeks and Romans do not have one) that is where the 'excess' sons and daughters of the elite go, but those doors are often at least partially if not entirely closed to our peasants." About the clergy: I am far from sure about statistics of "most". In British Establishment, the gentry wanted to grab and therefore did grab the livings in England and Ireland... but not Wales, nor Scotland. In Old Regime France, nobility wanted and monopolized the cushy posts of prelates and bishops... but village priests were not nobles. Apparently they were mostly peasants by background. In Russia, the priesthood was made a hereditary class after Peter the Big. But pre-Petrine Russian clergy... of the Patriarchs, Filaret was specifically a boyar and father of Czar but he was the only one. The others - some seem to have actual background hard to find, some were petty nobles, but Patriarch Nikon who provoked the Raskol was specifically a peasant. But when you enumerate the non-local-peasant employments in peasant societies... you've enumerated: 1) moving to be a peasant somewhere else 2) military service, possibly leading to 1) afterwards 3) working in towns, perhaps as unskilled and short-term hirelings 4) clergy How about, households of Big Men? Not applicable everywhere. In classical Greece and Rome, a free men or woman could not work in another's household, and household servants were slaves. But in medieval Europe after 11th century, household servants were ubiquitously hired free men and women rather than slaves (even in South Europe where slaves were still around, they did not exclude hired free people any longer). Where did the bands of lackeys, footmen, scullions come from? Were they sons of servants, or also surplus peasant boys? It seems to me that the total numbers of manservants between all employers combined were sometimes significant compared to other specialist employments like "professional" military, or clergy. Loading... Reply 1. [bf44f] M says: October 18, 2025 at 9:21 am There's a big difference between an established church (first Catholic, then Anglican in England) and non-established (I've heard the term "gathered"). An established church will have positions that pay a living. These will be in the disposal of either the higher church hierarchy or the local Big Man. They're either given out as favors, or they're actually sold. So the position will go to someone who can return the favor, or has relatives who can, or can afford the purchase price. It's rather like purchased officer positions in that way. If the "village priest" doesn't have a living, then a peasant could do this. But it means they have to get a living from something. Either they're also farming, or they're relying on tithes from the other villagers. These tithes would be in competition with both the Big Man's share and the tithe to the established church priest (if there was one). At least in England, the "gathered" churches grew mostly in the cities after those became large. Mostly because the cities didn't have established livings. And this is after the period OGH is talking about. Big Man household servants? Probably mostly from the local villages. Younger sons and daughters, probably not as good at farming but may be better at other skills at e.g. sewing. Loading... Reply 1. [cb4b0] Arilou says: October 18, 2025 at 11:39 am My understanding that (at least if by "elite" you mean the nobility) there was just too many clerical positions to fill to staff them all with noble sons. Remember just about every village has a parish church with a priest. And often other personnel as well (bellringers, chaplains, deacons, etc. etc.) A lot of them would be taken up by the "middle classes", burghers or rich peasants, rather than the elites per se. Though this varied extensively depending on time period (the reformation reduced the amount of nobility in the clergy considerably over time) Loading... Reply 1. [45a80] Richard Pamplin says: October 18, 2025 at 3:04 pm Livings also had differing values (from better than a bishop to barely above peasant level), the local Big Man might be the patron (who could appoint whomsoever he chose), or might have to compete on the open market. It was also common for wealthy rectors (the ones that 'ruled' the tithe) to hold multiple livings, and appoint 'vice-rectors' - 'vicars' - or assistant curates (on a tiny stipend), to do the actual work. Only in the 19th Cent. did most of this get tidied up! Loading... Reply 15. [5299f] Nebojsa G. says: October 18, 2025 at 8:31 am As horrid and miserable as peasant life was, it's not quite accurate to claim that peasants happily flocked to the factories and urban slums. Anyone who had enough land to feed himself stuck to the village. It was only the poorest, most landless peasants who voluntarily went to the cities. If your options are back-breaking, unending toil and poor diets in tolerably sanitary rural conditions or that same toil and hunger in urban crowding and squalor, the choice is obvious. Loading... Reply 1. [7af23] midpoint says: October 18, 2025 at 9:37 am There was also the horizontal network/social safety net. Before state implemented social welfare become wide spread, people's social safety net is largely their family and neighbors. Leaving for the city is obviously abandoning most of that safety net. Loading... Reply 2. [99560] Alien@System says: October 18, 2025 at 11:35 am I think we always have to keep in mind that these societies do not have all the information right on hand. The life in the city might have been squalid and miserable for the average person moving there, but the young men deciding to move there likely didn't know. Either they had no info at all, or just the tales from people who were affluent enough to travel again after having moved to the city (like merchants). Which often made this more a decision about novelty rather than quality of life: Toiling forever on you brother's farm with to prospect of any family of your own (and whatever grudges and annoyances have piled up in the household over the years), or moving to a different place that at the very least allow you to meet different people? There will be young men willing to take that bet. Loading... Reply 1. [cb4b0] Arilou says: October 18, 2025 at 11:47 am Part of what happens is that in a lot of cases there were ways for peasants to eke out a living in rural areas: Landless peasants could do work for others, forage, sometimes they'd have some kind of access to common land, etc. This was even more precarious (not to mention socially degradign) as regular peasant life but a lot of peasants could eke out a (mariginal) livng this way. They have different names, thorpers, cottars, backhouse sitters, etc. etc. But they're an even more invisible group than the landed (or tenant) farmers. These are the kinds of people who end up in the cities after the various enclosure reforms or other similar rationalization efforts: The marigins they used to inhabit are put under more firm ownership and control. I've seen the idea that this was some kind of plot by industrialists to get labour, but from what I understand it was more the reverse: Agricultural interests wanted rationalized agriculture adn this forced some people to move to the cities where they were a source of cheap labour that meant industrialization became more viable. Loading... Reply 2. [5ae42] mindstalk0 says: October 18, 2025 at 4:50 pm "There will be young men willing to take that bet." Lots of young women too. It was women who filled the early textile factories. Loading... Reply 3. [5ae42] mindstalk0 says: October 18, 2025 at 4:55 pm " Anyone who had enough land to feed himself stuck to the village. It was only the poorest, most landless peasants who voluntarily went to the cities." With primogeniture, only the eldest son could expect enough land to feed himself; the system easily produces surplus kids with dimmer prospects. Even without primogeniture, kids could see "there's a farm for 2 people but there are 3 of us", perhaps leading the more adventurous kid to volunteer for urban work. There's also a key question of how much the cities are paying. AIUI factory work could often pay quite well _compared to the alternative_. Even today, people criticize 'sweatshop' wages for being low compared to developed country wages, but less often compare those wages to local opportunities. Loading... Reply 16. [6f21a] holdthebreach says: October 18, 2025 at 10:42 am Now that the series is finished, I'm wondering if there isn't one big omission to all the calculations of labour. Injury and illness; the full spectrum from low level chronic illness to acute short term injury Surely people would sometimes get injured when doing manual labour, and everyone would get ill occasionally? Obviously when this turns fatal, then it's baked into the demographic models being used. But, even without medicine, it often wouldn't. Yet being sick / injured would reduce one's capacity to do work, either in hours total or in how productive those hours are. The ill also need some looking after, so can contribute negative working hours in extremis. I have no idea how significant this would be in total, or even how to estimate it. But completely ignoring it without justification feels like a significant gap, especially considering the care taken in calculating calorie consumption or farm labour to the umpteenth decimal place. Loading... Reply 1. [f9c80] Tea Kew says: October 18, 2025 at 6:37 pm One thing to remember is that a lot of the baseline estimates here, like "how many working days does it take to gather in a harvest", are based on historical comments on the number of working days to sow a given area or the like - those are the sorts of figures likely arrived at by observation, and so would incorporate at least productivity reduction from typical levels of injury/sickness. Loading... Reply 17. [53929] MIchael Ratti says: October 18, 2025 at 12:11 pm One correction, male farmers will typically work for 2 hours (caring for animals, readying equipment) near the house, while the women are cooking breakfast. After breakfast, the men head "out to the fields" Loading... Reply 18. [0c527] ad9 says: October 18, 2025 at 12:36 pm "And from that list, you can easily see great injustice - our peasants could be much better off if our aristocrats were modestly less comfortable." I'm not sure I see how that follows from this model. For one thing, IIRC we had around a third of the land being owned by the Big Man and being sharecropped by the peasants, which means around 5/6ths of the crop went to the peasants. Eliminating the Big Man would only increase their income by 20%. Nice, but not life-changing. More importantly, in this model the peasants regulate their fertility to their income, to avoid having more children than they can feed. So if their income goes up by 20%, they can afford at least 20% more children. So in one generation, there will be 20% more adult peasants, and no more land to farm than there was before. So after a generation or two, the result will be more peasants, not richer peasants. That need not be a bad thing. It means more people to feel joy, love, compassion, and so on. But it is not the same thing as being "much better off". A society in which the average person has as many children as they can afford is a society in which the average person can barely afford the children they have, for the same reason all tautologies are true. (And if the Big Man takes the hit in the bad years by lending people grain, it follows that with no Big Man then the people who take the hit have to be those peasants whose labour is not essential to the household, primarily the elderly and children.) After all, this is an essay series about those features of peasant life that were common to societies across Eurasia and Africa over thousands of years and millions of square kilometres. These features are going to have to be very stable to be common to all those societies, which means that if you try to change them, they are sooner or later going to pop back up again. That is what "stable feature" means. The things you can change are the features that differed between societies. How many people were slaves, for example. Whether the most villages were or were not at war with their neighbours. That sort of thing. Loading... Reply 1. [cb4b0] Arilou says: October 18, 2025 at 1:12 pm "Nice, but not life-changing." It's one of the things where very small differences can have outsized changes. Since you're working on fairly small marigins. That extra % might mean the difference between death and barely eking it out during a bad year. Note also that peasants are regulating thier fertility for *labour demands* not neccessarily *for consumption* (though I do note that their fertility regulation is by neccessity imprecise) and the thing with the extractive regime is that it reduces what you get out of each individual unit of labour but doesen't reduce the labour demands. *You're still working just as hard* but not getting the same benefits. Loading... Reply 1. [0c527] ad9 says: October 18, 2025 at 6:36 pm "Note also that peasants are regulating thier fertility for *labour demands* not neccessarily *for consumption* " I don't recall that being specified in the model of this essay series: Can you point out where that was specified? In any case, if the peasants are treating their children as investments that will yield a return in later years, reducing any effective tax on that investment (that is reducing any tax on their children) will encourage further investment, which would mean having more children. Theoretically, any simple model in which the peasants control their fertility to avoid having more children than they can feed is going to predict that more food per peasant will produce more children per peasant. A more complex the model might change that, but the more complex it is, the less likely it is to hold for every society in Eurasia. But we can look at this empirically. In the temperate zone of the Americas, a lot of land was taken from land rich Indians and transferred to the European population. And the result was a population explosion in which the European population at least doubled by natural increase in every generation for centuries. So it seems reasonable to conclude that taking land from land rich aristocrats and giving it to land-poor Europeans in Europe would have the same effect. Loading... Reply 19. [23aec] Subbak says: October 18, 2025 at 1:54 pm While the description in the first engraving is indeed idealizing, "enfant" (or "enfan" here, I guess in 18th century spelling) in French means child, "infant" would be "nourisson". The engraving does depict an unusually chill baby, but there are also older children this could be referring to. Loading... Reply 20. [bc408] TeacherHsu says: October 18, 2025 at 2:45 pm Excellent series, and a fabulous concluding post! I do have a question that pertains to "extra" sons. This seems to assume a primogeniture model. How does a society that practices equal inheritance (dividing assets among all sons) work differently than this? I'm a China scholar, but not a historian, so my expertise begins in the 20th C. I was taught that the Chinese practice of equal inheritance, combined with the civil service exam system, undermined bloodline aristocracy in China in the mid-Imperial era. (In a polygamous society, rich men have more sons. Dividing their estates among all those sons means that family wealth will likely decline in a couple of generations.) China still has subsistence peasants as a majority of its population for another thousand plus years. Does this change how the Big Men situation works? (Someone in a previous comment in this series said that in China the state extracts directly from peasants, rather than Big Men.) Does equal inheritance decrease the number of "excess" men for religion and adventuring? Does it change the incentive structure for inventing production enhancing technology, in textile and agriculture? (Lots of inventions come out of China, according all the Chinese people I know.) (Hill Gates argues that the Chinese system incentivized families to invest in education if they got lucky and could accumulate a little extra wealth. But then again, it's not exactly the kind of education that necessarily promotes technological advancement. Lots of poetry and philosophy.) I know there are people with expertise on premodern China in the comments section. Would love any insights! Loading... Reply 21. [18755] ey81 says: October 18, 2025 at 3:01 pm Do we have any sense of how many surplus young men left the typical peasant village, either to join the army or to move to town? (I don't know if there were other alternatives.) Also, in a monogamous society, which is most of Europe for most of history, the existence of surplus young men implies surplus young women. Do we have any sense of their numbers or options? Some that come to mind are (i) become an army camp follower, (ii) move to town and become a domestic servant (in societies that have free servants), (iii) move to town with a young man from your village or in hopes of finding one there, and (iv) move to town and become a prostitute. But I have no idea of the numbers or whether there were other choices. Loading... Reply 1. [92f7b] YARD says: October 18, 2025 at 3:45 pm Also, in a monogamous society, which is most of Europe for most of history, the existence of surplus young men implies surplus young women. While I'm sure all four of those options were getting taken more-or-less regularly throughout history (as well as others, certainly; I am surprised that becoming a nun is left out of your comment, for one), it's worth noting that "the existence of surplus young men" most certainly does not imply the existence of anything close to an equivalent number of surplus young women; not since sex-selective infanticide was also clearly present, and attested to. https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/07/15/ if-it-is-a-girl-a-letter-about-child-exposure/ P. Oxy. 120 (1st Century BCE) From Hilarion to Alis "Hilarion sends sends many, many greetings to his sister along with my lady Berous and Apollonarion. Listen, we are still in Alexandria. Don't worry about this--if they go home completely, I will stay in Alexandria. I am asking you and begging you to take care of the little child and when we are paid, I will send it to you right away. If you happen to be pregnant again, if it is a boy, leave it; if it is a girl, throw it out. You have told Aphrodisias "don't forget me." How could I possibly forget you? Please, do not be worried...." The above is the most famous literary evidence for sex-selective infanticide specifically. While it does date to Roman times, Wikipedia notes that "very high sex ratios were common in even late medieval Europe, which may indicate sex-selective infanticide." (cited to Josiah Cox Russell, 1958, Late Ancient and Medieval Population, pp. 13-17.) Loading... Reply 1. [18755] ey81 says: October 18, 2025 at 4:27 pm It's discussed above in this thread with respect to men, but I don't have any sense of how open nunneries were to peasant girls. That is certainly another interesting question. Loading... Reply 22. [650f2] Magistrissa says: October 18, 2025 at 3:18 pm The peasant cuisine being bland by modern standards reminds me of a MST3K quip from Teenage Crime Wave: Old farm lady: Do you know anything about farm cooking? Wholesome teen ingenue: No, I don't. Servo: Well, it's bland, and there's lots of it! Still largely better than poor city dwellers, though- the food desert problem of getting hold of fresh fruit and veg was definitely a thing for 19th century city dwellers, as Ruth Goodman covers in her video on working class Victorian food. No wonder gardening became a popular hobby for working class families when the opportunity arose! Loading... Reply 23. [650f2] Magistrissa says: October 18, 2025 at 3:39 pm The game Pentiment stands out to me as the best and honestly maybe the only time I've ever seen anyone really capture the cycles of peasant life. The game is set in 16th century Bavaria in an Alpine village, and covers the rocky transition from medieval to early modern in art and social structure. It's a game about a lot of things- truth, art, change, justice. But it's also a game about the cycles of life- the hours of the day, the families we build and leave and mourn, the work that lasts and the memories that are lost. It's fantastically well researched and clever and I think the themes carry it even further. It's pretty much my favorite piece of historical media. Anyone who enjoyed this series would almost certainly get a lot out of Pentiment. (I also nominate The Return of Martin Guerre and the Brother Cadfael book series for other pretty solid representations of how medieval and early modern European societies functioned on a daily basis. They were influences on Pentiment, and all three ask the question of how people would and did deal with mysteries in a premodern setting.) Loading... Reply 24. [ae37b] Daniel Berke says: October 18, 2025 at 4:20 pm the average American closet represents a concentration of wealth that would shock even a rich peasant I thought about this yesterday while clearing out my closest in preparation for a move and taking three bags of clothes down to the local thrift store. There's no way out of the calorie calculus Reminds me of the frustrating sci-fi story The Cold Equations, though this is about an actual historical situation that real people went through rather than a completely contrived one. Loading... Reply 25. [5ae42] mindstalk0 says: October 18, 2025 at 4:22 pm So, the big drop in child mortality has various obvious causes: clean water, vaccines, better removal of smoke[1], oral rehydration therapy for the kids that get diarrhea anyway. But seems that "more stable food supply" should also play a role, and I wonder if that's visible in dropping mortality rates before the big innovations. American-sized farms, potatoes and corn, canals and steamboats and railroads all leading to more food and more easily moved food. [1] though the switch from wood to coal smoke might have been a detriment. Loading... Reply 1. [18755] ey81 says: October 18, 2025 at 4:36 pm E.A. Wrigley discusses the demographic transition in England in considerable detail. My recollection (but I could be misremembering) is that the decline in death rates well predates the large farms, railroads and steamboats that brought American food to Europe, but agricultural innovation may have played a role. The potato may have made a contribution in some parts of Europe, but I don't believe it ever caught on in England. Loading... Reply 26. [cb4b0] Arilou says: October 18, 2025 at 4:39 pm Random thought: I find it interesting that we see very few stories of peasant rebellions in the classical era. Slave rebellions happen of course, but we rarely hear about the kinds of peasant uprisings that happens semi-regularly in the middle ages, or in China. Part of this might just be the presence of slavery ("There's always someone lower down the rung") partially that classical societies (at least the graeco-roman ones) were more oriented towards (at least the rich) farmers in terms of politics, etc. And partially it might just be that our sources have a tendency to frame stuff in other ways. But I thought it interesting. Loading... Reply 27. [08e34] gerard says: October 18, 2025 at 4:39 pm Hello from France. This being a military blog, I'd like to add to anguish, joy and despair another feeling that has woken sometimes in the peasants: anger. From time to time they have risen (I hasten to say that I am talking in a general way; I know that peasants have revolted in lot of countries). They always were crushed by the armored might of the big men. I think that these moments of defiance were not forgotten in their memory, but they also made sometimes a mighty impression to the big men, it may have led to some being cautious and trying to limit the power abuses after succeeding in crushing the peasants. And one time in 1789, they even won. Loading... Reply Leave a ReplyCancel reply Search for: [ ] [Search] Updates every Friday! You can support this project via Patreon, and by spreading the word! Recent Posts * Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part V: Life In Cycles * Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVe: The No-Rest Of It * Gap Week: October 3, 2025 * Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVd: Spinning Plates * Fireside Friday, September 19, 2025 (On the Use and Abuse of Malthus) * Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVc: Rent and Extraction Questions? Requests? Have a topic you want me to post about? A question on a post? 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