English feudalism |
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Manorialism |
Feudal land tenure in England |
Feudal duties |
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Rural area |
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A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord.[1][2] In Europe, three classes of peasants existed: non-free slaves, semi-free serfs, and free tenants. Peasants might hold title to land outright (fee simple), or by any of several forms of land tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and copyhold.[3]
In some contexts, "peasant" has a pejorative meaning, even when referring to farm laborers.[4] As early as in 13th-century Germany, the concept of "peasant" could imply "rustic" as well as "robber", as the English term villain[5]/villein.[6][7] In 21st-century English, the word "peasant" can mean "an ignorant, rude, or unsophisticated person".[8] The word rose to renewed popularity in the 1940s–1960s[9] as a collective term, often referring to rural populations of developing countries in general, as the "semantic successor to 'native', incorporating all its condescending and racial overtones".[4]
The word peasantry is commonly used in a non-pejorative sense as a collective noun for the rural population in the poor and developing countries of the world.[citation needed] Via Campesina, an organization claiming to represent the rights of about 200 million farm-workers around the world, self-defines as an "International Peasant's Movement" as of 2019[update].[10] The United Nations and its Human Rights Council prominently uses the term "peasant" in a non-pejorative sense, as in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas adopted in 2018. In general English-language literature, the use of the word "peasant" has steadily declined since about 1970.[11]
Very early on, both the English 'peasant,' the French 'paysan' and similar terms sometimes connoted 'rustic,' 'ignorant,' 'stupid,' 'crass' and 'rude,' among many other pejorative terms. [...] The word could also imply criminality, as in thirteenth-century Germany where '"peasant"' meant 'villain, rustic, devil, robber, brigand and looter.'
1 A poor farmer of low social status who owns or rents a small piece of land for cultivation (chiefly in historical use or with reference to subsistence farming in poorer countries)
1.1 informal, derogatory An ignorant, rude, or unsophisticated person; a person of low social status.
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