The Black Death gave Western Europe's surviving peasants unexpected bargaining power
When plague killed a large share of Europe's people in the mid-1300s, survivors found land plentiful and labour scarce. Many workers could now demand wages and other compensation, and the position of Western European peasants improved dramatically. In Eastern Europe, lacking such a jolt, the old medieval pattern lasted for centuries longer.
The word comes from fifteenth-century French païsant, someone from the pays or countryside, rooted in Latin pagus, an outlying district. By one estimate 85 percent of medieval people were peasants. Europe had three kinds: unfree slaves, semi-free serfs and free tenants. Under the open field system, which lingered into the nineteenth century in many areas, they lived on manors run by a lord or bishop, paid rent or labour for the right to farm, and shared fallow land, pasture and woods.
Paths diverged sharply. Russia tightened restrictions on peasant movement from the late fifteenth century, culminating in the Law Code of 1649, and abolished serfdom only in 1861. German villagers belonged to self-governing communities that managed fields, ditches and grazing and ran village courts for minor offences; the German word Bauer, or Bur in Low German, sounds like the English boor. Historian Eugen Weber's 1976 book Peasants into Frenchmen argued that railways, republican schools and military service turned isolated French villagers into a modern nation between 1880 and 1914.
The word has long carried contempt. In thirteenth-century Germany it could imply both rustic and robber, much like English villein, and today it can mean an ignorant or rude person. From the 1940s to the 1960s it became a catch-all for rural people in developing countries, described as a successor to native with all its condescension. Its use in English writing has steadily fallen since about 1970.
Some have reclaimed it. Via Campesina, claiming to represent around 200 million farmworkers, called itself an international peasants' movement as of 2019. The United Nations uses the term respectfully, most visibly in a 2018 declaration protecting the rights of peasants and other rural workers.
Source: Peasant
