nanshe-of-nina: Favorite History Books || The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England
nanshe-of-nina: Favorite History Books || The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England by Barbara A. Hanawalt ★★★★☆ The peasantry cannot be considered a “lumpen” class, however, but can be broken down into three basic status groups within the class. As George Orwell observed at the conclusion of 1984, societies always group into high, low, and middle. While it had been commonplace to observe that some peasants had thirty acres compared to another group who had fifteen and still another group who may have had only one or two, it was the historian J. Ambrose Raftis and his students who discovered and explored in depth what the implications of the different status groups were. Through painstaking village and family reconstitutions, they, and now several other scholars, have investigated the variations in wealth, the domination of village power, the reliance on fellow villagers, marriage alliances, and a range of behavior that relates directly to the social status of the village family. It is now apparent that these status distinctions were much more significant than the differences between free and unfree (villein) peasants. Modern scholars have found that marriages between villein and free peasants and an active land market tended to obscure these old legal distinctions until the demise of serfdom in the fifteenth century made them irrelevant.The wealthy peasants, who have sometimes been called primary villagers and even oligarchs, were wealthy in land and chattels, dominated village offices, ate well, and produced relatively large families. The secondary villagers were a numerous group who also had roots in the village, but they had less land and fewer chattels. In good times they could prosper, but to make ends meet they relied on a network of other villagers to aid them, They were respected in the village, but only occasionally held the coveted offices of village governance. Below this group were the cottars, or tertiary villagers. They had only a cottage and a few acres, and consequently they had to rely heavily on wage labor or some supplementary activity, such as thatching, in order to get by. Their standard of living was low, and few of their children survived. -- source link
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