This is the fifth and final part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) 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.
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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 members) | The Middles (6 members) | The Biggs (10 members) |
| Mr. Smalls (M. 40) Householder | Widow Middles (F. 46) Mother | Widow Biggs (F. 50) Mother |
| Mrs. Smalls (F. 32) Wife | Mr. Middles Jr. (M. 27) Householder | Mr. Matt Biggs (M. 43) Householder |
| John (M. 14) Son | Mrs. Middles Jr. (F. 22) Wife | Mrs. Maddie Biggs (F. 33) Wife |
| Jane (F. 6) Daughter | Fanny Middles (F. 4) Daughter | Mark Biggs (M. 16) Son |
| Freida Middles (F. newborn) Daughter | Matilda Biggs (F. 12) Daughter | |
| Freddie Middles (M. 16) Brother | Mary Biggs (F. 8) 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 durée 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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- Theophr. Caus. pl. 3.23.5
- 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.
- Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, ed. D. Thorner, et al. (1966)
- For instance, note this study by E A Hammel.
- 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!).
- 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.
- 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.
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.
This series was fabulous. Thanks so much!
I think, now it’s finished, this series should go in “Resources for World-Builders”
I know I’m using it for a thing I’m writing. 🙂
“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.
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.
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…”
I was thinking of Fiddler, specifically the conversations about Tzeitl.
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.
Fiddler on the Roof as a whole is about the breakdown of societal traditions with encroaching modernity. It’s notable that none of the daughters, despite rejecting tradition, end up in particularly stable or happy situations. It’s made more explicit in the source material, Sholem Aleichem’s _Tevye and his Daughters_, but Tzeitl and Motl are essentially starving to death because Motl really can’t afford a family, and they might have been better off going with the traditional economic considerations.
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.”
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.)
In Chinese sources, at least, the wife just goes on to be oppressed by her mother-in-law instead.
Jolly Roger: And that’s one of the differences between a patrilocal and neolocal family formation system.
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.
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
Girls WANTED to be married. Being mistress of your own household was the closest thing to freedom and power available to a woman. The husband was secondary. As a rule girls agreed with their fathe4s that a poor groom was undesirable.
I imagine people back then viewed marriage as a “work” that require two people to do together, not an act of finding a soulmate.
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.
Yeah, from my time living in India, whilst ‘love marriage’ is definitely a thing, and a growing one, people don’t really look down on doing it the traditional way. Even though labelling non-arranged marriages as ‘love marriages’ very much implies that that’s the difference and also that no-one involved really sees that as a massive problem.
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.)
‘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.
I, for one, would eagerly await an essay on ancient and medieval romance in marriage, esp. among the peasants. That would be fascinating.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
That story is extraordinary because 1910 was not that long ago. I had ancestors who went a lot further away than that, a lot longer ago, and they wrote home regularly – the illiterate ones found someone who could write, dictated a letter, and then sent the letter (somehow) to their family, who would find someone who could read it out to them.
Antrea isn’t even out in the ulu, by Finnish standards. It’s now called Kamennogorsk (I assume that’s the Antrea we’re talking about), in the south of Karelia, midway between Lake Ladoga and the sea. 70km from Kamennogorsk is St Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire. 100km away in the other direction is Helsinki. 40km away in the other other direction is a major railway through Viipuri. And 30km away in the other other direction is the regional capital, Lappeenranta.
If you go 70km in any direction from Antrea you are either in a major city, near a major city, or at any rate near somewhere a lot more connected than Antrea.
Are you sure the story isn’t a joke about how incredibly insular and misanthropic the peasants are?
Sorry. I was quoting from memoriam, and got the names wrong. My source, that I checked now, is Eliel Wartianen’s Karhunajoa Kauko-Karjalassa, 2nd edition. WSOY: Helsinki 1990, p. 32. The man, Vaslei Mitvoroff Jehkinen was from Maimalampi in Kitee and the woman, named Nata from a village that is mentioned just to be “much more northwads than Soutajärvi, but anyhow, in Eastern Karelia, somewhere around Porajärvi. I got remembered the names wrong, but the discussion is as I quoted. And Porajärvi and Maimalammi are about as remote as you get in Finnish or Russian Karelia.
Sorry for delar in my answer. It took me a while to find the book, even if I have it in my own personal library.
That makes a lot more sense! Sorry for putting you to the trouble of pulling the reference. That was not my intent… though however remote it’s still surprising not to be able (or willing) to get a message to a daughter 70km away!
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.
What year (or century) are you referring too here? Medieval? Early Modern? Early 20th Century?
The custom of young women sleeping alone in granary sheds was part of the Finnish culture too, and attested from the 18th century until the 19th century, both in poetry and in prose. The idea was that the young women would typically move, for the warm season, to sleep in granary sheds and decorate these nicely with their best clothes, partially as a means to advertise their capabilites as good workers.
The young men would visit in evenings, and especially, if there were more than one daughter living in a shed together, it would be acceptable and not deleterious to the maiden’s reputation to allow the young man in. There were some quite widely spread informal rules about how the pair should behave (the girl should remain under her duvet and not allow the boy put a had under it).
On the other hand, there was also an accompanying custom in some areas that a son who was inheriting property should not marry unless the bride was already pregnant, to ensure that there was compatibility to produce offspring. (Particularly attested in Ostrobothnia, where also the shed-visiting was most widespread, and which has close cultural connections with Sweden, where the custom of shed-visiting was strongest right on the areas opposite to Ostrobothnia.) This was so accepted that I have even seen an early 20th century Christian writer endorse this, with proper caution, as the only acceptable reason for premarital sex.
Nowadays, the custom is mostly remembered in song, as there are plenty of folk songs, still popular as choral pieces, about girls not opening the door of their shed.
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.
What you fantasize about is one thing… who you actually hook up with is another, at least after a little experience is gained.
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.
to be fair, i think this just applies to ‘stable relationships of all kinds’ – it’s often too easy for writers to insert ‘drama’ and conflict into all relationships for a bit of extra story tension. Which has the unfortunate effect of stories rarely including happily married (or even just ‘seeing each other’) couples who are passionate about each other – they’ll either be going through a rough patch/breaking up, or start out single and be promptly shunted out of the story (or into a nearby fridge) as soon as they tie the knot.
” 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.
It can still be an important “background fact”. For example, Persephone seems to have a very good relationship with Hades despite how it started. (It is Demeter who is grumpy over it.) This is particularly remarkable by contrast against what the other divine relationships are like.
If anything, one could set up a story with an anti-story background. In the background, deliberately break the equivalent-exchange principle. The romantics going against arrangement got what they asked for, and now are stuck in a high-conflict marriage. (Partly as a matter of being highly emotional people in general, and partly because Aphrodite’s curse wears off in anything from years to weeks.) Now the plot is for them to get out of, or failing that, manage the ensuing situation. Whereas the “beta couple” is enjoying Hera’s blessings quietly (read: literally in a low-expressed-emotion way).
Something like this isn’t necessarily impossible to pull off well. A very popular (now old) Hungarian animated TV show approximately closes each episode with the wife reacting to the comical/absurd shenanigans the family got into, and the situation they ended up in, that episode with “If only I had married Pisti Hufnágel instead!” (“Bárcsak a Hufnágel Pistihez mentem volna feleségül!”). Though weirdly enough, the husband is a boring everyman rather than someone who could plausibly have been a “bad boy”.
I often think the adage that stories require conflict gets used too much to excuse a lack of creativity or originality. There’s no reason that every element of a story needs to be a basis of conflict, or that all of the conflicts need to be the same. For the example of arranged marriage, it would be perfectly cromulent for the conflict to come from outside of the couple, and be a thing that they need to work together on.
Plus the idea that the protagonists of a story need some assets in addition to liabilities. There’s plenty of story in X making things easier when X=”John Wick being the deadliest human alive”, for instance.
Well the protagonist does not need conflict as such, but he or he does need difficulties to overcome. So an arranged marriage that takes the difficulties away is probably something for an author to avoid, but one that adds difficulties is fine.
Exactly. Same reason YA protagonists almost always have their parents out of the picture. Anything that makes life easier for the protagonist tends to make the story more boring.
The one case of (attempted) arranged marriage I heard about personally made it pretty clear it was unwanted, and that the parents didn’t have their daughter’s happiness as a high priority. A Sri Lankan family if it matters. Trying to dismiss objections with claims that it wasn’t so bad really, it was adapted to make a better story I think is misguided.
Of course the one case of attempted arranged marriage you’ve heard of was unwanted and the parents didn’t have their daughter’s happiness as a high priority. You live in a society where the norm is that people pick their own partners, and parents who violate that norm are going to tend to be overly controlling types.
Why do fallowed fields need to be plowed?
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.
Typical. Never a weed when you want one.
I think some of the value here was that the plowing killed whatever weeds had grown there so their remains enriched the soil.
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.
Obviously not a farmer. One does not want weeds to plow under because that plows under the weeds’ seeds, so there are more weeds than ever when the growing season arrives.
Because they will be full of weeds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ligneous plants germinate as quickly as herbaceous ones, in most cases; you have about two years in a temperate climate before shrubs and saplings leave stumps that absolutely can’t be plowed through without modern machinery. If you don’t turn the groundcover over every year, maybe more than once, you’ll have hard sod transitioning to forest instead of a field.
You can delay the forest by bringing in animal herds to eat the trees while they’re still seedlings, but if you’re lucky enough to be able to arrange that you’ll want to plow the manure in as soon as the animals are gone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Though more likely, she marries an older version of the “surplus sons” of the Middles or Biggs.
My sister did a fellowship teaching physics in Uganda. The university stipends did not fully cover graduate student expenses. One of her Ph.D. students was having some of his expenses covered by his family (who are basically subsistence farmers) and were selling off a small slice of precious land each year. The hope was that the oldest son being a physics Ph.D. would bring in enough money to make up for the large family no longer having enough farmland to feed themselves (I’d guess the parents had nightmares where the boy got his degree, and then was run over by a bus the next day).
Obviously, it wouldn’t be a physics degree in pre-modern times, but I’m sure there were plenty of reasons someone might sell land, even when land is vital to survival. Maybe you’ve got a chance to get your son into the priesthood, but he needs some funds to pull it off.
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.
As far as ACOUP is concerned, this is probably your magnum opus. I will be assigning this to my daughter for her history lessons.
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).
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.
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.
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/
An underrated aspect of this is the big man doesn’t necessarily need the formal power to command his lessers even when he has it. If he’s any good at his role, he’s going to accumulate a mountain of social power in favours owed or wished for in hundreds to thousands of social interactions where his store of physical capital, land or ability to get things done gives him massive leverage to ask for things in return, or defer asking for future obligation. I’m effect, in a social capital economy, he’s the bank.
It’s also why a big man who is good at being a good man is physically at his home power base, using his leverage and power to build more, and the power dissipates if they’re forced to or choose to live at court or a city and delegate to a lieutenant.
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.
” 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.
In addition to mindstalko’s reply, in some of these societies (more in medieval manors, less so in the classical era) the villagers’ fields were cultivated together without dividers in the “open field system”, and were subject to various shared uses (e.g. after the primary crop was harvested, the village’s animals might be allowed to graze on whatever remained there) which would have made it impossible for an individual peasant to innovate. This is one of the reasons enclosures could improve agricultural productivity.
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 ättestupa 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.)
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
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…
The latter would be done to some different purpose, I imagine? As in, they are your relatives, it just happens to be the case that they need to die. Depending on society, it may or may not be acceptable for them to fall on their sword, but in any case, both the subject and the facilitating relative would want to make the whole thing as painless as they could.
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.
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.
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.
sorry but… no.
uncultivated fields can be kept as pasture indefinitely.
Only if you want them to be pasture forever. Turning flat pasture into a crop field is different than cutting down old growth forest or draining marshes, but it’s not necessarily any less labor-intensive. All of a multi-year pasture’s topsoil is bound up in root systems, and turning that back into free soil without losing it is real work.
The amount of effort to clear old growth woods is far more than that required to clear land that has only been left fallow for a decade or two, even if the effort for the latter is still substantial. l’ve cleared 20-year-old growth with hand tools, but I wouldn’t even attempt to take down a 100 year old tree myself with a chainsaw.
Estimated population of England on the eve of the Black Death (1340): 4.75 million. Estimated population in 1550: 3 million. Land reverts to forest or marsh, or is used for pasture (latter is well-documented for Yorkshire), but these have their nutritional uses – mast, fowl, fish. plus other economic niches – fuel, reeds and so on. With, often, the added bonus of being much less controlled by the landlord (although in the English case the upper classes tightened control considerably).
As arfacchia says, surely if after a plague or something you have more land than you have labour to till, the obvious solution is to pasture livestock on it? As the population recovers, you can put more of the pasture land back under the plough.
This is what happened during the Enclosures, which was the point of the Enclosures, but also that land is often still pasture today, in the rare places where it’s worked at all. A similar thing happened naturally in eastern North America during the contact plagues, where the whitetail deer population grew massively on transitioning abandoned village fields; when settlers moved that land back into cultivation eventually, they could perceive no sign that it had ever been farmed.
See the thing is, not only is pasture not immediately convertible to farmland, it’s also the case that taking the pastureland from the people who own it and redistributing it to needy peasants only seems to become “obvious” to the existing local landholders when you kill said landholders.
” not only is pasture not immediately convertible to farmland, it’s also the case that taking the pastureland from the people who own it and redistributing it to needy peasants only seems to become “obvious” to the existing local landholders when you kill said landholders.”
Well, the Enclosures happened during a secular change in English society. I was thinking of earlier population crashes – what happened after the Black Death when there was suddenly more land than peasant tenants to work it? And what happened a hundred years after that, when the population had started to recover?
I suppose another point is whether the landowner is running his land as a business or as an estate. If it’s a business, and he wants maximum profit, that might mean clearances plus stock. If it’s an estate then the advantage of having lots of tenants is that in time of war you have lots of followers – rather than just a few shepherds.
To an extent I think this assumes respawning livestock at a convenient time in order to expand into use for these new pastures.
Livestock herds grow themselves, and there will presumably be a bunch of ownerless animals around after a plague, but I’m not sure that’s going to be enough to rapidly make use of a large amount of extra land. A cursory google suggests a cattle herd can double its size in approximately 4 years under good management, so it would take a while to make use of the new land properly.
I’m not saying it’s something that’s impossible (it clearly isn’t as it happened, and ), but I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘just turn it all into pasture’. That pasture needs animals to graze it that aren’t alive yet. It needs people to tend those animals, who are either dead (or possibly alive but not with quite the right skillsets for large-herd management), or at the very least working their socks off trying to make it through the next 5 years or so without half their horizontal support network.
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.
> 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!
> 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.
They didn’t get to vote, but also they didn’t have to feel responsible for whether their society was sliding into authoritarianism and worry about whether they could do anything to help…
I mean, it was already authoritarian, so that’s not great, but at least it wasn’t their job to DO anything about that.
It was also extremely decentralized, especially compared to our society. Even village chief can’t really meddle in your family affairs, let alone kings. Of course family head is very authoritarian in his own domain, but it’s over if you can just skip town.
Except of course in a wide variety of city-states. Both Rome and her socii, as well as those Greek poleis that were at that time as democratic as poleis got (and had a comparatively wide “citizen” body in the first place).
In fact, I’d suggest that contemporary democracies would do well to implement something like the ostrakismos. A non-criminal exclusion from public office above some (reasonably high) threshold of anti-approval. Calibrated in particular to get rid of polarizing figures, who may well win offices (whether directly elected or not, e.g. prime minister, depending on system) several cycles in a row while being detested by 20%+ of the populace.
Antivotes could be one way to achieve this. It would not be enough that a polarizing figure amasses largest amount of votes, they also have to avoid attracting large population that would vote against them.
This would help with the problem that people don’t have to vote for the candidate that is the second most detestable to them, they could directly vote against the candidate they detest the most.
“Antivotes could be one way to achieve this”
Or just use approval voting, which may tend to elect centrist candidates. Or some form of Condorcet voting, which very probably does. (Not IRV; with more than 2 competitive candidates it’s about as bad as plurality.)
Or parliamentary legislatures with proportional representation, so there’s less focus on electing single officials in general. (Switzerland has a collegiate executive, to boot.)
In those days, it might well be that they are falling under a new and crueler overlord.
One thing that landed home for me when he mentioned that your excess grain won’t keep for more than a year was…Mo Money Mo Problems. (I want to emphasize that what I’m about to say is *not* me saying peasant life was idyllic or that I want to be a peasant. It’s just thinking about how peasant life sucked in *different* ways than life today can. And how things would change from peasant to peasant based on external economic factors).
Essentially, I’m thinking about how the lack of fungible capital frees you up from being able to think too far in the future. For Mr. Smalls, where buying more land and shoring up his children’s future is an option, the time of plenty becomes a time of anxiety about whether it will be enough. But if the excess is smaller or buying new land is simply not an option, then that anxiety is gone (or at least delayed until the tragedy of a year of want due to being unable to shore things up).
Today, if a person who is living hand-to-mouth gets a larger paycheck due to overtime or something, they might want to indulge a little, but that comes with the guilt of knowing this money could be saved for a leaner time. Every little pleasure has to be weighed against the fact that this *could* be used for a need.
Whereas a peasant for whom actual change is impossible, and whose excess harvest is in the form of rotting grain, why not buy the kids a meat stick at the festival or buy yourself a tool that will make things a bit easier? You can’t save the grain for later, but you can convert the excess into a little bit of joy today. Change that grain to coin and suddenly the peasant’s calculus changes and there becomes a lot less room for little indulgences.
Whereas a peasant for whom actual change is impossible, and whose excess harvest is in the form of rotting grain, why not buy the kids a meat stick at the festival or buy yourself a tool that will make things a bit easier?
I mean, in many cultures peasants do have a clear way of saving money: they can buy livestock. Which, if you’re lucky, will reproduce themslves more reliably than a bank account would. And can serve as capital goods in their own right, through their capacity to pull a plough or a cart. There are definitely people out there who sink all their money into cattle instead of buying nicer clothes, a nicer home, better food etc..
Cattle of course can be a risky investment just like anything else- they can get sick and die, or they can be targets for cattle thieves, especially since they move under their own power and are thus easily transportable.
“Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” is a better reference for your points than “Mo Money Mo Problems.”
> 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.
@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.
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.
‘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 :-))
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.
Berries is another source: Raspberries, bilberries, lingonberries, (while modern strawberries are relatively recent, wild variants grow all around the northern hemisphere) etc.
I’m sure I read somewhere that it was with the Industrial Revolution that the Great Emblandening of British food started. I think it said medieval food was more like African or Middle Eastern in terms of flavour levels, though obviously they had to use local herbs not hot-climate spices.
I stayed with a family in rural Nepal long ago, and while the content was very similar: dal and rice every day, it was always heavily and distinctly spiced, with a different taste every day.
Elsewhere Bret has pointed out many times that people like nice clothes, and are willing to put in labour and resources to get them. People also like nice food!
“I’m sure I read somewhere that it was with the Industrial Revolution that the Great Emblandening of British food started.”
It is largely an American myth that British food is bland and poor-quality.
To take one very telling example, curry is the British national dish*. There is a sort of extremely hot curry that you’ll find in British curry houses called “vindaloo”. This is not the same as the Goan vindaloo. It was invented by curry chefs in Britain because none of their traditional curries, based on recipes brought from India, were considered spicy enough by British people.
There is also a sort of curry that you’ll find in British curry houses called “phall”. This was invented because British people were complaining that vindaloo wasn’t spicy enough either.
(*If you think “no no roast beef is the British national dish” well, fair enough, but I dare you to eat a spoonful of the traditional accompaniment to roast beef, which is horseradish, and still tell me that British food is bland.)
The sort of American who believes this probably does not have a passport. His last contact with the outside world was via his grandfather, who was a supply clerk with the US First Army in 1944, and brought back, from his first and last experience of foreign travel, the revelation that food in a country that has spent five years on the ration and under attempted blockade tends to be a bit lacklustre. He believes that nothing significant has changed since that time.
As for the link to the Industrial Revolution, I think this is unlikely? That’s when you get much greater disposable income, more trade, more exposure to foreign food – the first curry house opens in 1810 I think.
What the British tend not to do during the industrial revolution is stews. They rather look down on the French for eating ragouts and fricasees, seeing this as a bit fussy and emblematic of a non-serious culture. But they were wrong; eating ragouts and fricasses is of course what you do if you are poor, which is what everyone else was compared to the British at that point. You stew poor quality meat to make it palatable. The British could afford large amounts of high quality beef, which didn’t need such treatment.
Honestly, most Italians (and most Europeans too, I think) would concur with the American assessment, and struggle with the notion of curry as a typical British food.
“most Italians (and most Europeans too, I think) would concur with the American assessment, and struggle with the notion of curry as a typical British food.”
The racism and ignorance of the inhabitants of other nations is really not my problem.
@ajay
Only if you live on the moon, I fear.
Let me clarify that. It is not my personal problem; it is, and historically has been, the navy’s problem, and one which they have excelled at solving.
To be frank, and I don’t want to attract your ire given the apparent passive-aggressiveness of your tone, the Royal Navy doesn’t seem to be able to solve many problems right now, at least compared to the past.
Aside that, are you sure you cannot imagine a world where the racism and ignorance of nearby (and not so nearby) countries do not influence your life ? Really, really sure ?
and struggle with the notion of curry as a typical British food.
@TheophileEscargot,
I mean, if you want to be strict about it, most modern dishes that Americans call “curries” aren’t that ‘traditionally’ South Asian food either. They incorporate things like tomatoes, potatoes and chillies which have only been in the subcontinent for maybe five centuries (i.e. maybe a couple centuries before Hannah Glasse wrote about ‘currys” in her famous cookbook). I remember at least one Hindu holy day when people (at least the people i was with) don’t eat any New World foods, so people do remember the distinction, at least in principle.
Setting aside the whole question of whether curry is “English” (and all of the issues about immigration, cosmopolitan values etc. that that represents), I guess I’d say two things.
1) You can eat and cook very flavorful food without any ‘hot’ spices at all. My understanding is that European cooking generally did shift away from spices in the early modern period, but the idea was to rely more on herbs and on meat or fish stocks instead. (Which definitely sounds preferable to me).
2) England has quite good food today, if you’re looking for it. I was there a few months ago and remember going into a Tesco, they had fresh herbs that you can’t get easily in American grocery stores, and for quite cheap as well. I’ve eaten lots of stuff in England that I really enjoyed, and I don’t mean South Asian inspired things, either.
3) I can definitely believe that *on average* cooking in England specifically got worse during the Industrial Revolution- some of the really interesting recipes I’ve seen are from older cookbooks, before the 19th c.. They were the first country to industrialize, after all, so I wouldn’t be surprised if industrialization happened before the culture around food provision could change to accomodate it, and left some long term changes.
@Hector
1) Yes, exactly. The shift towards a spiceless cuisine began in France in the late XVIIth century, and spread throughout the rest of Europe in the XVIII and early XIXth centuries. The exact process varied from one country to another and from social class to social class; I don’t know about the rest of Europe, but in Italy it was far from uniform (our regional cuisines present very marked differences, and it’s up to debate whether a national Italian cuisine actually existed or not before our Unification).
I cannot say whether the shift was for the better or not; as an occasional dabbler in medieval and Renaissance cooking, I just think it’s a matter of personal preference and openness to new tastes.
2) I mean no offense to anyone, but my instinctive reply would be that English food is quite good only if you compare it to the US grocery stores…but then, we Italians are notoriously snobbish and dogmatic in matters of food, so please take it as it comes.
3) It may well be, but my knowledge of modern English cookbooks is rather cursory to be of any help.
> The shift towards a spiceless cuisine began in France in the late XVIIth century,
“Now that spices are cheap enough that even poor people can afford some, we need new ways of demonstrating our wealth via food, like showcasing perfect ingredients.”
“To be frank, and I don’t want to attract your ire given the apparent passive-aggressiveness of your tone”
Oh, sorry, I wasn’t meaning to be passive-aggressive; I was meaning to be aggressive. To be clear: if you say “curry cannot possibly be typical British food” then you are saying something very close to “people with brown skin cannot possibly be British” and you are almost certainly an ignorant racist. This is not my problem in that it is not my job to stop you being ignorant or racist.
“I can definitely believe that *on average* cooking in England specifically got worse during the Industrial Revolution”
I think this is an interesting question and not easy to answer!
First, let’s make a distinction between cooking and diet. “Diet got worse on average” is about intake of calories and protein and malnutrition and so on, and is amenable to a definite answer – this article https://academic.oup.com/past/article/239/1/71/4794719 suggests that industrial workers and miners spent more on food than farm workers during the period, and spent it to get a more varied diet with more animal protein. That would imply that on average diet got better – as the industrial workers pulled up the average. But I’m sure this is far from settled.
“Cooking got worse” is largely about taste. If everyone in England stopped cooking and eating beef and potatoes and started cooking and eating pasta schuta, Paolo would no doubt think that their cooking had got better. Others might disagree! And what the average person ate, and how they cooked it, and how well they cooked it – as opposed to what the elite in Naples or London ate – is much less visible.
But, with industrial workers making more money on average, spending more on food, buying a wider variety of food, and with more food types available to buy, and cheaper, thanks to cheaper trade and transport (Jane Austen was getting fresh oranges in rural Yorkshire in 1810!) – given all that, how could English cooking _not_ get better?
Maybe English cooks had less time to spend cooking because they tended to work outside the house?
@ajay
Good morning sunshine ! I see you woke up in a good mood, didn’t you ?
I wasn’t meaning to be passive-aggressive; I was meaning to be aggressive.
I have no comment, Your Honour: the defence has already done the prosecution’s work.
if you say “curry cannot possibly be typical British food”
I clearly haven’t said that. Learn to read before calling others “ignorant racists”.
it is not my job to stop you being ignorant or racist.
Nor is mine to stop your projections, but I still try to be civil.
If everyone in England stopped cooking and eating beef and potatoes and started cooking and eating pasta schuta, Paolo would no doubt think that their cooking had got better.
Paolo would not, if only because we eat a lot of beef and potatoes too. I would correct your spelling of “pastasciutta”, but I’m afraid I would ruin such a textbook straw man argument.
“struggle with the notion of curry as a typical British food.”
So, Paolo, what was your *point* in saying this? Were you saying ajay is wrong that British people commonly eat curry? With what authority and evidence do you say that? Have you visited England much? At all?
By the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry_in_the_United_Kingdom
‘ Curry recipes have been printed in Britain since 1747’
‘The first curry house opened in London in 1810’
‘Curry is very popular in the United Kingdom, with a curry house in nearly every town.[2][3]’
‘As of 2015, despite curry houses accounting for a fifth of the restaurant business in the United Kingdom’
(Also an interesting point that in 1747, even many curries in India wouldn’t use chili pepper, a recent introduction.)
“I clearly haven’t said that. Learn to read before calling others “ignorant racists”.”
I clearly never said that you did.
What you did say was “Honestly, most Italians (and most Europeans too, I think) would concur with the American assessment, and struggle with the notion of curry as a typical British food” – which I would describe as an ignorant and racist position.
If you are not one of those people, then well done, you are not an ignorant racist.
By the way, “pasta schuta” is one of several spellings used in English, presumably acquired via German. Also correct are “pasta shuta”, “pastasciutta” and “pasta asciutta”.
@Paolo,
2) I mean no offense to anyone, but my instinctive reply would be that English food is quite good only if you compare it to the US grocery stores
No offence taken, but I actually do think that you’re not really going to appreciate what the food options in a place are like (especially if you’re cooking for yourself) until you’ve lived in a place for a while. A tourist is usually certainly going to get a distorted impression, because not every grocery store is going to carry every item. It takes a while to figure out where to go to find items X, Y and Z, who specializes in them, what locations they’re produced in, etc.., and that’s the case whether you’re talking about living in rural Africa and getting much of your food from transactions with individual farmers, or living in a small city in the heart of the US Corn Belt and buying it from supermarkets, bakeries etc..
I clearly never said that you did.
Except you did imply it, multiple times. But, from what you’ve written thus far, I begin to suspect that you have some kind of fetish for misrepresenting your interlocutor’s positions.
What you did say was “Honestly, most Italians (and most Europeans too, I think) would concur with the American assessment, and struggle with the notion of curry as a typical British food” – which I would describe as an ignorant and racist position.
According to your pseudo-logic, any doubt whatsoever on the status of goulasch, strudel, kebab, couscous etc as typical Italian food would ipso facto make you an ignorant and a racist, and that notwithstanding your conflating a country’s food with its inhabitants’ skin colour.
Your previous straw man argument implied that pasta cannot be a typical British food, which is very close to saying that olive-skinned people cannot possibly be British: thus, by your own words, that would be an ignorant and racist position. Welcome to the club, mate.
By the way, “pasta schuta” is one of several spellings used in English
Nise tri, its still not corect. Im waitin fer yur navi tough.
@Hector
I actually agree, and I know very well that, for example, the US have a far greater variety of food than what we Europeans usually think, and that it’s probably better than what most of us is willing to admit. But, since they’re usually very local dishes that don’t receive media coverage, the overwhelming image that we have of US food doesn’t go beyond the “hamburger and BBQ” stereotype.
I’m more sceptical on US grocery stores and its common items’ quality: most sliced bread, for example, cannot be sold in Europe because it’d be classified as cake by EU laws.
P.S. I’ve been saying Europeans and not Italians, because this attitude, as far as I know, is widespread across the continent.
suggests that industrial workers and miners spent more on food than farm workers during the period, and spent it to get a more varied diet with more animal protein. That would imply that on average diet got better – as the industrial workers pulled up the average. But I’m sure this is far from settled.
@ajay,
Thanks for the paper link, I will check it out when I have time! If the paper’s conclusions are valid, then I would definitely take that as evidence against the idea that British food got worse during that time period.
@mindstalko
So, Paolo, what was your *point* in saying this?
I meant exactly what I’ve said, not a word more. I find it amazing how you can read some hidden meaning in such a simple sentence, and yet here we are.
Were you saying ajay is wrong that British people commonly eat curry?
Please, could you point out where did I imply that ?
With what authority and evidence do you say that?
I’d like to recall to your attention that I did not, very clearly, say that. It’s worth noting, however the abrupt shift in your argument: first you pose a rhetorical question implying that I have said that, and then you ask a second question where it’s given for certain.
Have you visited England much? At all?
I spent some time at Warwick University for my Ph.D. May I humbly suggest, by the way, to try to understand someone else’s words before jumping on them ? Or will you call too on the Royal Navy to bomb me ?
@mindstalko,
“Now that spices are cheap enough that even poor people can afford some, we need new ways of demonstrating our wealth via food, like showcasing perfect ingredients.”
yes, my understanding is that was definitely part of why the trend happened (things rarely happen for just one reason).
But, in defence of the “modern” style, I would say that, in the modern era, we have transportation technology and methods of freezing, refrigeration and canning that make high quality meats, fish, vegetables etc. broadly available and affordable. Why *wouldn’t* we want, today, to showcase the ingredients rather than drowning the taste with cuminn and coriander (or to take the “white American” equivalent, with mayonnaise or barbecue sauce)?
To weigh in on this as another Brit, I’ve always been lightly baffled by the world’s insistence that our food is bland. It seems more like an internet meme that’s been blown out of proportion than anything grounded in people’s actual experience. It certainly has been whenever I’ve challenged it online before (which tends to go: ‘have you even been to Britain’, followed by ‘no’).
Yes you have people who grew up on boiled ham (plain), boiled potatoes (plain) and boiled broccoli (within an inch of its life, typically). But that seems to be where the world’s perception of British food ends.
I, being proud of our multicultural heritage, do count curries within our culinary pantheon (the town I live nearest to has no fewer than seven Indian takeaways on its high street), but even if you only wanted to narrow it down to things that were explicitly made in Britain having been inspired by dishes abroad rather than imported wholesale then you still have Tikka Masala, Kedgeree and Piccalilli (which is inspired by south Asian spiced pickle preserves).
I once went shopping in a French supermarket and was profoundly disappointed in the lack of chutneys available (which are typically quite thoroughly spiced).
Those hams which were once boiled plain are now studded with cloves and pineapple (ham and pineapple having been a staple on the ‘pub grub’ menu since I was little, as is beef and rosemary, and lamb and mint sauce).
You’ll find herb-filled stuffing on practically every Christmas menu (which includes onions, celery, sage, thyme, breadcrumbs, parsley and often chestnuts).
The ubiquitous ‘brown sauce’ you will find in any restaurant that serves chips or bacon sandwiches is made from tamarind and spices, tartar sauce (mayo/gherkins/capers/tarrago/dill) is the traditional accompaniment to fish and chips, worcester sauce is a spiced fermented fish sauce that’s also ubiquitous and was invented in its namesake location.
Even the much-maligned beans in ‘beans on toast’ aren’t plain beans (which tends to surprise most Americans), they’re cooked in a sauce of tomato, malt vinegar, onion, garlic, pepper and a bit of that worcester sauce mentioned earlier.
That’s before we get into baking and sweet stuff, which uses even more. ‘Mince pies’ are practically everywhere around Christmas time, using a sweet spiced mix of fruit and suet. Christmas puddings themselves are similarly spiced. Figgy pudding is another one (from the 14thC no less) that uses ample ground almonds and ginger. I don’t think there’s a British person alive that hasn’t eaten crumble, and that’s spiced with cinnamon (as is damn near everything sweet here). Bakewell tart (almond), bread and butter pudding (nutmeg, vanilla, cinnamon, raisins), carrot cake (cinnamon, ginger, walnuts), hot cross buns (cinnamon, sultanas, ‘mixed spice’ which includes coriander, nutmeg, cloves, mace etc.), teacakes (cinnamon, fruit), battenburg cake (almonds), chelsea buns (lemon peel, cinnamon, mixed spice), seed cake (caraway).
I just find the whole thing quite odd. It’s like spotting that dodgy ‘Americana’ pizza with the french fries on top of it, ignoring everything else, and saying that Italian cuisine is ‘bland’ because they’ve flavoured a pizza with potato.
AIRC Ruth Goodman goes into the effects of cooking with coal in The Domestic Revolution. The short version is: The effects were awful, and imposed a lot of constraints on, among other things, cooking.
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-domestic-revolution-by
“In fact most medieval dishes were thick and sticky, exactly the sort of thing I like to give my toddlers because it stays on even the most inexpertly wielded spoon, and they’re extremely well-adapted to cooking over wood. Just get your pot boiling over a big fire, then as the flames die down your dinner will simmer nicely. You’ll have to stir it, of course, to keep it from sticking to the pot, but you have to come back anyway to feed the fire. You can cook like this over coal, but it’s difficult: a coal fire stays hot much longer, so moderating the temperature of your frumenty requires constantly putting your pot on the grate and taking it off again. It’s far simpler to just add more liquid and let it all boil merrily away, with the added bonus that the wetter dish needs much less stirring to keep it from sticking. With the switch to coal, boiled dinners — soups, meats, puddings, and eventually potatoes — became the quintessentially English foods.”
I don’t see a big blandness difference between a thick boiled stew and a thinner boiled soup. And I’d think you can boil the soup down near the end.
That review is absolutely fascinating – thank you! I have added the book to my list. I’d already read quite a bit about the importance of coal in an industrial context (Darby, etc; Anton Howes is good on this) but I hadn’t thought about how it would affect cooking – I’ve cooked over wood fires a lot, but never over coal. The review doesn’t mention it, though the book might, but you presumably also can’t spit-roast something over a coal fire, or at least not if you want it to remain edible. (Charcoal, yes, but not coal, because of the sulphur.) And also it might be a lot easier to run a closed metal oven on coal?
The labour required for a coal-fired house is less than for a wood-fired house, but still significant, though. Read “The Labour-Saving House” by CS Peel, a 1910s female journalist – it’s partly about how architects would do well to listen to women from time to time, in the interest of what we’d now call ergonomics, but mostly it’s about getting rid of coal in favour of gas or electricity wherever possible. Cleaning and dusting, and also the labour of hauling in scuttles of coal all the time. When Orwell and his contemporaries are talking about “labour-saving flats” this is what they mean – flats which, like (trigger warning, sorry Paolo) the Royal Navy, had made the transition away from coal to more convenient petrochemical fuels.
But I’m not sure that the effect on quality of cooking would be awful, necessarily. Frumenty does not sound great – hence why it has really only survived as risotto, congee and porridge – but you can do an awful lot with soups. And you can also steam things instead of boiling them, and they did. Also, as she says (and as any cook knows) frumenties are much more labour intensive because you have to keep stirring them. Soups and steamed puddings and so on can be left to themselves much more.
pepper was expensive, but ‘insane luxury’ is an exaggeration; a pound went for six pence in late medieval england, about two days’ wages for a foot archer, and would last for months [12.5 tsp per oz x 16 = 200 tsp per lb , 2 tsp per dinner batch for a family gets you 100 days].
I’m not so sure on the pepper front. Alexander (Smyrnium olusatrum) is a plant in the carrot family that was introduced in the British Isles by the Romans (who were apparently quite keen on the stuff). It doesn’t grow inland terribly well, but the coast where I live is lousy with the stuff.
Its roots are sort of parsnipy (though with a distinct ‘Alexander’ flavour that’s quite unlike anything else)…but importantly the seeds are very nearly a dead ringer for pepper. I’d say they’re more fragrant than pepper, and you need to use more of them to get a flavour as punchy as pepper, but they fundamentally work in the same way.
It’s also worth noting that prior to first contact with the Americas, no-one else in the Old World had chilis either…
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.
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.
People in stories are almost always less normal than average. We don’t get together to talk about how unremarkable people are.
“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.
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.
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)
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!
This is giving me flashbacks to the law of advowsons – the patronage of a benefice was treated as a form of real property, and there was a mass of common law precedent relating to disputes over who owned the advowson.
Because it’s the oldest form of non-physical property, a whole bunch of modern corporate law derives from the law of advowsons, so medieval precedents in cases relating to the rector of some parish somewhere in England get cited in cases relating to massive US corporations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“There will be young men willing to take that bet.”
Lots of young women too. It was women who filled the early textile factories.
” 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.
The textile factories open very late in the agricultural era (and bring it to an end). During the transition, I guess you can call Scottish girls from the Highlands and Islands peasants, but I wouldn’t use that term for girls from the farms of New England.
“I wouldn’t use that term for girls from the farms of New England.”
But in what ways are they not peasants? Particularly in the context of this series. High mortality, high fertility, worries about land and weather, hard daily work, agrarian cycles of life… the main differences from medieval peasants would seem to be less of a Big Man (no lords), more contiguous fields, and more literacy. Which for some purposes are significant differences, but for “why do people move to the city?”, less so.
Their fathers are enfranchised freeholders, so they are not peasants.
Freeholders of Sweden, Finland and Norway were expressly peasants, therefore so were those of USA.
Scandinavian farmers (to use a neutral term) were definitely not enfranchised as of 1814, when the first mill opened in Lowell, or for many years thereafter. For example, as late as 1867 about 20% of the adult male population could vote for the lower chamber of the Swedish parliament. In New England, it would have been close to 100%. (Byron Nordstrom, Scandinavia Since 1500, p. 226.)
@chornedsnorckack
I would like to note that “peasant” as an estate of realm in pre-1809 Sweden and pre-1906 Finland meant these 20 per cent of the rural population who owned their farms. Everyone else in the countryside was either a family member of a peasant, a servant or a crofter. (Or a clergyman or their household member, or a nobleman landholder or their household member, or one of the craftsmen allowed to pursue rural handcraft, like smiths, tailors and shoemakers or their hosehold members).
The peasants of a parish elected a representative to the electoral meeting of the district, who then elected the member of parliament. The peasant estate of the parliament usually consisted of members who were actually peasants.
So, the point of “peasants” being enfranchised meant freeholders being enfranchised. But the vast majority of the rural population was below that step in the world.
It’s not obvious to me why I can call 1800 Scottish girls peasants, but not American ones.
But it is obvious to me that for most of the thousands of years in which there were peasants, they were not at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. 1800 Britain and America can not have been *typical* peasant societies.
Scottish crofters had neither freehold tenure nor the right to vote. New England farmers had both.
ey81: “Scottish crofters had neither freehold tenure nor the right to vote. New England farmers had both.”
So what? The model of peasant life in this essay series says nothing about either. They are both irrelevant to the question of who this essay series calls a peasant.
This essay series is about core features of life that persisted across whole continents for millennia. Details of politics and the land tenure system are local colour. The crops didn’t care.
I think that represents a total misunderstanding, to say that farming, plus the universal human experiences of birth, marriage and death, define what it means to be a peasant. It is the extractive regime to which they are subject that makes them peasants. (You might even say that their relation to the means of production defines their class status, if you talked that way.) If, like a 19th century New England farmer, you don’t pay rent (or crop shares, or whatever) to the Big Man, and the only taxes you pay are the ones you voted on yourself, your life is very different from that of a peasant.
New England residents always had an open frontier attached to the polity, which mostly kept the farms even in New England itself large until mechanization arrived. As in, if someone in New England found themselves holding a farm that qualified as less than “rich peasant” in the Old World, they could sell it to a neighbor and homestead on the frontier. This meant that population growth there didn’t create poor farmers or landless second sons. Whereas in the Old World, most of the peasant farms had been subdivided to shreds many generations ago, thus population growth during the Industrial Revolution necessarily created massive numbers of landless second sons and daughters. Hence the movement to the cities (and to America, Australia, NZ, sometimes South Africa, etc.).
This is the part I want to hear more on. Growing up in the midwestern US, our entire history was that of bringing massive new areas under the the till in just a few generations, much of it in an era without significant technical changes in the specifics of how you do that (e.g. you’re still felling several hundred year old trees with hand axes and hand saws).
Europe still had large swathes of forest for most of this period — why was it so slow to come under additional development? Was it more about ownership and spheres of influence (e.g., even if there wasn’t someone farming that land, they’d still shoot you for clearing it)?
“Was it more about ownership and spheres of influence (e.g., even if there wasn’t someone farming that land, they’d still shoot you for clearing it)?”
It’s not like European forest was _unused_. It produced lumber, firewood, nuts and fruits, boar and deer. And yeah, someone would own it.
Which induced its own outlook. Laurie Lee grew up in the 1920s in an area still peasant. When an emigrant came back (from New Zealand), boasted of his acres and bought everyone drinks, his old companions gave him a good kicking.
“Growing up in the midwestern US, our entire history was that of bringing massive new areas under the till in just a few generations”–Depending on your family and your location, a good part of the inhabitants; history, in many cases, would be one of having been second sons (illegitimate in the case of one of my ancestors) and coming to America rather than living forever as landless laborers in the old country. Meanwhile the fortunate son stayed on his little 10 acre plot, LOL.
Right, in a society where rural population is growing*, you’re going to have an influx to urban areas *even if* life in the cities is not necessarily better on average.
*Specifically rural population: there are a lot of developing / industrializing countries today where total fertility is now below replacement, but besides the fact that population will still grow for a while because of demographic momentum, you also have to consider that rural fertility might still be above replacement even if urban fertility, and total country-wide fertility, is now below it.
“City air makes you free” is the German phrase for a fairly common medieval legal principle, that peasants who moved to a town/city became free from their obligations to their former Big Man after a year.
Peasant farmers may have had difficulty imaging any other way to live, but even in these very static and slow moving cultures there would be malcontents and rebels. Moving away from the family farm wasn’t always purely an economic decision.
I’ve heard from other comments that this part of Brett conclusion is entirely wrong. The only reason why mass migration to cities happen is because industry make Big Men even bigger, and able to push agricultural products price to nothing. This kills little land peasants, which forces them to cities to survive. Everywhere this doesn’t happen yet, peasants are perfectly happy still being lord of their own (little) domain.
The only reason why mass migration to cities happen is because industry make Big Men even bigger, and able to push agricultural products price to nothing. This kills little land peasants, which forces them to cities to survive. Everywhere this doesn’t happen yet, peasants are perfectly happy still being lord of their own (little) domain.
I’m sure this is a factor, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. Even in 20th century countries which got rid of their landlord class (following communist revolutions in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, and non-communist revolutions in places like Mexico and Peru) you still got migration of people to the cities. (For the most part, with some interesting country-by-country variation).
Landlord pressure is certainly one factor, but a second issue is that even without landlords, increasing agricultural productivity and surplus (thanks to modernity) would push down food prices and make it more difficult for farmers to earn a living. Plus of course, in a world with above replacement rural fertility, rural areas would generate surplus population that needed to move somewhere. In addition, while I think Bret and especially some of the commenters here overestimate how miserable and terrible peasant life is, it’s unquestionably very hard work, and involves a lot of anxiety focused around things like the weather, animals dying, etc., and I’m sure a lot of people have always been attracted to the more predictable and fixed-schedule jobs in urban factories. Urban areas, at least until the spread of mass education and social services in the 20th c, also offer more amenities like schools, hospitals, and so forth. And finally, even leaving material well being aside, people who find village life stultifying (especially maybe young women seeking to escape patriarchal authority) might enjoy the anonymity and social opportunities of the city, for non-economic reasons.
Do not forgot Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan after WWII. There land reforms happened as a measure to reduce support for Communism. I had read that the South Korean land reform had been so thorough that not one large farm had been left.
Yet those countries still had enough people willing to migrate in cities after this to achieve rapid industrial growth. This despite that the likes of the Chiangs and General Park were not known for being ‘pro-worker’; Park even had used the KCIA to repress labour organisations and had used the military to beat up trade unionists.
From Pseudoerasmus I also know that there was a study according to which Taiwanese land reform had even accelerated the movement of population into industry, the farms it generated were too small to be viable thus farmer families were forced to make some of their members work in industry; though I don’t know how high that study’s quality was.
It was also mentioned that the Taiwanese government in order to extract revenue from peasants for industrialisation had artificially suppressed the price of rice and through its monopoly of artificial fertilisers also inflated the price of fertilisers. So, apparently there somebody was ‘pushing agricultural products price down’, but it had not been ‘Big Men’.
Yes, the Hebrides, unlike the Highlands, did not see Clearances, but they still lost population to the cities, as increased agricultural productivity (often fostered by the benevolent landlords who eschewed clearance) simply reduced the need for agricultural labor.
Indeed. Finland had, in 1945, an extremely thorough land reform. After that, there were essentially no landless rural workers. Everyone got their own handholding, if they were married and had served in WWII. The size of the plot was about 2 to 5 ha of field, and some 15 to 30 hectares of forest.
Most of these small farms were not very viable but their inhabitants needed to supplement their income by e.g. manual logging work. By the 1960’s, when the boomers were coming to age, it was completely clear that this small-scale farming could not really provide much prospects to the next generation. As a result, we experienced a very rapid urbanisation. Part of that was absorbed by equally rapid growth of Finnish industry, part by the Swedish industry, who were happy to employ the 600,000 Finns who emigrated the country between 1965 and 1975.
So, it was not about somebody purposely killing the small farms. We seriously attempted to become a an utopia of rural yeomen, and the government subsidised the farming profession heavily, but it just didn’t work out.
Five to fifteen acres of farmland? (And in a cold climate to boot.) That is what I would call hardscrabble farming.
There were 100,000 new farms established between 1945 and 1960 as a result of this law, and a large portin of farms were “cold”, i.e. the owner needed to clear out forest and swamp to get these fields. This link shows a rather idealised picture of what that kind of work looks like: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Siirtov%C3%A4ki_raivaa_kylm%C3%A4%C3%A4_tilaa.jpg
Like I said, for the next generation, the life as an industrial worker (or, for that matter, a white-collar worker) was quite appealing.
@Finnish Reader,
That’s really interesting! If I may ask, which political party was that under? Because I know one of your major political parties is an agrarian party (or maybe today one might call them post agrarian), right?
I always find it interesting and a little bit tragic that agrarian land reform finally succeeded, over a lot of the world, in the 20th century, after centuries or millennia of *not* happening, but unfortunately right at the moment when urbanization meant that it was no longer an adequate/sufficient solution to society’s problems.
This was a very multi-partisan piece of reform legislation. It was passed by the parliament elected in 1939, that was dominated by the social democrats and agricultural party, but to pass, it needed a five-sixths majority, which the Finnish constitution requires for acts of parliament that contradict or amend the constitution and which are passed by a single parliament. (Normally, such acts would need two parliaments, and the later parliament would need a two-thirds supermajority to ratify the act of the previous parliament.)
The five-sixths supermajority was possible largely because the parliament wanted to have this reform before the first post-war election where the communists were allowed to participate (and where they got 25 % of the vote with social democrats and the agricultural party getting also about 25 % each, the rest going to liberals and conservatives). This allowed a somewhat more capitalistic approach to reform, with some compensation to former owners.
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.
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.
I have also wondered how sickness and injury factor into this. How often would people just continue working while sick, and how would this factor into their mortality? As Tea said, it’s propably indirectly baked into the model (at least to some extent). I’d still be interested into anything explicit.
“I have no idea how significant this would be in total,”
Probably not extremely so, due to those horizontal social bonds. Say that Mr. Middles has an accident happen during harvest time and can’t walk for whatever reason. The neighbors are going to pitch in as much as they can (especially if he isn’t a jerk) to help the rest of the family gather their crop in, because they know that next year they might be in that situation, and they’re going to want the rest of the village to help them out.
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”
“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.
“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.
“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.
We tend to forget here that the fields of a big man were tended with rather similar methods than the peasant’s. The fields of the manor proper might have a bit more advanced crop rotation and variety of crops, but before the 18th century, differences in productivity were minor, and often, a large portion of the big man’s fields were the fields of the peasant, and his income was rent from those.
So, there were few lands that would be miraculously freed for peasant use if the big man were removed. Instead, the peasants (or even worse, day workers) who tended the manorial domain, would be better off.
The moral justification of the government was, from peasants viewpoint, the eventual peace that allowed them to live peacefully, without foreign armies or robber bands looting them – and also the funding of the organised religion that guaranteed divine protection and, eventually, in some religions, a good afterlife for the people.
More pertinent is the French experience. The Revolution put the land in the hands of the peasantry, who responded by slowing the rate of population increase rather markedly.
French fertility had been declining decades before the French Revolution and was not impacted that much by it. Just like much of the world now is running on demographic inertia despite low current fertility, so was France on the eve of the Revolution.
I had encountered the claim ‘the French Revolution lowered how many children people had’ before; however, that was based on the theory that it did so by introducing equal partition of inheritance among all children, including women, which led to:
1: Landholding peasants reducing how many children they had to avoid too much land fragmentation upon inheritance.
2: It increased the average age of marriage for women, as land-owning women had less need of a husband to support themselves.
IIRC, some Economic Historian had done a study which used that parts of France had different historical inheritance rules to conduct a difference-in-difference estimates according to which these changes in inheritance laws lowered fertility.
However, I don’t know whether other Economic Historians believe that study had a high quality.
Note, this is not necessarily incompatible with what that @Hastings had claimed.
I had previously also encountered the claim that even before the French Revolution fertility was declining in response to the corruption and power abuses of the Catholic Church in France, in reaction to the pro-natalist attitudes of the Catholic Church some responded by becoming anti-natalist.
However, I don’t know what historians specialised in that time period think of that theory.
Yeah one thing I notice everytime someone’s shaming Big Men’s consumption, is that they almost always actually take relatively little of small men’s share. Even in our modern one with heavy inequality, if you parcel all billionaire’s fortune to everyone in the world (not just USA mind you. It’s always forgotten that those billionaires got their income from all over the world not just USA), we’ll only get a lump sump of hundred of dollars… And then nothing afterwards. And it results in killing tons of useful organizations around the world that benefit society for years to come. Of course there are always extreme deviants on either side, but it’s said that communist economy is dividing a cow equally by butchering it.
Pedantry, but most billionaires’ fortunes are (their share of) the market caps of the companies that they founded/inherited/etc. but own substantial portions of. “Parceling out their fortune” would presumably mean nothing more than changing who owns how many shares in these companies’ stocks. Which is to say, the companies themselves would continue existing and functioning just as they did before; they would not die.
Now, the above would apply perfectly in an economy as stagnant as those that the studied peasants lived in. However, in our case, the whole point is that people try to, and occasionally succeed at, creating entirely new business models and growing them. Thus to the extent the present valuation of “billionaire companies” is partly based on their expected future growth trajectory, such expropriation would cause some of their present value to evaporate instantly, and possibly even more to the point, the stream of new-growth companies of this sort may significantly slow down, making the future not as rich as it would have been. It’s not just that the communists preclude future dairy by butchering the cow today. It’s that this “cow” is a moderately-sized calf, it would have continued growing, and it would have calved several times.
That jab at communism is both unnecessary and a strawman argument, where you read the opposing position in the most shallow and literal sense (“Communists just want to take the money from the rich people and give it to the poor”) while giving your own position a very detailed and technical depth.
Also, if I read your argument correctly, what you’re saying is that the value of the shares of the company are worth so much to make the holder a billionaire *because it is the billionaire who holds them*. Which is to me an absurd argument – the value of a share of a company should depend on the performance of the company, not the person who is holding it.
> what you’re saying is that the value of the shares of the company are worth so much to make the holder a billionaire *because it is the billionaire who holds them*. Which is to me an absurd argument – the value of a share of a company should depend on the performance of the company, not the person who is holding it.
in some cases people in fact expect specific people to manage worse/better and who controls company has in fact influence on its performance/value
how actual effect on performance matches valuation may be debatable, there are some cases where it is dubious or was wrong and cases where it has better justification or turned out well
(note voting/nonvoting shares! who own and who controls company may be distinct!)
– “Parceling out their fortune” would presumably mean nothing more than changing who owns how many shares in these companies’ stocks.
This is quite a pertinent topic at the moment I find. I’ve yet to find someone who has put forward a compelling argument as to why having this sort of capital ownership in the hands of _individuals_ is in any way more effective than having it in the hands of companies owned by the broader population.
Especially since ‘companies that manage investment portfolios for their clients’ (e.g. private equity and investment firms) seem to be pretty well utilised by the super rich themselves.
In fact, if you actually implement it how I’m picturing it (e.g. a single pooled investment fund for a nation)…you end up with the Norwegians’ sovereign wealth fund. And they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves with that (Norwegian millionaires and billionaires included).
You forget that those Big Man not only owing a thrid of the land. They also are responsible for extraction. With out them, there is no church demanding 1/10 of the peasant movable posessions. Nobody to demand freeholders spend 10 days a year on maintenance for the local fortress. Nobody is drafting th sons, if their labour is needed on the farm, or not. Nobody demands a contribute to their daughters drowery. Nobody can make their markets and mill mandatory, and then demands exorbitant fees for using them.
We have good evidence that during events that cut down the upper echelons of the Big Men (also called society breakdown) the peasant have a tendency to become healthier in the first few generations after.
I agree that there is a reason why societies with Big Men where more stable than those with out. But that does not mean it was good for the peasants.
“the peasant have a tendency to become healthier in the first few generations after.”
As I said, the model specifies that the peasants reduce their fertility to match their income. If that means anything at all it means that the peasants would respond to an increase in their income by having more children. Which means more peasants per acre. Which means the population goes up until the peasants are as badly fed as they were before and can no longer afford above-replacement fertility. That is a logical consequence *of the model*.
This process explains why different peasant societies had such similar living standards over millions of kilometres, thousands of years, and wildly different crops, political systems and disease environments.
“why different peasant societies had such similar living standards”
I’m not sure we have the resolution to tell reliably how similar the standards were. From our POV, at $60,000/year/person, the equivalents of $500/year and $1000/year look pretty similar, yet there’s a huge difference to the recipients [assuming similar prices]. And I know various scholars have talked about the English of some period having high wages relative to Chinese peasants, or such, though I don’t have details to hand.
As for wealth leading to more children — Spartiates and Roman elites seem to have worried about their groups not having enough children to maintain the population, let alone growing without bound. If the model concludes an endpoint of being equally badly fed everywhere, perhaps the model is imperfect.
“Spartiates and Roman elites seem to have worried about their groups not having enough children to maintain the population”
These are elite groups, and our host began by pointing out their demographics could be different, but that in all peasant societies that persisted for any length of time the peasantry were maintained or increased by natural increase. It is explicitly a feature of the model described by the essay series.
It is also a core feature of the model described by this essay series that the peasants work to gain “subsistence, and a little bit more”. So in none of the peasant societies it applies to do the peasants have a *lot* more than subsistence.
But they did not have ‘similar living standards’, and a large part of the differences are due to different levels of elite extraction. A society of independent peasants tends to be healthier individually but lack investment in capital goods (of course much extraction goes to war or luxuries, but even these have downstream effects). A society with high levels of extraction is often too socially tense to invest in anything beyond repression.
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.
Do you have any recommended readings on excited peasants volunteering for paid factory labor the second it becomes available? I’m used to the story of enclosure (the Highland Clearances, Plateau Native lands being disturbed that they couldn’t survive off the land and went to town for work) as the main story of transition to wage labor for hunting gathering peoples and peasants. It reminds me of the push/pull factors used to describe immigration. So the “enclosure story” is a push factor, you’re kicked off your farm and need some way to live, but you present factory work as a pull factor, it’s an escape from the hardest job.
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!
> But then again, it’s not exactly the kind of education that necessarily promotes technological advancement. Lots of poetry and philosophy
Funnily I’ve seen this statement cropping again as humanity majors want everyone to be forced to learn their doctrines. Including from this very blog! Everytime I see “engineers should still learn philosophy in undergraduate study” it reminds me of those Chinese bureaucracy test in 1800s that’s derided as obsolete because they test for Confusian scriptures “instead of science”. And yet here we are.
Well, there are places where they do! Places like…Russia. In fact, every undergraduate student there needs to spend a semester studying philosophy, regardless of the degree they are pursuing. After all, an education institution can cram a lot of courses in when it’s allowed to impose six-day weeks – another feature of that education system.
I suspect that when people (in the West) make these suggestions and picture a society which has a widespread familiarity with philosophy*, they generally envision something quite different to the present-day Russian Federation, but well, we do not (or at least, should not) get to choose our own facts.
I recently stumbled upon Broadstreet, a fairly interesting history blog/Substack (albeit not one which appears to have been commented on by our host – at least, not yet), and there was a really interesting post on that just 6 months ago.
https://www.broadstreet.blog/p/the-myth-of-meritocracy-how-exams
Nowadays, I have heard claims that education initiatives inside the PLA (some reports claim those can take up as much as a third of a soldier’s time) perform a similar cohesion-building function. On the other hand, this comment by “Pelorus” under that post was quite interesting.
Lastly, for myself, I’ll add that though I already was chided earlier on in this blog for over-extrapolating from a popular entertainment work, I still find it interesting how a modern Chinese film, The Lychee Road, also echoes a similar-ish criticism of the exam system: in it, even a branch of bureaucracy which manages the imperial gardens in the Tang era still emphasizes not the practical skills but poetry and painting when it comes to promotions, while the numerically gifted main character seems forever stuck on the bottom rung. That is, up until the bureaucracy needs a scapegoat when the Emperor desires a seemingly impossible feat of logistics (delivering a fruit that spoils in three days over a route which normally took around two weeks), but with incredible effort, he manages to make it work (all while the story is very clear should not have been attempted in the first place, for the extraction needed to enable it is truly ruinous – particularly once the entire imperial court is convinced it’s possible, and their demands scale up exponentially.)
*And it is widespread there; ~29% of Russian population were estimated to have attained tertiary education as of 2021. Granted, people in their 50s and older included in that statistic would have USSR-era degrees, and I’m not sure if the philosophy subject there was also for everybody, or just “the humanitarians”. After all, there were also certain mandatory subjects in Soviet tertiary education, like “scientific communism” or History of the CPSU, which obviously do not exist in modern Russia, but might have had taken up the mandatory philosophy’s slot back then, providing the cohesion-building role. Still, no matter how you slice it, a substantial fraction of the population have experienced at least the Russian version of the semester-long introduction to philosophy.
On humanities for the STEM undergrads in Russia. It is true, and there is a reverse situation for humanity degrees where they have a semester-long course of calculus.
But just because a subject is *on the curriculum* doesn’t mean it is taught to the students to any meaningful degree. With these subjects, called непрофильный (~non-primary), there is always an understanding both on the students’ and teacher’s sides, that the course is mostly there for the show, tradition, or at most to provide some vague sort of “general education”. So they will be taught with much, much more leniency than the STEM subjects (vice versa in the humanities), and the program will amount, at best, to a very general and shallow overview, and at worst to a complete spectacle “you pretend to study just believably enough that I can pretend to teach you”, and my sense is that the latter situation is far more common.
Surely, to the people who really want to learn this subject, it provides some opportunity to do so. But even they could’ve probably done it much more effectively and enjoyably on their own, especially in the era of Google, Youtube and ChatGPT.
Much the same thing existed in my (American) undergraduate institution: there were distribution requirements, but the STEM requirement could be met by the courses colloquially called “Physics for Poets,” “Rocks for Jocks,” and “Stats [easy as] 123.” (That really was the course number.)
I can sympathise with the idea that a person needs to learn a certain mind set to become a reliable professional. In my own experience, the training of Finnish reserve officers is very much about becoming a reliable subordinates of your own commander: learning to prioritise the commander’s intent and to use your own creativity and intellectual capacity to fulfil that intent as efficiently as possible. This is shown well in some educational studies (e.g. by Vesa Nissinen) which studied the type of a person who fails the reserve officer training. The most typical type was a person with wrong motivation: the will to excel for the sake of excelling, enough intellect to get selected but without patriotic zeal. That would most likely result in the person getting bad reviews both from peers and superiors, as the stressful training brings the actual qualities of the person to surface.
I think that the cases of Chinese rebels who had failed the jinshi demonstrate that the system worked: you really would not want these men as magistrates, as they were lacking the motivation to study, but were ambitious enough to rebel – an likely to prioritize personal gain also in lesser matters. (Presumably, the jinshi exam required such hard work with the Classics that a person who did not love them to some extent would not be able to stay motivated, even if quite intelligent.) The rebels mentioned are exactly the type of person whom the well-designed system would weed out.
I certainly do not believe that a humanities education inherently suppresses technological advancement! However, the Chinese classical education (as I learned about it) was specifically one that idealized the past. However, as I pointed, there was plenty of technological advancement in China by premodern standards.
Huh, got a link to the blogpost where the host says they want everyone to be forced to learn the doctrines of the humanities? The closest I can think of is his blog post responding to Noah Smith, and even then it’s mostly about epistemologies, or as it is said in that post, how knowledge is gained, instead of having everyone take history or philosophy.
” 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?”
You are still going to have extra sons, I would think – after a certain point the size of inheritance just gets too low to be able to support a household, so maybe there is pressure on the extra son to forgo his share and go off and seek his fortune elsewhere?
This is what Cecil Woodham-Smith thought was one of the big causes of the Irish potato famine – plots had got so small due to population growth in the 18th century (the result of peace, order and good government, at least by the standards of previous centuries) that the only possible way to get bare minimum calories from them was to plant potatoes, and potatoes were unreliable crops. (The Famine attracts so much attention that people overlook the prelude, which was incredible population growth across the whole UK – tripling in the century to 1840.)
The Irish upper classes imposed divisible inheritance in Ireland, and also took a large share of the crop. The Irish grew potatoes to keep themselves alive, but grain to pay the landlord.
Equal inheritance (male-only) was one of the features of English colonialism in Ireland. It only applied to Catholics; land was divided generation after generation, and often a young man would end up with more land than could be sold to his brother (or other neighbor) while simultaneously having too little land to raise a family. As far as I know this lowered overall land prices but only the English were able to take advantage of that. The consensus seems to be that the law was intended to impoverish the Irish and did so. If you look into it I’m sure it’s been studied a lot and you’ll find work relevant to your questions about how the practice changed opportunities for people, and perhaps even comparative study referencing China.
Yes, but but in the Irish case, the Big Men were English and Protestant and therefore not practicing equal inheritance themselves. They use primogeniture to keep their extracted wealth in the main line of the family by casting off younger songs.
My question is how the cultural practice of equal inheritance affects the Big Men. It should it much harder to maintain the accumulate wealth over the generations. This should result in a bigger churn among Big Men, especially in society without a bloodline aristocracy That should make the Big Men less “big” in terms of the land and wealth they have. Does that change anything for the peasants?
Yes, and in Ireland specifically it destroyed the Big Men who were subject to it, and also it was understood that it would exactly do that when it was made the unequal law of the land in 1703. I brought it up more because I hoped there might be a lot of academic study of non-Irish history that uses it as a comparison written in English, and I think academic studies written in English are easier to find (not that that’s necessarily a good thing). It was not, in retrospect, the most useful comment.
Wikipedia suggests a lot of variation, on all sorts of scales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_inheritance_systems
But if primogeniture was the usual rule in Britain, and equal inheritance in Ireland, then the easiest rule to follow would be to have the immigrants follow the British system they were used to, and the Irish follow the system they were used to. Anything else was going to cause Trouble.
If the British pattern had been imposed on Ireland, I would definitely expect subsequent generations of Irish nationalists to complain about the imposition. That is how it usually works.
“Equal inheritance (male-only) was one of the features of English colonialism in Ireland. It only applied to Catholics; land was divided generation after generation, and often a young man would end up with more land than could be sold to his brother (or other neighbor) while simultaneously having too little land to raise a family”
But that process of constant division only happens if the overall population is growing, though. If you have replacement-level fertility, then logically the average size of the farm should remain constant as well, whatever the inheritance regime. Shouldn’t it? I mean, assuming you don’t have some sort of land seizure rule where if you die without a male heir the Big Man or the Church takes your land.
Toy example: let’s say we have replacement fertility, male-only partible inheritance, and eight families with ten acres each.
Messrs A, B, C and D all have one son (A1-D1) and one daughter. The sons get the farms.
Messrs E and F have two sons each (E1a and E1b; F1a and F1b). They split the farms.
Messrs G and H have two daughters each. Their farms go to their closest male heirs – their brothers, Messrs A and B, or if their brothers are dead then their nephews, A1 and B1.
So after the whole first generation dies we have:
A1 and B1 with 20 acres each.
C1 and D1 with 10.
E1a, E1b, F1a and F1b with five acres each.
But there are still eight farms with an average size of ten acres each. The effect of partition between multiple male heirs is counterbalanced – it has to be – by the effect of other males inheriting multiple farms from various male relatives who die without male descendants of their own.
“But that process of constant division only happens if the overall population is growing, though. If you have replacement-level fertility, then logically the average size of the farm should remain constant as well, whatever the inheritance regime. Shouldn’t it? I mean, assuming you don’t have some sort of land seizure rule where if you die without a male heir the Big Man or the Church takes your land.”
AND if completed family size is independent of wealth.
A lot of societies had wealth accumulation that was self-limiting. The rich had more children surviving: while rich children did catch infections in infancy and die of them, they lived in countryside, so they were no more likely to catch infection than peasant children, and with better food, had better resistance to illnesses; the rich could marry earlier; while rich girls were vulnerable to death in childbirth, rich teen boys were not who died giving birth and could remarry quickly, and in many societies the rich practiced polygyny. All of which meant that whoever got rich whether by earnings/conquest or joining of inheritance did not go on to get even richer – he went to to spread his riches on producing more surviving descendants than the poor did. The descendants of Big Men revert to mean – Big in numbers rather than average individual wealth. And the population size is kept constant by the poor breeding at slightly below replacement rates. If you have a village of 8 peasants and 1 Big Man, the 8 peasants might on average have 7 sons between them, and the Big Man 2… and 2 vs. 7 is more equal than 1 vs. 8.
In that case the distribution becomes more equal, but the average size of farm still remains constant, I think? You still have the same area of land, and you still have nine male heads of household.
“there are still eight farms with an average size of ten acres each”
Just looking at the average (mean, here) is inadequate to describe a distribution. Yeah, you’ve kept the average the same, but inequality has increased, from “everyone has 10 acres” to a 5 to 20 acre range. Further rounds will likely continue the process, with some people ending up with no land, or minimal slivers, and others 40 acres or more.
And probably some farms will end up being extinguished, and joined to someone else’s, so you start getting fewer farms.
European elites learned Latin and theology, but still often promoted advancement (a substantial fraction of British achievements were made by clergymen). Chinese district officials often promoted technical advance (eg new crops or techniques). For that matter, the arts-trained bureaucracies of the 19th and 20th centuries were also keen on advancement. It’s less the subject than the attitude.
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.
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.)
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.
My understanding is that nunneries if anything tended to be more selective. (partially because there were just less of them, and they didn’t have an equivalent of the parish priest outside of monasticism)
It does not have to be all out infanticide. But as our host noted several times in bad years womens ration will be cut first. And I guess the ration of a early working age (7-12) daughter will be cut before that of a early working age son.
This will lead to higher mortality rates for girls, even if nobody is going out of their way to kill them.
Even today, in entirely modern settings, boy-children are usually praised for eating extra food while girl-children are normally criticized for it. While much of human sexual dimorphism is genetic, at least part of average body-size differences are social.
A lot of the surplus young women are going to marry widowers. Or alternatively, remain at home raising their younger siblings/nieces/nephews after their mother/sister/sister-in-law died.
Due to maternal mortality, the death rate among married women will be relatively high for their age range. By contrast married men will have relatively low death rate; they’re not going off to do risky things seeking their fortune, unlike their unmarried younger brothers.
Additionally, a widower who owns his own farm is an economically desirable match, which is not so true a widow with young children.
Didn’t our fine host show in a previous post that the percentage of women who die in childbirth is pretty close to the percentage of men who die in military service (9-10%)? That probably takes care of both your “surplus” sons and daughters.
It doesn’t imply surplus women if pregnancy is the leading cause of death for people aged 13-40.
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!
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.)
“(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.)”
Of villages where we DO know more about daily life, because they had close contact with people who later became famous…
From Europe, two in France.
14th century Montaillou. Fournier took hostile interest in the village, wrote down details of what he saw and went on to become a pope.
The Big Man in his own right, the Count of Foix, lived in faraway Foix. He had representatives in village… functions divided between two Big Men with distinct tasks resident in the same village, and the third Big Man with functionally distinct tasks also resident in the village was the village priest. 3 Big Men with functionally distinct roles in a village of 50 or so households, and all of them appointees of faraway Bigger Men without a hereditary entitlement to the specific Big Man post. The castellans were of noble birth; the bayle and the village priest were classified as “rich peasants”, and both were actually brothers from the same local peasant household (Clergues). Plus a Big Woman – Beatrice de Planisoles, a noble born wife of castellan who stayed in the village during their marriage and then for several years as a widow (without holding the office) but then left. Note how the presence of Big Men and Women also varies with household events!
And 15th century Domremy.
Used to have a resident Big Man – had a castle and a resident noble lord. And then sometime in 1410s, the Big Man died… and the castle was inherited by a Big Woman. Who lived elsewhere with her husband and needed a representative to take over her castle.
As for the smaller Big Men who were classified on “rich peasant” rather than “small noble” side… d´Arc household. Their home was the only stone house in the village of about 50 houses… apart from the Big Man´s castle, church, and maybe parish priest´s residence? Jacques d´Arc was a peasant and a Big Man… but he was not owner of the house or land. He was an outsider from Champagne. Isabelle Romee was a Big Woman, the house and the land came with her not Jacques. Jacques rented the castle… at the head of a syndicate of 7 peasants, so he needed companions.
Jeanne d´Arc certainly could not write before she became famous (she started learning to do so after she became famous). In Montaillou, Beatrice de Planisoles could not write but her daughters (who were born and raised after she left the village) could. And in Montaillou, it was not only the village priest (Pierre Clergue) who could write, but also his brother the secular official in charge of village (Bernard Clergue). Could Jacques d´Arc as the doyen of Domremy write? Quick search gives allegations either way.
From China. 14th century Zhongli Village. The home of Zhu family.
Zhu Yuanzhang, unlike Jeanne d´Arc, was apparently NOT from a rich peasant background – they were rather average peasants, and in a famine/epidemic of 1344, saw his whole family die except for himself and one brother. Little of support network that a rich peasant would have had when the networks of their poor neighbours stretched and failed.
And unlike Jeanne, Yuanzhang lived to old age and bothered to write detailed personal reminescences of his experiences.
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.
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.
I don’t see how the situation in The Cold Equations is any more contrived than that in most works of science fiction. People just find the resolution painful, and are correspondingly more likely to complain about it.
The resolution is memorable precisely because it is painful.
I expect that frustration about this story may include
– ship being large enough to fit unnoticed stowaway has nothing else to throw away and excess weight is not caught by pre-flight checklist (wikipedia quotes someone as commenting that ‘the story is “good physics”, but “lousy engineering”‘)
– extreme negligence of whoever caused above in-story
– people hating bad ending
– people hating contrived setup where evil things may be an optimal solution
– irritation at author of deliberately setting up above
The frustration with the story, as you’ll have seen in that Wikipedia article, comes entirely from the involvement of notorious asshole editor Campbell. Almost everything in your list is known to be something the author thought of, but was forced to discard in order to get paid/published.
“(wikipedia quotes someone as commenting that ‘the story is “good physics”, but “lousy engineering”‘)”
As distinct from the average Star Trek episode, which has lousy physics *and* lousy engineering.
The difference is that when Star Trek kills some innocent character there is always a Villain to blame. What leads to all this hate on the Cold Equations is that it doesn’t give a villain to blame.
If only the author had blamed the Evil XYZ Corporation or Penny-Pinching Bureaucrats no one would complain. And no one would remember it.
I myself have not read that story but if what I had read of The Cold Equations is correct it is even more contrived than those ‘idiot plot of the week’ episodes in Stargate I had all decided to skip in rewatches.
From here: https://sciencemeetsfiction.com/nonfiction-essays/the-real-problem-with-the-cold-equations/
Alex R. Howe goes on like this for a while.
Then he takes a look at the rocket equation before concluding that the presence of a stowaway would only increase the speed of the spaceship as it approaches the planet.
And then:
Whilst there are a lot of scifi stories with many plot holes, idiot plots, and hand-waving that does seem like an abnormal amount of that to me…
In the real world, the less likely a fatal accident is, the less it is worth guarding against it. Thus, you are never going to eliminate all fatal accidents. There will always be some freak accident.
As for the fictional world, if I keep the resolution of that story the same, what change to the setup will make you happy with the story?
If there is none, the thing you dislike is not the set up: it is the conclusion that life sucks sometimes and occasionally some innocent person will be killed without it being anyone’s fault.
I am certain a less contrived set up would have at the very least given me a less low opinion of that story.
I dislike extremely contrived set ups even when they result in good endings. For example, all those ‘idiot plot of the week’-episodes in Stargate which make me go ‘even my little siblings know physics/biology does not work that way’ or ‘even my little siblings would have taken basic security measures/safety precautions which would have prevented the problem from arising in the first place’ that I had placed on my mental ‘skip during rewatches’-list.
It might have been that I was a kid when I read it and
missed the flaws, but I did like Herge’s version of it:
-There are explicitly safety margins, enough that two stowaways is described as (paraphrasing) “possible but a near thing.” It helps that the limiting factor is oxygen instead of mass, so each stowaway is 25% of the expected value rather than 1%.
-Stowaway #3 comes aboard with a plan, specifically “murder everyone not involved in the plan.” Killing him the same way is considered and rejected, which another character calls out as foolish.
– The endgame is that Stowaway #3 is killed when someone tries to wrestle a gun away from him, and the crew member he forced into smuggling him aboard steps out an airlock. Everyone else needs immediate medical attention upon landing.
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.
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.
Does the book describe the export of grain from Ireland to England? I know that was a part of the potato famine in the former…
The Columbian Exchange might have spread out harvest for some families. I think the more important factors are the political changes in society that are downstream from the introduction of the printing press and from increased circulation of coinage. While extraction was not much reduced (if at all) for the typical peasant family, more and more of the extracted wealth was being redistributed back to the people as infrastructure. Cleaner water, safer roads, a shift towards observable reality in education.
Pre-demographic shift peasants had those mortality figures because there were times of the year that they went hungry, peaks and valleys in their food availability, and if you smooth that out a bit they really stop dying nearly so often. As the rich were moved from a system where they enforced peasant subjugation through a mix of violence and sporadic generosity, to one where the rich purchased social stability (including stratification) with reliable obligations, the dying seasons simply shrank.
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.
I think this really does come down to the same political discontent or disorder being channelled differently by different political systems and then also being called different things.
Extreme example: In a Greek polis and the Roman Republic, a citizen peasant would obviously not organise a mob to kill the tax gatherer and burn the Big Man’s estate, because the tax gatherer is just executing the laws that they themselves via their votes have influence on. They can scream at people in the agora/forum first, and if that doesn’t work and they escalate, it comes to us not as a peasant uprising, but as political unrest that potentially ends with the establishment (or execution) of a dictator.
As another example, if there were widespread anger about the Big Man in the stateless societies of the Gauls (or neighbouring peoples) that resulted in an armed mob forming and setting their Big Man’s house of fire, this would not be considered a peasant rebellion, but as the charismatic leader of the mob establishing their own Big Man status via a normal (if violent) political process.
Not to mention that these kinds of “We see very few of a certain event in our sources” arguments always have to be couched with caveats about the quality of our sources. Part of the reason why peasant unrest is regularly reported on in Chinese histories was that this was considered a measurement of a ruler’s legitimacy.
(I’m not saying that there isn’t any difference in the regularity and severity of peasant unrest in different societies, there likely are. I however wouldn’t be surprised if this is just something our source base doesn’t allow us to say with any kind of quantitative certainty.)
Isn’t it because of slavery? There’s no rebellion because the one who rebel are the slaves. I bet we can plot a (negative) correlation between them.
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.
I think it’s misleading to see 1789 as a peasant revolt, and if you look at where the events of that year happened (overwhelmingly in Paris) and who the leaders were (urban middle class, very largely lawyers and officials) and who their followers were (the Parisian lower-middle-class and poor) you can see why.
If anything, the peasant revolts were not in 1789 but in 1793-4, in the Vendee and Brittany, and were pointing in the other direction.
That is quite a nice point. Certainly any government that actually tried to take food from the countryside to feed the Parisians would be unpopular with the people who lived in the countryside i.e. peasants. Especially after a bad harvest.
The French Revolution was very Paris-centered. The French elite already largely lived in Paris or other major cities. However, the Great Fear of 1789 did involve a major peasant element.
One of the few areas where the big men were still mostly living on their estates was the Vendee, probably not a coincidence. The Vendee revolt cut across class lines in rural areas (the towns had more revolutionary sympathy), top leadership was roughly evenly divided between blue bloods and those with rural professional class backgrounds (sons of tailors, millers, etc with some military experience) with major buy-in from the lower peasantry. It was a regional, heavily Catholic, revolt, only secondarily royalist.
They aren’t peasants per se, but my understanding is that in many times and places in history it was common for peasant households to include slaves. I would would really like to learn more about what their cycles of life would be like.
Slaves from the 19th and 20th centuries wrote biographies about the cycle of life for slaves in an agricultural setting. Most are from African descended slaves in North America, but there are some from other parts of the world. The podcast “Subject to Change” has an episode “From Eunuchs to Corsairs: The World of Islamic Slavery” which includes discussion about the persistence of slavery even into the 21st C in a couple of African countries.
Finding older sources is going to be a difficult subject, because surprise surprise poor agricultural households weren’t all that likely to write down their own biographies, let alone those of their thralls / slaves.
The industrial revolution didn’t have much effect on how slaves were treated and used in agricultural work, so I would expect these more modern biographies to be very good guides to slavery in peasant farming communities.
We know of at least one massive difference: slavery in classical antiquity was not demographically self-sustaining. It has been discussed in the comments on several occasions, but apparently it was a surprise that continental America had such a glut of land that hereditary slaves could form a class that would grow rather than shrink in absolute numbers.
This also answers the OP. Overall: was a peasant farmer somewhere else, was andrapodized (captured in war and sold as a slave), work for a length of time dependent on the tasks (e.g. mining vs. household servant), and died without children. Occasionally owners could manumit them e.g. on their deathbed into freedman status, from whence they could join the track for excess sons/daughters who moved to the city — if they succeeded, they could marry and have freeborn citizen children. (In the Roman legal system, that is. I assume in Greek poleis they would be permanent metics.) But then the cities also were notorious demographic sinks, so this looks like “had several children, they all died of disease”. (Or maybe one did survive to adulthood, but not two.)
Perhaps if a slave woman had a children, the owner may say “10-20 person-years of food is worth significantly more than an unskilled slave, since the price of the latter is set by the demand meeting the supply coming back from the frontier; obviously I will not make a losing investment”. Occasional exceptions, if the owner fathered said child — manumit and adopt.
Hmm, I doubt that was as common as you made it sound.
Based on what I had been told on such places as r/AskHistorians:
– Vernae or homeborn slaves were seen as more valuable than war captives.
– In the Roman Empire the main source of slaves was the ‘natural increase’ from births to slave-women. However, I suppose that might not have been the case in the Late Republic when the influx of slaves through war was much larger.
– Apparently, there even was a Roman Latifundia owner who had promised freedom to slave-women who birthed three children to be new slaves of his to increase the reproduction of his slaves.
Though, poorly enough, for the last example it had not been given in what time period it happened; maybe the price of slaves had then been much higher than normal because of a lengthy period of peace?
So, maybe such scenarios of the type you describe still happened a lot when slaves were relatively (very?) cheap. I am not enough of an expert on history to know that…
who had promised freedom to slave-women who birthed three children to be new slaves of his to increase the reproduction of his slaves.
I can’t imagine many women finding that an appealing proposition, although I guess it would depend on how bad that particular slave regime was.
I can’t imagine many women finding that an appealing proposition, although I guess it would depend on how bad that particular slave regime was.
I suppose it depends on the details, if the promised ‘freedom’ involved the new freedwoman being thrown out of the estate and left to fend for herself without being allowed to see her children it would be much more worse than if she was allowed to remain on the estate as a free employee who above her food and board still receives enough wages that she in time could buy the freedom of at least one of her children.
However, I don’t think those details had been mentioned* and I cannot find the exact answer again with a short search. And I am not going to spend like an hour trying to comb through r\AskHistorians to find that answer just to then look up that slaveowner or the sources which referred to him to see if I can find more details that way.
* I forgot the name of the slave-owner, but IIRC he had been provided as an example of a ‘less terrible than normal’ slave-owner who had advised ‘good’ treatment of slaves out of enlightened self-interest. It was also mentioned that one of the slave-women first had a normal child and then gave birth to a triplet, with the result that one of the triplet was born free as the slave-women had technically already met the condition to receive her freedom at the birth of the second baby of that triplet.
Note that a lot of slave biographies we *do* have come from people who escaped slavery one way or another.
“my understanding is that in many times and places in history it was common for peasant households to include slaves. ”
I wonder how widespread this was, because a slave is an additional mouth to feed and at most 90% of an additional worker in the fields (because you have to spend time supervising him) and, of course, a significant capital outlay, so the advantage of having a slave for a typical peasant at the subsistence level isn’t always obvious.
To put it another way, a slave is the answer to the question “I have all this land that I could make a profit from if it was worked intensively, but I just don’t have enough people to work it in exchange for subsistence feeding!” and from this series that doesn’t seem like a question most peasants asked themselves very often. Certainly not often enough that a lot of peasant households would have multiple slaves. If you have a latifundia or a plantation or a mine, then, yes, sure, slaves make sense, but then you aren’t a peasant.
As this series explains there are going to be some times when some peasant families will have more land than workers – the widow with two small children or whatever – but the advantage of getting one of the neighbour’s sons in to help with the work is then that you’re building an important bond with your neighbour etc. Plus there’s no capital outlay.
“October, just before the plants go in the ground, another plowing and manuring.”
This sentence seems to be lacking a verb. I’m not sure if it’s meant to be a continuation of the previous sentence, or stand on its own, but either way, it’s a bit confusing.
Supply est.
Thank you very much for this series! I’ll be thinking of and returning to it a lot in the future, I expect! Whenever anyone talks about how the past was better, for one thing. I’ve always thought those people were foolish; now I think they’re crazy.
By the way, does anyone know any good sources for how this all worked out in Asia? China and Japan especially. I’d be interested to know about the peasant life there. I can’t help but imagine more was similar than different, but you never know.
Well, this series is explicitly stated to apply to the vast majority of people who ever lived, so it is certainly intended to apply to them. Obviously the cycles of the rice-growing year will be a little different.
I’d previously understood that joining the clergy was one possible “relief valve” for people who were gay, asexual, or who would otherwise chafe under the societal expectation of marriage. However since, as you say, that option wouldn’t have been available for most people, would there have been other “relief valves” available? Or would those people more or less have been expected to accept that familial obligation and romantic love wouldn’t necessarily overlap?
I doubt clergydom was a release valve for many people in that situation. First, it was only available to the elite. Second, even in elite families, if you were the first son (or any daughter who needed to be married off to enhance the family’s status or connections), you’d still have to have a heterosexual marriage and product children.
As the post explains, the expectations for marriage were very different in premodern societies. Your family was your job/workplace/insurance/healthcare plan/retirement plan. Therefore, your spouse had to be the best coworker you could get for a lifelong economic partnership, as well as the person with whom you would biologically produce your future workforce (and retirement plan). Whether you enjoyed having sex with this person was not going to be a high consideration. It would be great if you did, but no big deal if you do not. You need to have children, or you will have a miserable middle age and old age.
I think this is a little too negative: sex with a young healthy person (and who else would you marry?) is usually enjoyable, if not mind-blowing.
“who else would you marry?)”
Uh, older people with land or other income? Just a few posts ago Bret discussed how the male age of first marriage could be a lot higher than the female one; girls/young women being married off to some rich old guy are a persistent trope for a reason; and young men might marry widows, too.
None of the various marriage regimes which Bret describes features an average age at first marriage of over 30 for men. Thirty is still pretty young in my book. And it was discussed in some earlier thread that peasants in earlier times did not become fat or soft-bodied: they were lean and wiry to the end.
Homosexual sexual preference, as a set of emotions and interests, was just as common then as how. Homosexual sexual preference, as an *identity*, was comparatively unknown in these societies. So the lived experience for a typical homosexual person would be far more like the modern experience of bisexuality, where performing a hetero sex act doesn’t mean betraying your sense of yourself and your community, it just has a greater chance of being unpleasant or worse.
Also there were rich gay sons sent to the priesthood and even gay Popes, by modern understandings, but in America at least a lot of the ‘gays go to the church’ stuff is a remnant of 19th-century Anti-Catholic slander.
Laying the plight of younger sons out so directly also makes it suddenly very obvious why European fairy tales (generally collected or created in modernity but before the full collapse of subsistence farming) so frequently feature third sons as the protagonists, and why Arjuna is the third Pandava brother (though out of five). Everyone telling and hearing those fairy tales knows that the youngest son is most likely to have to leave home and have extraordinary circumstances to find a stable life. The people whose stories became compiled into the Mahabharata in turn would also know immediately the tension Arjuna is constantly placed in because he must defer to his older brothers and care for his younger ones but is the best of his family at the tasks of life.
> If we are shocked by how poor their lives were, they might be shocked by how terrifyingly unstable our lives are
This goes far beyond jobs. I expect that they would horrified at instability in terms of religion, culture and society. And I bet that religious turmoil for people who actually believed their religion would be a big issue (and everything that directly goes against their religious beliefs).
And probably very significant or utter destruction of family safety net would be shocking.
Prospect of basically all people moving 10+ km, 100+ km and it being completely normal, with it sometimes multiple times in this lives – may be also quite weird to them.
I actually wonder how accurate that is.
My aunts and uncles were/are certainly willing to help each other by providing money, labour, or housing, when somebody needs it because of renovations or that they are still looking for a house after losing access to their previous one. Whilst I still think we don’t rely so much on each other as pre-modern peasants did, I doubt the differences would be so very big enough to count as ‘very significant destruction of family safety nets’.
Or I might be overestimating how normal that is; maybe my family is an outlier without me knowing.
—
And with that I am going to stop writing comments as I certainly don’t want to waste as much time on it as last week.
Regarding annual cycle, I’ve heard that a pontifex maximus’ (Julius Caesar) misadventures make the calendar out of sync of months. Was there widespread harvest failure because of this?
As I understand it, the Roman calendar was badly out of sync before Caesar, and he fixed it.
Yes, but no. The roman calendar depended on the pontifex maximus to put a few “extra” days into the year every now and then, since it had no leap days, and less then 365 days. It was just how their calendar worked.
Problem was, that a certain Pontifex Maximus decided to leave Rome for a decade or two. Letting the calendar shift something like 90 days out of sync with the solar year. Cesar brought a greco-egyptian astronomer with him from Alexandria, that were supposed to fix the calendar in a way that nobody would have to mess with it ever again.
You can read this in two ways, The positiv way is, Cesar wanted to fix the calendar for good, and get rid of the Potifex Maximus ability to mess with voting times etc. The negativ way is, Cesar really did not want to take care of the duties his offices entailed, and he wanted this chore to be gone for ever.
If it was just a matter of avoiding work by not having to figure out the old calendar, he could have told someone else to do it and then signed off on that other person’s decisions. This is something he actually cared about, otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered with the big project of making a new calendar.
> he could have told someone else to do it and then signed off on that other person’s decisions.
Yeah, but he still would have had to be in Rome to do it. You know how the Romans thought about these things.
Nobody working in the fields is doing things based on a calendar, they’re doing them based on the actual season.
I mean, if Dilectus or Harvest Festival is not actually done is sync with the season, it sounds like it’ll bring some trouble.
@TeaKew,
Right, although that in turn is going to take some fine-tuned judgment on the part of the farmer, incorporating both the actual current weather as well as their knowledge, based on the past, of what the weather can be ‘expected’ to be like.
In a place with very clear wet and dry seasons, you don’t necessarily want to plant right after the first rain, because you need to be able to make a good guess about whethr that’s *actually* the start of the rainy season, or just an unseasonable fluke.
That kind of judgement is probably a big part of what distinguishes a good farmer from a bad one. Both in terms of inter-individual variability, but also as an individual becomes more experience in farming. E.g. a 16 year old boy can probably do all of the mechanical tasks of farming just as well if not better as his father in the late 30s, but the father is going to be much better at judging when to sow, when to harvest etc. Probably that’s also a part of where the “respect your elders” norm comes from, which afaik is universal and very strong in these societies, because someone who lived to 60 years just have seen that many more seasons to learn from.
Probably that’s also a part of where the “respect your elders” norm comes from, which afaik is universal and very strong in these societies, because someone who lived to 60 years just have seen that many more seasons to learn from.
I think that’s absolutely right, yes. Even for an unusual literate peasant who somehow got access to a book or a manual, we’re talking about an era before statistics or climate science had even been discovered- there was absolutely no substitute for individual experience, based on the past, and of course older people are going to have more ‘experience’.
See my answer to Bulleye about the calendar thing.
But concerning the harvest failure, you have to remeber that this happened during an absolutly devasting civil war. The second or third civil war in a generation. It surely did not contribute to the overall situation, but there were were a lot worse things going on leading to harvest failures than a calendar out of sync with the solar year.
Thank you for the articles – especially this final one putting stories on the numbers.
As an expository suggestion, and it’s a minor point, I wonder whether it might have been better to give the same initials to household members at equivalent stages rather than to members of the same household? When you refer to M Biggs I know from the surname he or she is a Biggs, but I can’t tell just from the name which Biggs he or she is without looking it up because the M just reinforces the Biggs. Whereas if you called the male heads of household Matthew Small, Mark Middles, and Martin Biggs, then the reader just needs to pick up that that’s the rule.
It’s a minor point and it doesn’t really matter, because you always make it pretty clear in the surrounding text which household member you’re talking about.
As a first approximation, it does sound like the peasantry is in a Malthusian equilibrium — a bad harvest causes people to die, or at least, not be born. At a second approximation, it seems to me that a truly shrewd Big Man might regulate his extraction from year to year based on how good the harvest is to ensure that enough peasants survive to maintain maximum agricultural production. This seems especially possible if the Big Man has some way to convert agricultural surplus into some sort of wealth that can be stored for several years. That allows the peasants’ situation to be buffered by the Big Man absorbing much of the variation in harvests. (Indeed, that is how modern capitalism works, the returns on capital are much less stable than the returns on labor.)
Yeah it sounds funny how the other article deny Malthus so much while in the middle of series explaining peasant in the exact situation. I guess the only thing Malthus got wrong is how “easy” and “peaceful” it’s to control birth rate according to resources, compared to doom and gloom of Malthus. But still it was happening, and it may happen again.
I think people tend to get confused between Malthus (“people regulate their fertility to maintain their standard of living”) with Ehrlich (“Half the population of India will inevitably starve to death by the end of the twentieth century”).
So they can end up denouncing Malthus for Ehrlich’s opinions.
The problem really is the term “equilibrium”, that implies there’s an (even if overall) “balance”, where population stays roughly the same.
And that doesen’t really happen. While people are regulating their fertility to some extent (note; It’s not actually very good at this and people constantly have to deal with having too few/too many children) but population in most of the Peasant World (TM) is still increasing, albeit slowly.
What we will get instead is “X years of slow population growth, followed by a setback (famine, epidemic, war, etc.) that erases a couple of years of population growth, then it keeps growing again” and over time this adds up. (with some further variation for longer-term stuff like climate change)
Now this isn’t the explosive population growth of the demographic transition, but it *is* ongoing.
“[E]xtraction goes to provide for everything else these societies do . . . .” There is another social function, directly useful to peasants in a way that art and literature may not be, performed with extracted resources, which Bret sort of alludes to but does not elaborate: the provision of insurance. The Big Man accumulates a surplus (just like insurance companies do today) which can be distributed as largesse to alleviate crises. It’s true that the system operates somewhat erratically, at the discretion of the Big Man, but it’s better than nothing. And the “premiums” are extracted involuntarily, but even today lots of people, left to their own devices, underinsure, and the state therefore requires the purchase of insurance to own a car or buy a house (with a mortgage), Also the state requires health insurance (sort of) and pension contributions (to Social Security). So our extractive regime may be a little kinder, but it still exists.
Er, the compulsory insurance for a car specifically is different. The idea is that holy sh!t, you are going to operate that heavy and high-powered piece of machinery around other people and their stuff?!? Compulsory insurance covers the damage you do to others, not the damage to your car.
In general, the things called “insurance” usually aren’t forms of extraction. (A number of state-run pension systems are notoriously underwater due to post-Baby-Boom decline in birthrates, for instance. The problem is either kicked down the road or the pension system is continually propped up with taxes.) There is sort of no point in obfuscating extraction with this sort of language game, when we already have perfectly overt extraction in the form of taxes. The largest shares are, in no particular order: income taxes (and matching “you have employees tax” that behaves identically but is reported separately), VAT (value added tax), various real estate taxes where they exist. And funnily enough, adding them together, they cover a much larger fraction of GDP than preindustrial Big Man extraction does (even when adding up its disparate forms: tax in kind, corvée labor, banalities fees); I suspect this may be another point of origin for the “you work harder than a peasant” meme. Though it must be said, in the societies which extract this much in taxes, a very large share is redistributed directly, or is used to pay for public goods.
> adding them together, they cover a much larger fraction of GDP than preindustrial Big Man extraction does (even when adding up its disparate forms: tax in kind, corvée labor, banalities fees)
maybe
but note that as we are much much much richer, disposable income is much greater
while for peasants negative disposable income (not enough resources to avoid starvation) was a real risk that repeatedly occurred
paying 60% taxes is preferable if it takes away resources that would go toward buying more powerful gaming PC for children over 40% taxes that take away resources necessary for my children to not starve
and people with poverty equivalent to peasants would actually not pay taxes in many countries but rather would get support (effectively, negative tax rate)
Also, if you want to get truly silly: you can compare nominal tax. Someone bought some furniture/electronics and paid VAT tax? That VAT tax easily can be worth as much as 500kg of potatoes.
I expect that paying this kind of extra tax would be life-ruining for typical peasant family and may end with one or more people starving.
Random person in developed country may be not even entirely noticing VAT tax or be more irritated by fact that price displayed in store/ad mismatches actually paid one.
Absolutely! The high tax rates are only possible because nowadays, ordinary people are rich enough to afford them. If you try to tax peasants anywhere near this hard, they will just revolt, or walk away to the hills, or both. Because — exactly as you said — that tax regime is simply a death sentence, so what do they have to lose?
And yes, all that redistribution is going to some recipients. Likewise, if you want to think of it on those terms, the public goods are available to those who pay disproportionately little (or nothing, or less-than-nothing) in taxes. Poor people get clean drinking water piped to their homes, all children — no matter who their parents are — get extremely deeply discounted month passes for transit, vaccines are free, and so on.
On the other hand, there are countries that charge 25-30% VAT on most types of things.
“Absolutely! The high tax rates are only possible because nowadays, ordinary people are rich enough to afford them. If you try to tax peasants anywhere near this hard, they will just revolt, or walk away to the hills, or both. Because — exactly as you said — that tax regime is simply a death sentence, so what do they have to lose?”
Or neither, and literally starve. See the Irish peasants of 1845-1847 – potato blight contributed but the rents did not instantly drop to zero. They did not revolt or walk away to hills – they died. Ukrainian peasants of Holodomor – again, no revolt, no walking away to hills, mass death by starvation. Great Leap Forward of China – no revolt, no walking away to hills, mass death by starvation.
” Ukrainian peasants of Holodomor – again, no revolt, no walking away to hills, mass death by starvation. ”
Well, no walking away to hills also because it’s Ukraine, so no hills. And this isn’t just a pedantic gotcha – fleeing to the hills (or the jungle or the deep woods or any terrain that was outside the easy reach of the state) simply physically wasn’t an option. Nor was emigration, because they (unlike the Irish) were living in a totalitarian state that wouldn’t let them leave.
Well, no walking away to hills also because it’s Ukraine, so no hills
I know you know this, but in case any other readers get confused: Ukraine has mountains *today*, but it didn’t back when the 1930s famine was happening. The mountains (northeast arc of the Carpathians) are in the regions annexed from Poland, Romania and especially Czechoslovakia after WWII.
“but in case any other readers get confused: Ukraine has mountains *today*, but it didn’t back when the 1930s famine was happening.”
Good point, I should have made that clear. Pre-war Ukraine was the sort of place where, as I heard someone put it, you have big signs by the side of the road saying “ONLY 25 KM TO NATIONAL SCENIC LOCATION: THE CONTOUR LINE”.
@ajay,
I live in the heart of the US corn belt, which is as flat and featureless as it gets (this portion of it, anyway) so yes, I can relate to that story.
@Basil Marte,
I really think comparing taxes, in a modern industrial society with a welfare state, to premodern patterns of landlord extraction really does shed more heat than light. The fact that these taxes are extracted by public institutions, and separately, as you note, the fact that much of the taxes are redistributed or used to pay for public goods, means that these things are more different than similar.
if most of my taxes went to fund things like military parades or golf trips for Donald Trump and Elon Musk, or even billionairie bailouts, i’d probably feel differently, but I don’t think we are there yet.
I would describe auto insurance a little differently, especially in its no-fault variety: there is a high-risk activity that we as a society indulge in, namely automobile use, and those who engage in it must make mandatory contributions to a fund to pay the social cost. Those contributions, overall, will be distributed to the people engaged in the activity.
How much of this model applies to China and India?
My first guess would that the biological and ecological foundations are general enough that until the development of relatively recent technology the model is going to apply, but I don’t know for sure.
The series on wheat production that Bret did had a small addendum about rice; iirc the main difference is that rice produces hugely more calories per labor and land input, allowing for smaller farms and higher population density, but also requires hugely more capital in the form of irrigation and paddy construction. So you could probably extrapolate from their, though I’d imagine it’s mostly fairly similar.
I’d be curious about the social technology for handling the seed corn. Given the relatively poor yield ratios (by modern standards) a rather significant amount of the harvest would have to be held in reserve for next years plantings. In bad years, while watching family members slowly starve to death, it must have been very tempting to shave some off such stores. Not to mention the challenges in keeping the grain safe from pests, rot, and predation. Were such efforts often centralized? Were their systems of exchanges or additional held in reserve by the big men etc.? Loss of the seed corn is an existential risk. I’m reminded of the Lykov family living in the wilderness in Russia who, do to a poorly time snow one year, were left with a single surviving rye plant (which they guarded night and day from pests) which yielded 18 seeds from which they rebuilt their rye crop over multiple years (the mother, choosing to feed the children over herself, starved to death during this time).
A number of people have been talking above about peasants moving to the towns for work etc. I think it worth remembering that these are people whose major concern is maximising their food supply during a bad agricultural year. From this point of view, consider who starves first in a bad year. Is it going to be:
a) The Big Man and his family?
b) The peasants who grew the food, and who will hold on to it in a bad year like death itself?
c) The townsmen who have to pay group b) to give them food so that the peasants families starve instead of the townsmen’s?
If I had been in that society, I would have bet on group c) drawing the short straw.
Which is why towns and cities own and administer their own farmlands around the urban infrastructure, so they do have at least some kind of food supply.
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-part-i-the-ideal-city/
Moreover, they also have the ability to buy food in bulk and then preserve it (most commonly through building granaries) on a scale far beyond what the countryside can dream of. I wish the “Bread and Circuses” post was more explicit about how long grain in a typical granary of the period could be expected to remain edible (it’s surprisingly difficult to find consistent estimates: the Hanjia Granary is one example of very long-lasting storage, but it is also an outlier), but it still gives a good overview of how at least the Roman society dealt with c) (Although, it also notes those approaches weren’t always good enough to avoid bread riots.)
https://acoup.blog/2024/12/20/collections-on-bread-and-circuses/
For most plants, a seed keeps it’s seedly characteristics until it either gets too wet, or dries out enough to crack the skin. Some seeds have skins that are too hard to crack that way, but that is an adaptation that selective breeding for crops tends to try to get rid of.
Obviously, storage solutions that work everywhere are impossible.
A great thing if you are a citizen of the city. Which a person who wasn’t born there and whose parents are not citizens will not be.
Remember *someone* has to draw the short straw, and it is going to be drawn by the people whose don’t start with possession of the asset essential to life, and who don’t have a lot of power over other people.
“A great thing if you are a citizen of the city.”
Were the cities handing out grain only to citizens, or were they making it available in the market?
The free market grain price in towns and cities is always going to be higher than in the countryside because of the additional cost of transport.
And a city that is seizing grain from peasants in the countryside is not going to be handing it out freely to the same peasants if they move to the city.
As I said, someone has to lose the battle for food, and in general that is going to be the people who started out without either food or power.
Urban stores went to citizens (newcomers died in the alleys). But well-run towns were harsh on hoarding, and did not leave provisioning to the market.
Actually c) was less likely to starve than b). Cities have an easier time organizing and tend to be centers of administration anyway (less true for feudal regimes). So they can coerce grain out of the countryside. Since they also will generally be on trade routes and are more monetized, they also have greater ability to draw on non-local sources of food.
To add to what people have said, and without claiming any expertise, I would guess the city largely buys the food from the Big Men and not directly from small farmers. And those in turn can – if they chose to – extract it from the peasants with the threat of weapons even in a bad year. Or the city can tax peasants directly, in which case it will be the city threatening the peasants with weapons. In either case, the answer to peasants holding on to food “like death itself” would probably be along the lines of “your death is not that hard to arrange”.
“And those in turn can – if they chose to – extract it from the peasants with the threat of weapons even in a bad year. ”
In this model the Big Man is lending the peasants foodstuffs during the bad times at interest to get more from them during the good times. He cannot be both doing that and extracting foodstuffs from them during the bad times.
Food he is giving to the peasants at interest is not food he is giving to people in the town. Especially not to poor, landless people in the town, who live far from their friends and relatives.
The peasants own land, an asset against which they can borrow food. Labourers in town do not.
There’s a reason that the various French revolutions started in Paris in a year of bad harvest.
I know the series is finished but would be very interested in an exploration of the example younger brother and the impact of military service in relation to peasant life
>they might be shocked by how terrifyingly unstable our lives are
I don’t know, they were under constant threat of malaria, sepsis, bad harvests, foraging and suchlike – they or their entire family could just randomly ‘drop dead’ from a fever or be suddenly on the brink of starvation. What’s more, with no concept of germ theory, modern agricultural techniques or even news about local conflicts, they might not know how and when disease, famine and war would strike them until it did, for entirely mysterious reasons. This doesn’t seem like a parangon of stability to me
> they might be shocked by how terrifyingly unstable our lives are
Tell them “we pretty much assume that all our children will survive to adulthood and that our mothers won’t die in childbirth.”
Well said.
> 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.
I think they would also be aghast on how socially isolated and how weak (or nonexistent) our communities are.
I’m sometime jealous of peasants back then, because they had communities and stable social relationships. Meantime for me colleagues come and go and having no family anymore, I don’t have any social relationships.
The flip side of isolation and individualism is hierarchy and domination. Most of these community links were in fact unequal and socially and culturally enforced. You largely did not get to choose your trade, social relationships, marriage partner, social station and way of life – and the few people that did, even to some meager extent, were viewed suspciously. There is no way around it: if the individual isn’t an entity of their own right, if the community has primacy over the individual means something or someone – everyone – is telling them what to do and how to live. Parents over children, man over woman, lord over peasant, freeman over slave.
There is a reason that with rising living standards and education levels, both across history and in the current developing world, societies are drifting more individualistic when given the choice, especially marginalized groups. The modern liberal world is alienating, true – as can be alienating sudden freedom after a lifetime in prison.
My extended family still, to a degree at least, follows the old ways of community. Everyone lives within a short drive of the old family farms and either works on the farms or has a local service job in the community. They get together regularly, consider their cousins their best friends, watch each others’ children, and stop in at any random time of the day to chat.
My branch of the family moved off to the city. When my grandma had kids, she would drive the ninety minutes to visit her parents *every weekend*, because that community was still normal to her. None of her children or grandchildren do anything like that.
One of my more urban cousins moved back into this environment for a year or so. It drove her *insane*. By the fifth time her great-uncle stopped by during the middle of the day to knock on the door and chat, they were literally turning off the lights and pretending they weren’t home.
Community means a lot of things, but mostly it means other people whether you want them right now or not.
There is a reason that with rising living standards and education levels, both across history and in the current developing world, societies are drifting more individualistic when given the choice, especially marginalized groups.
I don’t think that’s really true, as a universal rule, and I also think to the extent it’s true, it’s not necessarily going to be a long term change. I definitely think that many of the old forms of ‘community’ (family, village, etc.) are weaker than they were, probably irreversibly. But I also think in the long term, people are going to find new forms of collective identity that organize and give meaning to their lives (and in their own ways can be quite restrictive too). There’s a metaphor for liberal individualism that I like, though I need to look up the source. Imagine an old building that’s been broken down, and the bricks are lying around and haven’t yet been used yet to construct a new building. That’s not an intrinisically bad thing- many buildings deserve to be torn down, either because they were serving bad purposes, or because they’ve become obsolete, or for other reasons. But it’s also not a stable equilibrium- sooner or later the bricks will be used to build something new, and people will generally accept that as good and natural.
If we lived in an era where socialism and communism were politically influential, like they were 50 years ago, those ideologies might form the basis of people’s collective identities. They aren’t politically influential today though (though they might be again in the future), so I think in the foreseeable future the main form of collective identity and ‘community’ that take the place of the old ones, will revolve around ethnicity and nationalism. I would expect ethno-national identity to become more important as families get smaller and family ties get weaker. (That is, I think the idea of kinship is broadening from the family to the ethnic group).
Maybe also we might see religious revivals, who knows.
Bret, I was disappointed to see “perpetual stew” mentioned as a valid concept. If you actually follow the link to the Wikipedia article, you will see some reasons that historians have “cast doubt on the historicity of the idea.” One of the strongest arguments against it, to my mind, is the necessity of keeping the temperature at boiling. If you don’t, then you invite the formation of dangerous bacteria. As anecdotal evidence, I count myself as one of those who suffered some kind of food poisoning (fortunately not fatal) from someone else’s “perpetual stew.”
You mention the men working together while farming, but your description of the women’s work seems rather atomised – shouldn’t we expect them to work together across families? After all, for a lot of these tasks, doing double is not double the labour – keeping an eye on a pot of stew has the same amount of attention whether it’s stew for 3 or stew for 5, and while keeping watch on two children is more work than keeping watch on one, it’s not double the work. Would we not expect women to use their horizontal ties to get more done more efficiently, and maybe even out some of the deficiencies? Mrs. Smalls lacks the labour for making a lot of thread, but if she was teaching the middles’ girl how to spin, that might help. Or maybe she is cooking or baking for mr middles too while she spins, and the widow middles, a skilled spinner, teachers her daughter, so there’s less time spent on child raising, or so on and so forth.
You mentioned “release valves” for men, but are there release valves for women? Because, with a 50:50 gender split, every men that is not getting married, a woman too should not be able to find a partner, too. I always assumed spinsters were that release valve, but a previous post mentioned that there was no functional spinster class of single woman.
So where did these women go?
I’m curious about when peasants would have learned social skills they would have used at festivals and the like, such as dancing and playing musical instruments. They must have had some leisure time throughout the year to practice these things?
Granted, dancing might be as simple as a same-sex group circling around to the music, which seems to have been (and still is) a common form in many cultures, in which case you probably wouldn’t need much practice. But in societies where people danced with those of the opposite sex, more complex dances evolved.
And playing a musical instrument would require a good amount of practice regardless, especially if it’s being used to accompany dancing.
The way people learn folk dances today is largely “by imitation”. More complex dances are often called, i.e. someone stands up at the front and shouts out what movement to do next. Simpler dances you just copy what the people around you are doing. If you dance that way a few times a year since childhood you very rapidly learn how things are done.
As for music, remember there are no books, no TV, no computers. What are you going to do on Sundays after church? Drink, tell stories, sing and play music. So again, you learn by imitation, being shown the basics by someone who knows how to do it and then learning tunes by ear from those around you.
Doing (at least some types) of music while you worked seems to not have beene ntirely unknown. Partially because of practical reasons for some things (sea shanties and other work songs help you keep tempo)
A minor aside, but the Jan de Bisschop piece is a redrawing of Bruegel the Elder’s Peasant Wedding Dance which was done roughly a century prior in 1566. The original is a fairly colourful affair so far as clothing goes with bright reds and blues contrasting other more earthen colours as wells as stark whites and blacks further complementing the contrasts; rather more colourful than most period dramas these days…
Very nice serie