peasantry. Although widely used, in a British context the term ‘peasant’ has no obvious contemporary definition which fits the way it is employed today. Medievalists have questioned whether Britain ever had a social group to which the word peasant was applicable, and would certainly question the continued existence of such a group beyond the Middle Ages. Even the famous ‘Peasants' Revolt’ of 1381 was referred to by the chronicler as a rustic rather than a peasant tragedy. In literary sources the term was occasionally used of labourers, implying someone of low birth and inferior standing, rather than a small owner and/or occupier in the countryside. This link with rural labour can be found into the 19th cent. The term also acquired romantic overtones, with the peasantry depicted as the humble members of a fast-disappearing rural society, a Hardy-esque chorus.

By the later 19th cent. historians writing of England from a European perspective often saw peasants as small freeholders, copyholders, and even farmers. Modern anthropological definitions of peasant societies allow the term to be employed for what has been called ‘analytical simplicity’, largely because it is widely used (as in the French term paysan) to mean simply a countryman. As a result, it has been employed as a useful shorthand term without specific definition. Most historians use the term to mean small landowners and/or small farmers, but it can also be used loosely to include the cottager, the commoner, and the squatter; in other words, of the social group which depended on common rights (at least prior to enclosure) and stitched together an income from farming, labouring, and a range of other activities. As such, ‘peasant’ refers to some of the least identifiable rural dwellers, simply because they do not appear in the written record.

The term has also become a catch-all for the social group largely displaced through the economic conditions prevailing in the post-Restoration period, or at enclosure. Some have argued that the term is inappropriate after 1750 because by then England had no peasantry in the continental sense of the word. However, it is accepted that peasants survived in Ireland and in thinly populated parts of Wales and Scotland, and even in some of the pastoral upland counties of northern and western England. Recent scholarship asserting a stronger survival of ‘peasant-type’ rural dwellers than has often been accepted suggests the term still has a currency.

John Beckett