PEASANTRY

PEASANTRY. The existence of a European peasantry did not change fundamentally between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but during those three hundred years significant shifts in the status, occupation, and livelihood of peasants occurred at various times and places. Generally speaking, the fortunes of Europe's agriculturalists conformed to a cycle of upswing until the later sixteenth century, followed by depression or even crisis, which lasted in some parts of Europe until the late seventeenth century, to be succeeded by a recovery in the eighteenth. Although Europe's peasantries had been the prisoners of Malthusian checks—with war, famine, and disease serving to restore a population in danger of outgrowing available resources to a new homeostatic balance—by the eighteenth century substantial and sustainable population growth in the countryside was being achieved by means of improved crop rotations, the planting of new crops (not least potatoes, which in many instances replaced grain as the staple of subsistence), and some technological innovations. But the pace of change was slow and incremental: there was no "agricultural revolution," and it is doubtful whether changes in the rural economy were responsible in any direct fashion for the supposed industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. Rather, the increased stratification of rural society, above all the emergence of a sizeable class of cottars and landless, which is an almost universal feature of early modern Europe, created pressures for employment that were often satisfied by the rise of "proto-industries" based in the countryside; the alternative, especially in much of southern Europe, was seasonal mass migration into towns, with peasants returning to their fields during the months of plowing, sowing, and harvesting.

TENANCY AND INHERITANCE

Two contrary strands can be observed in the pattern of farm-holding peasants' stake in the land after 1500: their rights of tenancy became generally more secure, even if hereditary leases were often reduced to term-leases, but their possession of the land (outright ownership was rare) was progressively eroded by nobles' and bourgeois' acquiring extensive estates, on which the peasants might continue as rent-paying smallholders, but where they were frequently employed as wage-laborers or obliged to enter into sharecropping agreements. The classic instance is France, where generally favorable rights of tenancy were powerless to prevent a decline in peasant landholding in the face of purchases by the administrative nobility (noblesse de robe), so that by the eighteenth century peasants held no more than one-third of the land. A similar tale unfolded in southern Italy, though here it was nobles of the blood who became major latifundistas. On a parallel track, in Spain the common land (forest and pasture) at the disposal of the peasant community was sold to meet growing tax demands; after 1570, 40 percent of commons, known as baldíos, were alienated, ending up in the hands of the aristocracy or the church, which came to own two-thirds of all agricultural land in the peninsula. Secure rights of tenure were to be found in parts of the Holy Roman Empire (with peasants holding up to 90 percent of the land in western Germany, around 70 percent in Austria, and even 60 percent east of the Elbe River in Brandenburg), as well as in much of Scandinavia, or else—under a commercial agrarian regime—in parts of the Low Countries (where hereditary leases were common, even if farms were often very small), and in Catalonia. In England, where the yeoman paying a market-determined ground rent to a capitalist landlord is supposed to have displaced the traditional peasant, customary tenures of manorial provenance in fact persisted well into the seventeenth century. The beginnings of capitalist agriculture were as likely to be driven by such peasants (who in any case had long been able to dispose of their customary tenancies on the open market) as by freeholders or "yeoman" leaseholders. Indeed, contrary to received opinion, security of tenure may have stimulated a land market and agricultural investment by peasants, as has been argued for western Brabant within the orbit of Antwerp, or for many areas of France, where village elites embraced specialized crops and complex crop rotations.

The efforts by landlords to shorten leases after 1500, however, can be seen in France, in Italy (where short-term contracts replaced customary leases), or in Spain (though emphyteutic leases, that is, perpetual leases at fixed rents, were common in the north), and, under a harsher sign, in the German lands east of the Elbe, where hereditary tenures were relegated to leases revocable at will. Although the boundaries between areas of partible and impartible inheritance customs throughout Europe barely shifted over the centuries, landlords in southern Germany, a region poised between the two, showed some willingness after 1500 to encourage impartibility in place of equal division of the farm and its inventory among the heirs, not least in order to underpin the peasantry as a fiscal and economic resource. An ideological variant of this policy was pursued by the Austrian Habsburg rulers of the Tyrol, who, in one alpine valley on the linguistic borderland with Italy, promoted impartibility among their ethnic German full-holding peasants in order to shore up their role as local agents of state policy, but who allowed their Romance-speaking subjects, an underclass of cottars and migrants, to cleave to partibility. Where partibility was practiced (as in all of Mediterranean Europe), the size of farms tended to decline; in France, most holdings were less than five hectares (about twelve acres), with up to 90 percent of the rural population having to seek alternative employment as manual laborers. But the consequence was not invariably the rise of a rural proletariat, as shown by the example of western Germany, where the manpower required by agrarian regimes such as viticulture could absorb (at least seasonally) the labor of members of the peasant household otherwise destined for impoverishment.

SERFDOM

After 1500 the burdens and restrictions upon European peasants are held to have followed two sharply diverging paths: the disappearance of servile obligations in the west, whether negotiated or achieved by popular resistance (as in the remenças revolt in Old Catalonia before 1486), and their intensification in northeastern and east-central Europe. Although broadly accurate, this verdict is open to misinterpretation. It elides the distinction between personal and tenurial serfdom: even in England, where serfdom is supposed to have vanished by 1500, the East Anglian rebels in Kett's Rebellion of 1549 well knew the difference between bondmen and "bondy lands."

Forms of tenurial unfreedom persisted in parts of northwestern Germany, while in southern Germany lords before and after 1500 deployed personal or residential serfdom as an instrument to consolidate small or fragmented territories. East of the Elbe, by contrast, a "second serfdom" became prevalent, whose hallmark has been taken as hereditary personal subjection, placing severe restrictions upon movement and marriage, ultimately coupled with onerous labor-services and the expropriation of peasant farms. In fact, the origins of a revived serfdom in eastern Europe were identical to those in the west: the lords' attempts against the background of the late medieval demographic and economic downturn to find tenants for abandoned farmsteads. Only gradually and much later, in the seventeenth century, did serfdom as a personal disability with degrading connotations become widespread, often, but not always, linked to the rise of large cereal-producing commercial latifundia under aristocratic control, which relied upon the corvées of unpaid (sometimes paid) forced labor. But a settled peasantry, working its own farms, by no means disappeared east of the Elbe; demesne farming, with attendant labor-services, was slow to develop, especially in Russia (in Belarus it was even abandoned in the later seventeenth century in the wake of the Northern Wars). Moreover, in the case of Denmark, labor services on demesne estates were embedded in a form of personal subjection (vornedskab) that granted peasants security of tenure but no freedom to move.

PEASANT ECONOMIC ACTIVITY

The image of peasants as possessing tenants, farming their lands with family labor within a nuclear household, underwent much retouching in early modern Europe. In many areas peasants turned their hand to alternative employment such as rural crafts or petty dealing, to the point where, as with the maritime provinces of the northern Netherlands, a traditional peasantry is supposed to have disappeared—or, rather, to have subsisted as one rural class alongside other groups no longer defined by agricultural livelihoods. The marked recovery in European population from the late fifteenth century onward certainly put pressure on land and resources, squeezing the chances of heirs inheriting farms that were viable in their own right, yet the spread of rural manufacturing and the growth of an underclass of landless or wage-working hired hands were not, contrary to expectations, seriously interrupted by the renewed economic and demographic calamities of the early seventeenth century. In some areas the need for peasant by-employment was obviously shaped by ecological constraints independent of secular cycles (the harsh climate of Scandinavia, for instance, or the poor soils of upland Castile). In others, such as many parts of Germany, France, northern Italy, and, somewhat later, Russia, a dense urban network together with constraints on manufacturing capacity within towns created a demand for goods that could be produced more cheaply and flexibly in the countryside, commonly through outwork by means of the "putting-out system." Urban capitalists and entrepreneurs advanced money, raw materials, or tools of trade to dependent piece-workers ("outworkers") in return for delivery of finished or semi-finished goods. Such a system was particularly applied to the production of textiles—linen, fustian (a linen/cotton blend, which required merchants north of the Alps to supply Mediterranean cotton to peasants who locally could only grow flax), the woolen and worsted "new draperies," or silk.

But a distinction needs to be drawn between such put-out by-employments, controlled by urban entrepreneurs, and the subsequent growth of genuine proto-industries in the countryside that were able to flourish precisely because they evaded urban supervision (as with Italian silk-weaving, or Bohemian and Silesian textile production). State authorities did not always look kindly upon unregulated rural manufacturing; in France, the textile boom of the sixteenth century gave way to decline in the seventeenth, as state manufactories were set up with strict quality controls. Nevertheless, no matter how far the peasant economy was penetrated by crafts and manufacturing, the essential structure of peasant society remained unaltered (barring the northern Netherlands, and ultimately, for different reasons, England). A switch to the secondary sector and production for market should not be taken as automatic solvents of the peasant household and economy; indeed, it has been argued (for France and the southern Netherlands, for instance) that such diversification provided the very safety-valve that allowed traditional peasant social structures to survive.

From the time of the late medieval economic depression onward, these influences set their stamp on the peasant economy as a whole. There were few regions of Europe that did not witness a diversification into new crops, especially fodder plants grown as catch crops (so-called green manures), which restored nitrogen to the soil, and the cultivation of industrial crops such as flax, dyestuffs (saffron and madder, but especially woad) and, by the seventeenth century, tobacco. The initiative for the development of commercial farming lay as often as not with the peasants themselves, especially in urbanized areas such as the Low Countries, where a ready-made consumer market and good communications (via canals, and latterly paved roads) enabled peasants with holdings of five hectares or less to survive and prosper, not least because they were able to raise crop yields appreciably. A similar story unfolded in Catalonia, where advanced agriculture benefited from the stimulus of Barcelona as a major outlet. In both cases, the resilience of a diversified peasant agriculture was underpinned by long-term leases and moderate ground rents. The advantages of land drainage and reclamation, moreover, so evident in the Low Countries, were matched elsewhere, as in the Lombard plain, by irrigation systems that allowed peasants to dispense with fallowing altogether. The prevalence in much of northern Italy of intercropping or particulture (coltura promiscua), with grain, olives, and vines grown intermingled, allowed peasants to seize regionally or seasonally varying market opportunities and so to spread their risk.

Nevertheless, such agrarian regimes were often managed by sharecropping, in which a proportion of the harvest (usually half) was surrendered to a bourgeois or noble landowner. The general verdict on sharecropping, whether in France (where it was prevalent beyond the northern cereal-growing plains), Iberia, or Italy, is entirely negative: it is regarded as economically backward, encouraging risk-aversion, and a lack of investment and innovation. While it is possible to qualify this verdict (especially for parts of Lombardy), there is no denying that agricultural diversification as such, whatever its initial responsiveness to market demand, might in certain circumstances prove a blind alley. But it posed less of a hazard to the autonomous peasant household than the appearance in early modern Europe of latifundia, large estates devoted to agricultural specialization (usually a cereal monoculture), which sprang up in southern Italy, Iberia, and above all in east Elbia. Here large sections of the peasantry were reduced to the status of laborers, with little economic independence (though in Spain latifundistas also resorted to sharecropping), a development that might lead to enserfment (east of the Elbe), but need not (as in the Mediterranean). The fortunes of the peasantry of early modern Europe were in the end adversely affected, not so much by the accumulation of land in the hands of noble or ecclesiastical magnates as such, as by the latter's unwillingness to invest in their huge estates (unlike the aristocracy in England), preferring instead the life of the rentier, who viewed his lands as a vehicle of social prestige.

PEASANTS AND THE STATE

By the late sixteenth century, however, peasants in many countries of Europe were faced with an additional threat: the burden of state taxation. The costs of war, bureaucracy, and representation fell most severely on the mass of the population as peasants, except in England (where the aristocracy was not exempt from taxation) and the northern Low Countries (where commerce was taxed and towns obliged to purchase state loans). The level of public taxation was already rising before 1500 (provoking tax revolts in Italy, for instance), but it was in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the state's fiscal appetite unleashed popular uprisings across a broad swathe of Europe—France, Italy again, the German lands (especially in the north), and Russia, where up to half the peasants' income was swallowed up by the state in the wake of Ivan the Terrible's wars. But there was another side to this coin. Rulers were often just as concerned to protect their peasants for reasons of state: Bauernschutz, the maintenance of viable peasant households with a measure of civil legal protection, was practiced by the Austrian Habsburgs, not least on their mortgaged estates where state revenues must not be allowed to diminish by destructive exploitation of the peasantry, and in Brandenburg-Prussia, notwithstanding the spread of serfdom. And that policy was extended to the peasant commune itself, which, contrary to older views, was far from crushed east of the Elbe; in Russia, it was actively promoted by the tsars as an agent of local policing in a country vast and difficult to govern. The peasant household and commune indeed became upholders of social discipline and morals at the village level, as the welter of "housefather" literature in western Germany attests. At all times in early modern Europe, lordship, state authority, could only be exercised effectively with, rather than simply over, peasants, who remained the bedrock of ancien régime society.

See also Agriculture ; Capitalism ; Class, Status, and Order ; Feudalism ; Landholding ; Rentiers ; Serfdom ; Serfdom in East Central Europe ; Serfdom in Russia .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Tom Scott