Agricultural Groups and Classes

Sources

The Aristocracy. The aristocracy (or nobility) occupied the apex of the social hierarchy in preindustrial and industrializing Europe. It was the privileged class. Nobles had considerable economic and political power; in many places they paid no taxes. They considered themselves superior to other people by blood (noble status was inherited) and by training and education. While the nobility is sometimes referred to as a class, it is more accurate to speak of the nobles as constituting a rank or an order. Class terminology came into use later. The other traditional orders were the clergy and the commoners. In France these groups were referred to as estates. The clergy were members of the first estate, and the nobility constituted the second estate. High-church officials were the younger sons of the nobility, which means these two groups largely overlapped. Everyone else, regardless of occupation or wealth, was a member of the third estate. Compared with the rest of the population, aristocrats were a small group. In the eighteenth century they constituted about 1 percent of the population in France and Germany, slightly more in Britain, and 4.6 percent in Spain. In western Europe the eighteenth-century nobility divided its time between country estates, where the land was worked by tenant farmers, and city houses or royal palaces such as Versailles. In eastern Europe the nobility was larger in numbers, less mobile, and more likely to stay on their large rural estates.

Roles and Social Rank. The social ranks were distinguished by their roles in society. Aristocrats were responsible for defense and governance; the clergy prayed; and the commoners met economic needs. Inherent in the noble/non-noble division was a distinction between those who worked with their hands (commoners) and those who did not (aristocrats). The aristocracy owned much of the land, but the commoners farmed it. Nobles, at least in theory, could not earn money from commerce, manufac-turing, or mining.

Social Mobility. The nobility of Europe was neither closed to entry nor uniform in status. The older and wealthier a noble family was, the higher its status. But even old and wealthy families needed to husband their family wealth carefully and could find themselves in need of an infusion of cash or land. They found new incomes in three ways: they improved farming techniques on their land and, hence, crop yields; they circumvented the rules about what they could not do and engaged in mining (on their land) or commerce (especially the transportation of goods to foreign markets); and they sought advantageous marriage partners for their children. Confronted with economic decline, an established noble family might marry a son or a daughter to a newly ennobled family with great wealth or even to a wealthy commoner. In most cases, only one son (usually the eldest) would inherit the family’s land. This system kept the family’s land and wealth intact, but it placed younger sons and daughters at a distinct disadvantage. Only the eldest son and one daughter were likely to marry. Indeed, the provision of a dowry for a daughter was likely to be the single greatest drain on the family’s resources. Younger sons were expected to enter the priesthood or the military (all officers were of noble birth) or to leave home to engage in commerce. Unmarried daughters either entered a con-vent or remained in their parents’ or another sibling’s home. Wealthy common families thus could enter the nobility through marriage; through the purchase of a landed estate and the adoption of a noble lifestyle; or, in France, through the purchase of a government office such as that of tax collector. The status conveyed by land ownership was so great that many wealthy merchant families, even after the beginning of industrialization, took money out of their businesses and purchased country estates. Some nobles resisted industrialization, but the intermarriage of noble and wealthy merchant families, the nobility’s circumvention of the cultural notion that they should not engage in commerce or manufacturing, and the entry of younger sons into the commercial world positioned many aristocratic families to take advantage of industrialization as it occurred.

Nineteenth-Century Aristocracy. The decline of nobility began toward the end of the eighteenth century.

In France the revolution that began in 1789 eliminated the legal privileges that nobles had enjoyed and declared everyone to be equal before the law. In other countries the nobles retained privileges for a longer time. In monarchies they retained considerable control of politics. In Britain, for instance, the upper house of the two-chamber Parliament was the House of Lords; in France the relatively short-lived nineteenth-century monarchs and emperors appointed new nobles to influential government positions and gave them considerable power. But the age of manufacturing brought the rise of the bourgeoisie in wealth and political power and started the decline of the nobility, who remained tied to the land and agriculture. Nobles who invested in manufacturing, commerce, and the railroads could and sometimes did acquire considerable additional wealth, but in general the noble lifestyle was becoming more expensive to maintain and the sources of income less lucrative. To make matters even more confusing, wealthy bourgeois families such as the French Rothschilds were often given noble titles.

Peasants and Farmers. In the eighteenth century the overwhelming majority of the European population engaged in farming. Nothing was more important or consumed more labor than the production of food. On the Continent those people who earned their living from agriculture were called peasants; in England they were farmers. Peasants and farmers either owned a few fields, rented fields for a cash amount, or worked as sharecroppers on land owned by the nobility or church. In some areas wealthy peasants also owned large fields and employed other peasants to work for them. In many areas, however, the majority of peasants were poor.

Enclosure. During the eighteenth century many peasants lost their scattered fields as wealthy farmers with an eye for the capitalistic marketplace consolidated their holdings, enclosed them with fences and hedges, and introduced new crops. These dispossessed peasants also lost access to the village common lands. Traditionally this area had been where everyone grazed animals; now it too was divided and sold. Small farmers who lost their land had few choices. They could live in small cottages on the larger farms and work for the new landowners, hire themselves out by the day, labor on agricultural gangs, or migrate to towns and cities to work in the factories. Wealthy farmers and peasants, in contrast, now grew wealthier. They hired more and more laborers to do the work of the farm. Women, who had run the dairy part of the farm, now supervised hired milkmaids. Men oversaw planting, weeding, harvesting, and the construction of new fences and hedges. Children, or at least boys, were sent to school, and girls learned social graces such as fancy sewing and piano playing.

Servants and Day Laborers. Farm servants lived with and worked for relatively large landowners. Traditionally these servants had shared bedrooms and meals with the family, but during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they increasingly were relegated to separate quarters. They were usually young, single men and women who worked on one-year contracts. While they received room and board from the family for which they worked,

they were paid wages only once a year; if the harvest failed or was small, they might not be paid at all. Day laborers, in contrast to servants, did not live on the farm where they were employed. They stayed in small peasant villages and walked to and from the fields and farms. Day laborers were often older than the farm servants. Their work was seasonal and their lives precarious.

Sexual Division of Labor. All members of farming families worked on the farm. Except during the harvest, when everyone went into the fields to gather crops, farm-work was divided along spatial, age, and gender lines. Men were responsible for work in the fields. They plowed, decided when to plant, thinned growing crops, and organized the harvest. Women were responsible for work in the farmyard and tended fruit trees and bushes, the house, and the children. They milked cows, churned butter, and made cheese. Many regarded dairy work as the most physically arduous part of farming. Women also fed chickens, gathered eggs, collected feathers, and sold these three items at markets. They cared for young farm animals and produced any nongrain or grape crops on the farm. Children of both sexes worked with their mothers until they were adolescents. Then boys learned to do their fathers’ work while girls continued to do their mothers’ work. Everyone worked on the harvest, but even then work was divided by gender. Women used sickles to cut the crops while men used scythes, and women were responsible for gathering and binding the cut grain into bundles and for gleaning the fields for fallen grain.

Cottage Industry. It is a mistake to think of peasants and farmers as engaging purely in agricultural work. Instead, they regularly combined farming with cottage manufacturing, especially the carding, combing, and spinning of yarn and the weaving of cloth. In some areas peasants and farmers used the wool from their own sheep; in others they raised flax plants whose fibers could be turned into linen thread and fabric. By the middle of the eighteenth century many also were working with imported cotton. During planting and harvesting, when everyone might be needed in the fields, cottage industry was put aside. At other times, especially during the winter, spinning and weaving were major occupations for poor peasants whose agricultural earnings often were not enough for them to survive.

Serfs. In eastern Europe, including Russia, peasants were not free. Neither they nor their children could leave one noble and go to work on the land of another. Called serfs, they belonged either to the land (owned by a noble) or to the landlord himself. In many ways their position was quite comparable to that of American slaves. They could be sold by their landlord to another noble. They had to obtain permission, which was rarely given, to marry outside of the noble’s estate. They engaged both in agriculture (their most typical work), which many combined with cottage industry, and in various merchant occupations. Unlike American slaves and their owners, however, serfs and their landlords were members of the same racial group. Serfs could sue their owners for mistreatment, which slaves could not. Nobles could be tried if they killed their serfs. During the reign of Catherine the Great (1762–1796), about twenty landlords were tried for causing the deaths of their serfs. Seven of them received harsh sentences.

Causes of Serfdom. In eastern Europe, landowning nobles constituted only 1 percent of the population. Their serfs numbered around three million at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Farms in eastern Europe were large, and hundreds of serfs typically worked on the estate belonging to a single noble landowner. Serfs lived in villages, called communes, on the land of the noble who owned their labor. In eastern Europe the enserfment of peasants began in the sixteenth century, the impetus of which was economic. Nobles desired an inexpensive labor force so they could sell their crops cheaply in western Europe, and they worried that free peasants might leave their farms and seek better conditions or work elsewhere, including in cities.

End of Serfdom. By the nineteenth century many Europeans no longer regarded serfdom as an acceptable economic and social situation. Nevertheless, many landlords were loath to emancipate their serfs, regarding them as a sign of their social status. Nobles were on the losing side of this view, however. Europeans increasingly considered serfdom as a moral evil and a hindrance to economic development. Reformers’ critiques—and economic, social, and political developments—finally led to its abolition. In 1807 Prussian and Polish serfs were freed; in 1816 and 1819 the same was true for the serfs of the Baltic States. The revolution of 1848 freed the serfs of the Austrian Empire, and the tsar emancipated Russian serfs in 1861. Finally, the last European serfs, those in Romania, were freed in 1864. In Russia the freed serfs were entitled to half of the land (all of which had previously belonged to the nobles) but had to pay a redemption fee in order to obtain it. The redeemed land belonged to peasant villages rather than to individual peasants.

Sources

Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).

M. L. Bush, Rich Noble, Poor Noble (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1988).

Jonathan Dewald, The European Nobility: 1400-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Robert Forster, The Nobility of Toulouse in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960).

Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1987).

Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (London: Routledge, 1930).

K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660-1900 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite?: England, 1540-1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press / New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).