Villagers

In 1600 the vast majority of Europeans lived in the countryside, in small villages; two centuries later, the population was still mainly rural, though by a smaller majority. The standard term for early modern country-dwellers is "peasants;" it's the word de Vries uses, and I'll use it often in class. But it's a complicated concept, with multiple implications that not all historians accept. Literally, peasant just means someone who lives in the countryside (from the French word pays. In addition, though, the term implies a series of attitudes and social relationships: a commitment to traditional ways of doing things, strong attachments to family and community, some financial obligations to landlords and other outsiders.

All this implies a distinction between peasants and modern farmers, whose economic decisions are based on calculation of profit and loss, rather than tradition. Many historians say that English farmers ceased to be peasants in the seventeenth century, because they became more market oriented and individualistic. Other historians go farther, and say that no early modern farmers count as peasants in the usual sense of the word. Even centuries ago, these historians argue, all farmers had to think carefully about their economic choices-- their survival depended on doing so.

European artists found peasants fascinating, so we have some powerful images of them. Here's a harvest scene, by the Dutch-Belgian artist Pieter Brueghel, from the late sixteenth century:
Note how many workers it took to cut and bind the grain; note also that women worked alongside men-- the men are shown cutting the grain, the women binding it into sheaves.

Another well-known Brueghel work shows a village wedding:
It's a scene of abundance and comfort (note the jugs of wine on the left), which also suggests the intensity of village life; people lived and worked close together, and socializing was expected to reflect that.

The social imagery is more complicated in the next two pictures, both by the French painter Louis Le Nain, from 1642:



Again, there are signs of abundance: there's wine, rather elegant glassware, music (note the boy holding a violin), and a pet dog in the lower left; most of those depicted are wearing solid shoes and quality clothing. But the mood is somber, and there's a poor man on the right, without shoes and not drinking. Poverty is presented here as a village reality.

This is another picture by the same artist, with some similar themes: there are signs of comfort, but also a somber mood-- there's wine, but the only food on the table is bread:



One reason for the intense collective life of early modern villages was the organization of rural space: most villagers lived close together, rather than in the isolated farms we're familiar with in North America. The map (of a village in France) below shows the result: fields were spread out around the village, divided into narrow strips of land. The map shows dozens of such strips, owned by small landowners. Just to get to their own fields, villagers had to cross paths with one another, and many villages organized some collective forms of labor to deal with this situation.


The last picture shows an estate in Germany, belonging to a monastery:


This is the kind of agricultural enterprise that became much more common in seventeenth-century Europe: consolidated property ownership combined with heavy capital investment (note the size of the farm buildings toward the bottom of the picture). One of de Vries's central arguments is that this organization of the countryside opened new possibilities for Europe's economy. With better equipment and consolidated fields, farms like this could produce more, and they were more oriented to the market than smaller farms.