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Tudor peasants
686.
To my mother — who was totally and unapologetically politically incorrect — a peasant was the worst name she could call somebody.
Being the daughter of two Budapesti intellectuals (a lawyer and a writer), she obviously was not a peasant and regarded them as almost a different species. Peasants were above Brown or Black people on the old Great Chain of Being but only just.
For most of history this has been the attitude of most intellectuals, bureaucrats and professionals to the class of people who farmed their own land as well as the local lord’s. Peasants were generally illiterate but also often canny and shrewd (according to folk tale), lived in the countryside in tight-knit villages and feasted together when they could.
In England we lost most of our peasants to the fires of industrialisation in the 18th century. The first generation of English peasants left behind their animals and their knowledge of how to get food out of the soil and the wildwood to go into the new factories. The second generation got better at machines because they had to and they’d grown up with them. They became the working classes. The third generation remembered some recipes and were forced to learn to read and some of them started the long march to respectability.
