potofsoup

Posted by Bret Devereaux

https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-v-life-in-cycles/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-v-life-in-cycles

https://acoup.blog/?p=31761

This is the fifth and final part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd, IVe) looking at the structures of life for pre-modern peasant farmers and showing how historical modeling can help us explore the experiences of people who rarely leave much evidence of their day-to-day personal lives. I’ve been stressing this over and over again, but it is worth repeating, peasant farmers make up a simply majority of all humans who have ever lived, and yet we generally have very little evidence for their lives, because they were rarely literate and thus do not typically write to us.

We’ve talked about the patterns of marriage, of birth, of death, of subsistence in farming and spinning and weaving, the innumerable maintenance tasks that keep the household running and the pressures that elite extraction – omnipresent for our peasants – exert on the system.

This week I want to try to put it all together, taking our models and transmuting them into a sense of what life in these communities was like, with its hardships and its joys. In particular, this is an effort to take our models – which exist mostly as numbers – and turn them into something approaching a narrative, a digital-to-analog conversion that I hope can capture a bit more of the nature of life for these people. That narrative is going to follow one of the dominant ways early agrarian societies thought about time: not as a linear progression, but as a sequence of cycles, from the smallest to the largest.

But first, if you like what you are reading, please share it and if you really like it, you can support this project on Patreon! While I do teach as the academic equivalent of a tenant farmer, tilling the Big Man’s classes, this project is my little plot of freeheld land which enables me to keep working as a writers and scholar. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter and Bluesky and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.

Before we launch in, I am going to be referring to the members of our model households a bunch, so if you need the reference, here is the table showing who is who (by relationship to the householder, whose name is in bold):

The Shortest Cycles

As you may have already teased out of our models, the lives of these peasants work in a series of cycles. There’s a reason agrarian societies of these sort often do not think in terms of time as a linear progression, but instead as a set of ‘ages’ or ‘cycles,’ with the present, in a sense, endlessly repeating in a static sort of rhythm. For these societies technological and social progress, while real is often so slow as to be almost or entirely imperceptible on a normal human lifespan. For instance, we can see that between 1000 and 1800, changes in spinning and loom technology are going to radically change the labor efficiency of that task, but for a peasant in c. 1100, for whom the technology of spinning and weaving has been constant for centuries, that is not obvious. Indeed, consider the peasant woman in c. 1500 working a non-treadle spinning wheel – things might seem almost as static. For a society with limited literacy, she relies on ‘living memory’ to understand change and that technology, introduced in Europe in the 1200s, hasn’t changed massively in three centuries, so that woman’s mother, grandmother, great-grandmother (we’ve already well passed the limit of living memory here), great-great-grandmother, great-great-great-grandmother, and on for close to fifteen generations have been using basically the same device.

Change in these societies isn’t always that slow – though when it is faster, it is often traumatic for communities that simply are not built to handle rapid change – but it frequently is. So time doesn’t seem like a march endlessly into the future, but like a wheel spinning. Or more correctly, wheels within wheels, like a clock: there is the spin of seconds, minutes, hours, days and so on – smaller cycles within larger ones, with the largest cycle our peasants, as humans, can observe being their own lifetimes.

But let’s start with the smallest cycle: the day.

The day begins early, a bit before true sunrise. Contrary to what one might imagine from pop-culture, artificial light, such as is available, is provided by lamps and candles, not torches and is, in any event, expensive. Our peasants rely almost entirely on sunlight instead, so sunlight defines much of this daily cycle. The women are likely to be moving earliest, as they’re expected to prepare breakfast for the men before they set out into the fields or to other tasks. For Mrs. Smalls, the daily set of chores is going to be especially packed as she has to shoulder most of the burden for the household, but by this point little Jane Smalls is an extra helping hand – not old enough yet to do many tasks fully on her own, but already well into the task of learning them.

By contrast in the larger households, there’s likely a bit of a division of the morning’s labor between the grown women. Widow Middles might start preparing breakfast – something simple, like pottage – while Mrs. Middles Jr nurses tiny Freida Middles and prepares to head out to fetch water from the well. For The Biggs, water-fetching is one of Matilda Biggs’ chores, while Mary Biggs helps her mother stoke the hearthfire and start warming breakfast. Martha Biggs, of course, has two children, one nursing, to rouse and look after.

In all three households, the women work something like a team, directed typically by the eldest matron, dividing tasks. They are rarely alone, nor do they stay forever sedentary in the house. Instead, with children in tow, they are on the move quiet a lot, moving to different parts of the farmhouse – which, recall, includes working and storage spaces as well – as well as heading out to pick up water, heading into the village to check on neighbors and so on. Remember that horizontal social relations in this society aren’t just a nice bit of socializing – maintaining those ties is crucial to the household. If there’s a lot of field work distant from the house, it wouldn’t be unusual for them to also plan to bring lunch out to the men in the field (though equally the men might carry lunch out with them or, if working close to home, return for a hot lunch).

As the sun comes up, the men are dressing, gathering tools and eating breakfast. Their work during the day won’t be isolated either: they’ll head out in groups and work in the fields effectively as a team. My best sense is that around seven or eight is when we’d expect to start seeing these boys supporting the farming tasks of their fathers and be expected to function as adults, performing the full range of tasks around fourteen or so, though the exact ages here will vary culture to culture. Just as with the women of the household, the senior adult male is likely to direct the collective labor of the men and boys in his household. For the Smalls, that is simple enough: John is learning how to be a farmer by helping his father, but you can easily imagine these relationships being a bit more complex for Mr. Middles Jr. and Mr. Matt Biggs, both of whom have a grown brother still in the household who is likely to chafe to some degree at the control exerted by the householder (something we’ll come back to).

The work day in the fields is likely a full one – in farming, there is always more that could be done, but our farmers are setting their own pace and schedule, with rests as necessary (or at least, as deemed necessary by the head of household). Village farming would often be itself a cooperative effort not only within households but between them, so we might very well see multiple households working together on shared or adjoining plots as well. It is worth remembering that the topography of these villages is not spread out like homesteads: for the most part the farmhouses are nucleated in the village itself, with the fields spread out around them, so walking from one house to the next to visit, ask favors or coordinate group labor is quick enough.

In all of these activities – men working in the fields, women working in the home, getting water, moving through the village – our peasants are rarely alone, for better and for worse. For the better, the social aspect of these activities are very strong: they chat with each other while working, they might sing together, they certainly pray together. Horizontal ties are also important to survival – perhaps while going through the village to fetch water, Mrs. Smalls might stop by at the Biggs to speak to Maddie Biggs (a sister, or perhaps a cousin, in these close-knit communities) to see if she can’t get some extra spun thread, perhaps in exchange for some grain, vegetables or such.

On the other hand, eyes are always watching and these are societies which expect the individual to place the community first, with individuals valued to the degree that they fill a communal role. There’s very little space for self-expression here and throughout the day, every day our peasants exist within a hierarchy beneath the male head of household. The older women direct the other women and girls, the men direct the boys and the male householder, who by law is the one that owns (or has claim to) the productive asset (land) that enables the household is the final decider on basically everything. But those heads of household are hardly able to make all of their own decisions either, constrained by the need to remain ‘respectable’ in a community that demands conformity and by debt or peonage to the Big Man.

There might be a break in the field work around midday. While women in these societies work more hours overall, the physical demands in strength and endurance in field labor are very high, so that midday rest – siesta – is an important way to conserve strength. Artists looking to capture ‘pastoral simplicity’ often seem to depict these sorts of breaks, which can give a deceptive sense of what the farming day is like: periods of rest alternated with periods of quite intense physical labor.

While the men are in the fields, the women are working through the myriad maintenance tasks necessary to keep the farm running: storing and preparing food, watching children, cleaning living and work spaces, maintaining the hearthfire and such. The diet was heavily based on grains – wheat, barley and the like would be providing a majority of the calories for most peasants – but that doesn’t mean that other types of food (legumes, meat, vegetables, fruits) were entirely absent, simply that they existed within grain-based system. The proportion of calories coming from grains would have always been high, but varied based on time and place, with wealthier societies having marginally more varied diets; a good ballpark for the calorie proportion of grains is around 75%, higher in some places, lower in others.¹

That grain might take the form of bread, of course, which once baked could be taken into the field and eaten cold, but equally it could be made into porridge or (thinner) gruel). In all of these societies I’ve investigated, the task of managing food stores fell to women, who had to figure out how to make a meal out of whatever was available. Many foods would thus naturally be seasonal, especially with limited options to preserve meats, fruits or vegetables.² The frequent recourse was to stews, which could be made with essentially whatever was available, especially if anything was liable to spoil if not eaten soon – ‘perpetual stews‘ kept over relatively long periods with new ingredients added regularly as they became available were one option to ‘use up’ any odd bits of food.

It is easy to over-idealize ‘home cooking’ – some peasant women, doubtless, were clever and creative cooks, but when you make all women cook, naturally you are going to have some indifferent or ineffective cooks as well (the same way that when you make all men farm, chances are some of them are not very good farmers). Almost regardless of cooking skill, peasant cuisine would have been mostly remarkably bland by modern standards, based heavily in grains, with few options to add sweet or savory flavors. Alongside the actual cooking of the meals, there’s quite a bit of work involved in cleaning cooking and eating surfaces, as it all has to be done by hand and without the aid of modern cleaning supplies that can loosen things like grease.

Our peasant women are also engaged in a mix of childcare activities. Matilda Biggs, at 12 is likely working along side her mother or grandmother effective as an adult; childhood doesn’t last long in these societies and by her age Matilda is already likely a relatively proficient spinner and more than able to help with cooking and other household tasks. Our three households also have a number of teenage boys (John Smalls, 14, Freddie Middles and Mark Biggs, both 16). While they probably aren’t yet legal adults (ages of majority in these societies for young men range from 15 to 21), by those ages these boys are expected to work like adults, so they would be in the fields alongside their fathers and older brothers (and would have been helping out in the fields in some capacity probably since around age 7). Likewise, as noted above, little Jane Smalls is probably transitioning into this state and so while she is with her mother, Mrs. Smalls is increasingly expecting Jane to be an active worker alongside her.

For the younger children, the two nursing infants (Freida Middles and Melanie Biggs) are going to need to be with their mothers. However for children in the age 4-7 bracket – too young to really start working, but old enough not to need constant supervision – the parenting style was, somewhat necessarily substantially ‘free range.’ Fanny Middles and Michael Biggs (both 4) might be in this period of their life, which really was the last gasp of ‘childhood’ as we understand it, as a period of play and learning rather than labor. The women (and older girls) of their households will be keeping an eye on them, in between the necessary work tasks the day demands.

Throughout all of these activities – cooking, cleaning spaces in the home, cleaning cooking and eating surfaces, watching children – our women are working textiles. For much of Eurasia, that will mean primarily wool, though linen and other fabrics are certainly used. With more capacity for spinning than strictly required, the women of the Middles and the Biggs might focus some of their efforts on producing modestly nicer clothes, while poor harried Mrs. Smalls will have to struggle just to replace worn out clothing. Nothing spun and wove will be wasted: worn out clothes are turned into children’s clothes, patchworks, rags or whatever else they can be used for, until they basically disintegrate.

As the sun begins to set, the farming work parties in the fields will start heading back home, while their wives, sisters and daughters prepare the evening meal. The day has had its cycle, from morning tasks, to the main of the work day, to evening tasks and finally, as the sun sets and work is no longer possible without artificial light that is simply too expensive for our peasants to use in any kind of quantity, to sleep. There is almost no dedicated leisure time during the day. There is a regularity to the cycle, a monotony – each day more or less like the one before it and the one after – one imagines it was comforting to some peasants and deeply constricting to others, shaped by the continuing demands of peasant labor (itself structured by the heavy extraction regime they operate under, which consumes the leisure time they might otherwise have). The next day, they’ll rise and repeat the cycle.

The Year

If that monotony was all there was, one might imagine most peasants would give into despair, but while most days were just like the ones before and after, the peasant calendar had all sorts of cyclical changes. The cyclical nature here is worth stressing: most of the events that broke up the yearly cycle happened every year at roughly the same time, so they too became part of the routine of life. Peasants wouldn’t go ‘on vacation’ (though they might go to war, more on that below) or do other things that we do to disrupt the cycle, but the cycle had its breaks.

The next smallest cycle was a more-or-less weekly cycle of days, with a day of rest or religious observance at the week’s end. The Abrahamic faiths all have a weekly day of religious observance on which work is to be avoided or at least limited by religious activity, while the Romans had the nundinae (‘ninth-days’) every eight days (they’re counting inclusively) which were days for rest or attending local markets. So while that tends to mean these societies had six work days out of seven (or seven out of eight) there was, for our peasants, a day that offered, if not a rest, at least a change of pace and a chance to gather for larger social events on a regular schedule.

Beyond this was the annual cycle, all-important for farmers whose crops had to be planted and harvested at the correct times. That cycle isn’t universal, but depends on the planting and harvest times for the local major cereal crop. Spring wheat is planted in spring (usually around April) and harvested in late summer or early fall (often in August) while winter wheat is typically planted in early Fall (sometime between late September and November) and harvested in early Summer (typically June or July). These dates shift around a bit depending on local climate as well, which is why I’m offering rough ranges.

Using a winter wheat schedule, since that’s what I’m a bit more familiar with, and I am going to follow roughly a Roman agricultural calendar, the Menologium Rusticum Colatianum, but note that the exact timings here would vary depending on local climate and such. Plowing would begin in September; this was hard, backbreaking work (even with a plow-team of animals) but requires relatively few hands and has a decent amount of time for it in the calendar. It’s worth noting that fallowed fields also need to be plowed, usually once each in the fall, spring and summer. October, just before the plants go in the ground, another plowing and manuring. November brings the first labor peak in the planting season (done at the last plowing) and in some cultures we’ll see women in the fields helping get the seed into the ground at this point.³ Beans – an important food in Roman crop rotation and also simply to provide a source of protein – are planted in December.

The calendar then lightens a little bit while the plants are in the ground, but this isn’t necessarily ‘spare time’ as months without major pressing agricultural jobs are when our peasants need to do all of the gathering, fixing, preparing and such they can’t do during the hard months. January is a good time for repairing tools, cutting trees, fixing buildings and such (note this is a warmer climate; in a colder one, you’d want your firewood gathering done before winter). Hoeing is done in February. March is a slower month (and not an accident then, that it is the traditional month for the Roman dilectus – if you must call everyone to Rome for the draft, do it in a month that doesn’t have heavy labor demands). April is when sheep are washed and shorn and also when weeding might begin, although on the Roman calendar weeding more properly belongs to May. The big task in June is haymaking (although that may begin in May according to Columella) and then in July comes the harvest, the highest labor-demand part of the year, running into August. As we’ve noted, the harvest brings everyone available out into the fields to reap, thresh and winnow the grain so that it is ready for storage.⁴ The rest of August is often a break from all of that work – another chance to repair tools, buildings, fences and so on – and then the cycle starts again.

That annual calendar, of course, structured agricultural work, determining the kind of labor that our peasants (mostly the men, in this case) but it was also a calendar of anxiety for our peasants. After all, roughly three-quarters of the households annual calories came in during a single month – July in in a winter-wheat region, August if you’ve planted spring wheat. Remember our quote of Theophrastus, “the year bears the harvest, not the field.”⁵ Meaning harvests were significantly variable one year to the next and as we’ve seen our peasants do not have large margins of error in terms of their production. Most of our model households were already falling short of their ‘respectability’ requirements, but a year where the harvest was, say, 75% (or worse yet, 50%) of its expected yield could put them in serious danger of shortage. The margin of error here is actually tighter than our model suggests: we haven’t accounted, for instance, for spoilage of grain in storage over the year.

So our peasants have Janus-like worries, looking forward and looking back. Looking forward, once the seed is in the ground, while our peasants can weed and watch as carefully as they can most of the process is out of their control. Too much rain or too little, weather too hot or too cold, can ruin the harvest (while ideal conditions might produce a ‘bumper crop’ and a good year), but the farmer can only sit and watch and work on other tasks and desperately hope.

Hope, because if the harvest is poor and food is short, someone needs to be underfed. The household has to survive and that means the working adults need to have enough strength to do the farming and the household cannot shortchange the seed set aside for the next year. So the first people to tighten their belts and go with less in a shortage are the very old and the very young. Reduced nutrition in turn renders them vulnerable to sickness or injuries that in another year might be easily overcome, with the greatest vulnerability for very young children (for whom sickness can be a significant concern even with modern medicine). The Smalls are perhaps the least vulnerable household here – a bad year might stunt Jane’s growth, leaving her a bit shorter or with other developmental problems, but it probably won’t kill her. But for the Middles and the Biggs, a poorly timed bad year is quite possibly a death sentence for little Freida Middles and Melanie Biggs; it has a distressing chance of claiming Widows Middles and Biggs too.

So the peasant farmers plow their fields and plant their seeds and hope.

Meanwhile, of course, there is the food from last year’s harvest. Grain is hard to keep in the conditions these peasants can create much longer than a year or two, but it wouldn’t matter too much if they had radically better storage given that they’re barely producing enough for their own needs anyway. The task of preserving, preparing and if necessary, rationing that food generally falls to the women of the household. And they don’t lack for worries either: because the grain all comes in at once, should anything happen to it, the result could still be shortage. And there are a lot of things that can happen to it: pests, spoilage, theft or fire, for instance. So our peasant woman are, each week, keeping track of how much food remains in storage and measuring it out accordingly. If they’ve got more food than necessary, that might allow them to banquet their neighbors or to sell some grain to get tastier foods (e.g. meats) they might not normally have. But if the harvest was poor, or there’s an unwelcome surprise (say, a sack of grain develops mold), then the job suddenly becomes trying desperately to stretch what is there to the next harvest, filling gaps as much as can be done with whatever crops and produce become available in the meantime. And if necessary, knowingly shortchanging the elderly or the little ones to make sure there is enough for the rest.

(Of course there is also the peasant woman’s own nutrition to think about. Remember, she is very often pregnant or nursing, which produces substantial nutritional demands on her body, which can endanger her health, potentially cause a pregnancy to miscarry or reduce the amount of nutrients she can pass through nursing to her child, endangering the child’s health. There’s no way out of the calorie calculus: someone has to go short and both our families and mother nature will tend to prioritize health adults over children and the elderly.)

So the calendar is a cycle of anxiety, relief and despair: anxiety as the family waits for the harvest, watching the skies for weather and the pantry for its steady depletion. Glorious relief if the harvest is good, the pantry restocked, another year survived and despair if it is poor, which at best likely means seeking aid – with many strings attached – from the Big Man with his Big Estate and at worst means the household loses some of its most vulnerable members, the “vacant seat…and a crutch without an owner.”⁶

But the yearly calendar is not just the harbinger of threat and anxiety: it is also the bringer of joy and society, because the year is studded with festivals, days of rest and social gathering, joy and merry-making. Of course we still have holidays too, but I wonder if we don’t miss their potency to pre-modern farmers because – with, at least for some of us, eight-hour-work-days, two-day weekends and built-in vacation days – they are not our only escape from labor.

In any case, for those long days in the fields or the long hours of spinning thread while keeping one eye on the large pot and the other on the tiny tot, our peasants would be looking forward to the next festival, the next feast day, the next major event which might have music and dance and special foods. The break in the monotony of food is a significant one: in addition to peasant families putting in extra effort and deploying their relatively limited access to tastier meats, dairy and such, festivals often served as an opportunity for the ‘Big Men’ to engage in conspicuous wealth display by providing finer foods. In ancient polytheistic cultures, religious festivals generally involved animal sacrifices at scale, paid for by either the state or the very wealthy (often a bit of both) with the meat from those sacrifices cooked and given out to the celebrants, a chance for the elite to cement their hold over the community. In the Middle Ages, certain holidays might include similar traditions, where the local lord or other big man might throw a feast for the commons.

Many of these festivals were single-day affairs, but some could be multi-day events, a period for rest, socializing, singing, story-telling, and general merry-making. One very common festival motif was a ‘fool’s feast,’ – a festival predicated around brief social inversion, like the Roman Saturnalia (celebrated in December) or various ‘Feasts of Fools‘ in the Middle Ages. These sorts of festivals often created a space for a kind of tongue-in-cheek parody and mockery of authority and thus potentially a space for the lower classes to ‘let off steam’ in a way that didn’t threaten elite power, reducing the strain created on a society with such tremendous and conspicuous inequality and functionally no social mobility.

So our peasants, doing their work, have a lot to look forward to, good and bad. Mrs. Smalls, terribly overworked, might be spinning at home while Jane sweeps out the kitchen and the stew slowly boils, thinking about a coming festival – her household has food to spare so perhaps she’ll sell or exchange some for some fancier foods (perhaps to bake some cakes) to impress her neighbors (though she worries her good kirtle – that’s the top layer of the typical European medieval dress – is getting a born worn, but she’s short on fabric and needs to replace her husband’s work tunic before she can work on a new kirtle). Meanwhile, Mr. Matt and Martin Biggs are nervously watching the sky: everyone in their household has worked as hard as they can, but they need so much land and the tenancy terms for some of it were not good, so they need a good harvest to avoid a shortfall. Everyone adores little Melanie but at just one year old, she’s certainly not out of danger yet for a bad year.

John Smalls and Mark Biggs, both young men, are looking forward to that coming festival too, but for the chance to play some games and attend some dances and perhaps try to catch the eyes of some of the eligible girls in the village. Of course they’ll also need to impress those girls’ families – it will be their fathers, in this society, who decide who they marry – but John and Mark both stand to eventually inherit their farms and so have a fair bit to recommend them as matches. Freddie Middles, the same age, is not so fortunate – his brother’s farm, on which he works, is likely to go to a son if Mr. Middles has one and in many of these societies, might still go to his daughters – and so he thoughts drift a little further into the future, as he has relatively little chance of being marriageable in the village (the same, in a decade’s time, will be true of little Michael Biggs, but right now he is still of the playing age).

Which leads us now to the larger cycles.

The Family Cycles

The bigger cycle is the generational cycle. If we think of these households in the long term, they tend to go through broad cycles. The foundational work on this idea is by Alexander Chayanov from work on Russian peasants,⁷ but as we’ve seen the precise family formation and household structure do vary depending on when peasants marry, mortality rates and also when they form new households (in particular, extended kin-groups and social relationships across multiple households soften the sharp transitions in Chayanov’s basic model).⁸So the exact cycle is going to vary a bit, but the basic ideas are a good framework.

We can think about it very simply thinking in terms of our smallest, simplest household: the Smalls. We can start imagining the Smalls household perhaps 10 years ago when Mr. Smalls is 30 and Mrs. Smalls is 22. John is, at that point, 4 – too young to work – and Jane is not yet born. But as you’ll recall from our childrearing model, while John and Jane are Mrs. Smalls only surviving children in the present, they are unlikely to have been her only children. That age gap between John and Jane is likely to be ‘filled’ by a child – James Smalls – who died at age 2 but 10 years ago is still living (one and a half). Mr. Smalls’ father was still alive then too – 62 years of age – but increasingly limited in his ability to work. When Old Man Smalls died, that left a household with two adults, but 2 small children and thus quite vulnerable, with a low ratio of workers to dependents. That might explain why poor James Smalls didn’t survive and also Mrs. Smalls’ repeated miscarriages: in the bad years, with Mr. Smalls only able to work so much land, food ran short and the children suffered.

But now, now John is of working age and Jane will be as well soon. If we imagine the Smalls’ household over the next, say, five years, we might expect Mr. Smalls is likely to be alive and able to work all five years, and John the same, but John Smalls won’t marry and start having his own children for quite some time. Meanwhile, Jane will be more and more helpful for her mother until she hits marriageable age which, as we’ve seen, varies by culture. These are the ‘peak’ years for the household in terms of labor-per-dependent. And while Mrs. Smalls, remembering well how the generosity of neighbors got Jane through a bad year when she was young, is thinking about how to use their increased labor to pay back favors, Mr. Smalls is thinking that he has a chance, in these years, if he works hard, of pulling together just enough money (or other resources) to maybe buy an extra field or two and thereby make the family more secure for generations to come.

That aim is possible, but the odds are stacked against him. For one, remember: the yield is born by the year, not the land. So while Mr. Smalls might want a boom harvest year to get a lot of grain to sell to pull together the capital he needs to expand, that bumper year is likely to be a good year for everyone and to cause grain prices to fall accordingly. But of course in a bad year, even the Smalls’ don’t have the wide margin for error to benefit from rising grain prices (unlike the Big Man in his estate).

Moreover, most of these peasant societies are dowry societies, meaning that the father of the bride is expected to lay down money, resources or land when his daughter marries and of course Jane must – by the rules of these societies (which we are describing, not endorsing) – must eventually marry. That time is quite a ways off, but Mr. Smalls has to think that in the next 10-15 years he needs to have put together enough of a reserve to provide that dowry, otherwise his failure of foresight will harm her marriage prospects. At the same time, in a decade, John will also be looking to potentially marry. That might bring in a dowry, but it will also in short order mean more children and the family shifting back to that first phase again. Mr. Smalls might seek to delay that marriage, but he can hardly do so forever. So while his household right now is reasonably secure, as peasants go, he is scrimping and saving with the hope that over the next few years he can just barely thread that needle in order to get those extra fields while the family is at its peak productivity…so that John won’t need to suffer through losing four very much wanted children (two to miscarriage, two to infant mortality) like he and Mrs. Smalls did.

As an aside, there is a tendency for modern folks and especially modern popular culture to assume that people in the past dreaded the sort of frequently arranged marriages they had, but this isn’t the impression we get. People in the past, after all, tended to share their societies values, and in these societies a lot of value was placed on marriage and the legitimate children it produced. Marriage was, for women especially, but also for most men, a necessary step towards adulthood and status in the community and so in most cases seems to have been anticipated, yearned for and welcomed when it came.

So while the Biggs brothers look, worried at the sky and the lack of rain clouds, worried about this year, Mr. Smalls is right there with them, worrying about the future. As humans are wont.

All of these households are going through similar cycles: periods where they are more vulnerable and less vulnerable. Though they mostly don’t see it in those terms. Instead, they see it in terms of generational events: the celebration of marriages (always a good occasion for a party), of births and of course of deaths. Alongside the annual festivals, these too create a cycle of anticipations and moments (of both joy and grief). None of our households have an unmarried child of marriageable age (an oversight of mine in plotting them out), but we might well imagine that all three households know that one of the other village households is anticipating the marriage of their daughter to a boy from the next village over and everyone is looking forward to the party that will entail. And, of course, just a few months ago the Middles were celebrating the arrival of little Freida.

For most of these peasants, there is no real escape from these cycles: one generation of Smalls, Middles and Biggs after another, each mostly the same as the last. And that is often the cultural ideal of these societies: people are born into roles and the expectation is that they will fill those roles. One day after another, one year after another, one generation after another. And within the vision permitted by a single human life, that pattern mostly holds. John Smalls and Mark Biggs can expect to marry in another 10 or 15 years; that their fathers will pass away perhaps in another 15 to 25 years and that they will then absorb the role of head of household, their wives taking the place their aging mothers held, with a new generation on the way behind them.⁹

Students sometimes find it odd to the point of absurd that these societies often concieve of time generally as cyclical rather than progressive, imagining that time can kind of loop back on itself if you wait long enough. But from this vantage, it doesn’t seem so absurd: the technology and conditions that shape these farmer’s lives largely don’t appear to change without the benefit of longue durée history that they (and even the aristocrats who lord over them) lack. They are so incredibly distant from their pre-farming roots (far more distant from them than they are from us) that they do not remember a time before this kind of living and cannot imagine a time after it. Instead the cycles of their lives seem to stretch out endlessly into the past beyond living memory and into the future beyond imagination.

For most of them, at least. For Freddie Middles, the picture is different: his brother inherited the farm and now has children. In societies where girls cannot inherit, Freddie might hope that his brother and sister-in-law will remain without a son – and the odds on that aren’t terrible given the high infant mortality – but in societies where daughters do inherit, he is pretty much already likely out of luck. He can probably remain in his brother’s household and be reasonably safe from want – he’s a good source of labor, so unless his relationship with his brother is really bad Mr. Middles is going to want to keep him around – but as he looks at his future, he’ll never be head of this household and will struggle to marry.

A cautious fellow might stay in his place regardless. but Freddie isn’t a cautious fellow. Because the supply of men like Freddie is virtually guaranteed in societies that have such static structures – far too static for the fluid family formation dynamics underneath them – they have ‘release valves’ for this sort of thing – which these societies understand (not entirely unreasonably) as ‘land scarcity’. One very common release valve is military service. If these were families in the Roman Republic, we might expect Freddie to be the sort of fellow who volunteers for additional military service – which both removes his mouth-to-feed from the household, but also offers him the opportunity (however narrow) of getting enough loot and pay to be able to form his own household. Likewise in the Middle Ages and especially in the early modern period, Freddie is the sort of fellow we might see enlist as a mercenary or professional soldier. Alternately, Freddie is precisely the sort of fellow we might see showing up to do some Greek or Phoenician style colonization.

In a decade or so, Michael Biggs is likely to be in a similar spot: his Uncle Matt and father Martin had enough of an arrangement to try to squeeze two family units into a single household (which is part of why the Biggs’ are more tightly economically constrained than the other households), but that sort of thing isn’t likely to continue forever. Chances are Mark Biggs, when he becomes the head of the household, would be happy enough to keep Michael on as a worker, but probably not to play host to Michael forming a family with yet more dependents in a household that is already too big. Of course either of these young men might ‘luck out’ with a marriage to a young woman with no brothers who is thus set to inherit her father’s farm (in societies where that inheritance pattern can happen), but some significant number of young men are going to be ‘thrown off’ by this system, providing a small but meaningful ‘floating’ workforce of young men with dim futures in the countryside, to do day-labor in the cities or service in the armies.¹⁰

It is notable that of the peasants, if we hear about any of them, it is often the peasants shunted through these ‘release values’ to become something else that arrive in our history. But of course I feel the need to note that the future for most such members of the peasantry was pretty grim: most would die poor and frequently young, compared to the tiny handful of unusual successes that make it into our books.

But of course, even for Freddie Middles and Michael Biggs, those disappointments are in the future. In the present Freddie has work and Michael has play and both are looking forward to that festival, mostly because they heard tell that Mrs. Smalls is planning to make her village-famous cakes and they remember those fondly from last year.

Conclusions

This final post in the series is, of course, a bit more ‘made up’ than the rest: I am doing my best to ‘fill in’ the color between the black and white lines of our models. But I think there is value in that, so long as we are reminded that the color is not original, these are ‘colorized’ pictures, not color pictures, to get a sense of what it was like to be a human in these societies.

On the one hand you do not work more than a medieval peasant. These households – both the men and women – worked under conditions of extremely low (by modern standards) productivity, meaning they had to put in a ton of labor to get out a fairly small amount of production. We can see that in how limited the surplus they generate under ideal conditions is and even more so just how much labor it takes to keep these families clothed. But we can also see they are also pressed down under the weight of extraction, a regime that squeezes them as hard as it can without quite ever crushing them.

That extraction goes to provide for everything else these societies do. It is how the build monuments and temples, how they maintain the lifestyles of the elite, how they provide the time to develop literature, to invent philosophy and mathematics. It is how they feed soldiers, form armies, produce weapons. Everything else that these societies do is done on the backs of these peasants. And from that list, you can easily see great injustice – our peasants could be much better off if our aristocrats were modestly less comfortable. But of course then we also don’t get the Epic of Gilgamesh or innovations in mathematics or engineering, or Greek sculpture, or preserved Greek and Roman literature, painstakingly copied by hand over and over again (mostly by monks being fed off of the produce of – of course – our peasants).

And the brutal reality of competition in the pre-industrial world is that agrarian societies which do not find some way to extract resources from their peasants to fund warfare end up conquered by societies which do. There are better and worse ways to do that extraction: it is not the case that the most brutal extraction regimes are the most militarily effective (more on this in my book project; the Roman extraction regime in Italy in the Middle Republic was actually relatively light in terms of taxes, but expected citizen-farmers to support the cost of warfare themselves, which turned out to work really well). But it is the case that the sharp edge of military necessity meant ‘no extraction’ wasn’t a realistic option.

So you do not work as much or as hard or with as much difficulty as a medieval or ancient peasant, at least if you are a typical person reading this from an industrialized country.¹¹ But that also doesn’t mean that these peasants lives were nothing but grim starvation.

They were humans. They loved and cared about people, they made plans (which often fall through), had hopes and desires tailored to the constraints of the situation they were born into. It is true that, for the most part, they weren’t going anywhere – at least, not on the time scale of a single generation – but that wasn’t typically what they or their society valued. Indeed, major disruptions – which we haven’t dealt with here – were generally of the bad kind. That lifestyle might feel to us to be stultifying and it certainly felt that way for many of our peasants: when factories and jobs in the cities at last did appear, peasants did not have to be chased into them, large numbers of them voluntarily quit the countryside for new horizons and opportunities (to the point that their landlord overseers sometimes scrambled to find ways to prevent them from leaving).

But like humans, within the confines of the structures we’ve laid out, they had their full share of joy and grief, of success and hardship, of anxiety and relief. And they liked to have nice things: a nice meal, a carefully made piece of clothing and so on. One of the most striking misconceptions about ancient and medieval peasants is how our popular culture dresses them in brown rags, when these folks made their own clothes and liked to look nice. Their clothes, tools, housewares and homes might have been a lot more worn than ours, perhaps a little thin in places, but they were made and kept with care. It is important not to overcorrect in either direction: the average American closet represents a concentration of wealth that would shock even a rich peasant, but that doesn’t mean peasants went around wearing rags.

Likewise, it seems abundantly clear from the evidence we do have that they felt the grief and anxiety every bit as keenly as we do and that they had more of it. But that doesn’t mean their lives were without joy. Indeed, the regular predictable cycles of life left them almost always with something – the next Sunday, the next festival, the next harvest, the next generation – to look forward to with joy and anticipation. If we are shocked by how poor their lives were, they might be shocked by how terrifyingly unstable our lives are – how many people work jobs that effectively didn’t exist a century ago? Or have grandparents who once worked jobs that effectively no longer exist? They might well wonder how we coped with the anxiety of that. At least they knew that their jobs would be there for them, one day after the next, one year after the next, one generation after the next.

Perhaps most of all, I hope this sort of project helps to reorient the way some of us think about the past. We’re used to thinking about the past in terms of kings and soldiers, because that is who write to us and thus whose history gets written, to the point that we need to engage in this kind of round-a-bout modeling sometimes to get a solid picture of the structures of pre-modern life. Yet these structures make up the largest part – the majority! – of the entire human experience. Most of humanity lived not like us, nor like our more distant hunter-gatherer ancestors, but as agrarian peasant communities, in societies with very low productivity and high extraction, which changed so slowly the effect was usually imperceptible within a human lifetime.

Because of course these peasants were people too, their place in the human story no smaller than yours or mine – but far more numerous.

https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-v-life-in-cycles/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-v-life-in-cycles

https://acoup.blog/?p=31761