Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part V: Life in Cycles

Summary

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@histor...