ABSTRACT
Historians in the social science tradition often find it useful to create models, as a first step in bringing order to the complexities of the real world in times past. A specialized model much used by Max Weber and other early social scientists is a construct or 'ideal type' of, for example, the peasant. In this chapter, this peasant ideal type will serve as a point of departure when considering changes and continuities in rural society. The ideal-type peasant was necessarily an underdog, a member of a subculture which was subordinate to outside elites. In addition to the economic subordination, pure and simple, all members of a community of ideal-type peasants were subordinate to the judicial authority of members of the outside elite. In the peasants' life-world risk avoidance was an important element. Even during the golden age of the peasants, roughly 1480–1550, inequality within the village was a basic fact of peasant life.
