ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author has grouped peasants and some urban dwellers together, but, as he has seen, each of these categories included distinct social types. The distinction between owning land, renting land or working as a journeyman determined rank within the social world of the peasantry. Regional conditions affected not only the peasants' relation to the land and to their lords; they also dictated patterns of inheritance, family structure and demographic distribution. Peasant life – its social organisation, and the way in which the arable was cultivated – was governed by patterns of inheritance. In the towns of late medieval and early modern Spain and its colonial empire, lower social groups also showed complex social gradations, ranging from urban indigents to prosperous artisanal masters to oligarchs, many of them noble, who dominated the political life of most Spanish towns.
