ABSTRACT
At least four-fifths of European families lived by working on the land. Most were threatened sometimes by desperate poverty; a few had opportunities to become more prosperous; but in the west at least they lived in much the same way and with much the same variations in their fate as had their parents and grandparents. The economic developments of the seventeenth century, impressive as they seem in themselves, did not make much difference to this. Nor, despite all the expansion in some parts of industry and commerce, was there a spectacular alteration in the lives of most townsmen or of those villagers who were on the fringes of land-working. The great changes arose among the small minority who owned the land, or in some less permanent way controlled it. In this chapter we shall look at some aspects of the ordinary life of the main groups in society, beginning with the majority – the peasants, as they can be labelled in most places – and moving on to the minorities.
