page_title: Peasant
section_title: See also
hierarchical_section_title: Peasant / See also
context_page_description: A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or farmer with limited land ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants existed: slave, serf, and free tenant. Peasants hold title to land either in fee simple or by any of several forms of land tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and copyhold.
  In a colloquial sense, "peasant" often has a pejorative meaning that is therefore seen as insulting and controversial in some circles, even when referring to farm laborers in the developing world; as early as in 13th-century Germany the word also could mean "rustic," or "robber," as the English term villain. In 21st-century English, the term includes the pejorative sense of "an ignorant, rude, or unsophisticated person". The word rose to renewed popularity in the 1940s–1960s as a collective term, often referring to rural populations of developing countries in general – as the "semantic successor to 'native', incorporating all its condescending and racial overtones".
context_section_description: Agrarianism
  Family economy
  Feudalism
  Folk culture
  Land reform
  Land reform by country
  Peasant economics
  Peasant Party (political movements in various countries)
  Peasants' Revolt
  Petty nobility
  Popular revolt in late-medieval Europe
  Serfdom
  Via Campesina
caption: "Peasants in a Tavern" by Adriaen van Ostade (c. 1635), at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich
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