Word Finder - peasantry

definition

Impoverished rural farm workers, either as serfs, small freeholders or hired hands.

definition

Ignorant people of the lowest social status; bumpkins, rustics.

The Mahratta peasantry possess manly fortitude under suffering and misfortune.

Hundreds of castles and monasteries were destroyed by the frantic peasantry, and some of the nobles were murdered with shocking cruelty.

Lucca too enjoyed good government, and the peasantry were well cared for and prosperous.

In general the attitude of the Albanians in the north-eastern districts towards the Slavonic peasantry may be compared with that of the Kurds towards the Armenians.

The peasantry are impoverished, and in many parts live on the verge of starvation for the greater part of the year.

The peasantry suffer much from pellagra.

The economic and moral condition of the peasantry was little improved by freedom, and in many districts there were signs of positive impoverishment and demoralization.

He followed it up with a number of other works on the condition of the Russian peasantry, on Nihilism, and on the conditions of life in Russia.

Wheat and other cereals are cultivated, with fruits of many kinds, olives, and vines which yield a wine of fair quality; while saffron is largely produced, and some attention is given to the keeping of bees and silkworms. Stock-farming, for which the wide plains afford excellent opportunities, employs many of the peasantry; the bulls of Albacete are in demand for bull-fighting, and the horses for mounting the Spanish cavalry.

It is impermeable to water, and is therefore used in northern countries for roofing, for domestic utensils, for boxes and jars to contain both solid and liquid substances, and for a kind of bark shoes, of which it is estimated 25 millions of pairs are annually worn by the Russian peasantry.

The emperor gave his support to the latter project, and the Russian peasantry accordingly acquired rights and privileges.

Before the introduction of machinery applicable to the spinning of silk waste, the refuse from cocoon reeling, and also from silk winding, which is now used in producing spun silk fabrics, hosiery, &c., was nearly all destroyed as being useless, with the exception of that which could be hand-combed and spun by means of the distaff and spinning wheel, a method which is still practised by some of the peasantry in India and other Eastern countries.

There are some very fertile regions in the level portions of the county, but in the mountainous districts the soil is poor, the holdings are subdivided beyond the possibility of affording proper sustenance to their occupiers, and, except where fishing is combined with agricultural operations, the circumstances of the peasantry are among the most wretched of any district of Ireland.

In Catholic countries (notably in Ireland) great churches are still built out of the savings of a poverty-stricken peasantry; and from this point of view the destruction of churches in the 26th century was probably a benefit to the world.

The services of the peasantry can only be conjectured from what we find in later times.

Thus the dead are believed by the peasantry of many Catholic countries to return to their former homes on All Souls' night and partake of the food of the living.

Among the Castilian peasantry, where education and foreign influence have never penetrated deeply, the national character can best be studied.

Christian had to depend mainly upon hired troops, supported by native levies recruited for the most part from the peasantry on the crown domains.

Even to-day the ignorant peasantry of many European countries, Russia, Galicia and elsewhere, believe that all disease is the work of demons, and that medicinal herbs owe their curative properties to their being the materialized forms of benevolent spirits.

Inferior to this is " cudbear," derived from Lecanora tartarea, which was formerly very extensively employed by the peasantry of north Europe for giving a scarlet or purple colour to woollen cloths.

Three miles south is a fine stone circle, and to the south-east are the wells of Struell, famous as miraculous healers among the peasantry until modern times.

The tyranny of these nobles drove the peasantry and smaller vassals to seek the protection for life and property, the equality of taxation and of justice, which could be found only inside the walled city and under the rule of the archbishop. Thus Milan grew populous, and learned to govern itself.

Opposed to them is the coalition of the orthodox Protestant conservatives, styled antirevolutionaries, supported by the Calvinistic peasantry, and the Catholics, who represent about one-third of the population and have their headquarters in Dutch Brabant, Dutch Flanders and Limburg.

Here is the Dansk Folke museum, a collection illustrating the domestic life of the nation, particularly that of the peasantry since 1600.

That rival was the Swedish peasantry.

Pursuing a policy intended to reconcile the peasantry to Russian rule and to break the power of the Polish nobility, the Russian government promulgated, during the outbreak in 1864, a law by which those peasants who were holders of land on estates belonging to private persons, institutions (such as monasteries and the like), or the Crown were recognized as proprietors of the soil-the state paying compensation to the landlords in bonds, and the peasants having to pay a yearly annuity to the state until the debt thus contracted had been cleared off.

But whereas between 1864 and 1873 the peasantry as a whole purchased, in addition to the land granted to them by the government, 297,000 acres, in the period 1873-1893, they bought 540,000 acres and between 1893 and 1905 as much as 1,620,000 acres.

Forests cover over 21.3% of the surface, of which nearly onethird belong to the Crown, and only 515,000 acres (7.7%) to the peasantry.

The improvements he introduced in the tenures of his peasantry anticipated in some respects the agricultural reforms of the next generation.

Beneath all these, forming the mass of the agricultural population, were the peasantry and the serfs, the latter attached to the land, the former ground down by heavy taxes.

To refuse this claim would have meant the indefinite prolongation of the crisis; to concede it would have been to invite the peasantry of the whole empire to put forth similar demands on pain of a general rising.

They looked on the German schoolmaster as the apostle of German culture, and they looked forward to the time when the feeling of a common Austrian nationality should obscure the national feeling of the Sla y s, and the Slavonic idioms should survive merely as the local dialects of the peasantry, the territories becoming merely the provinces of a united and centralized state.

By these means a large and rapidly increasing revenue is being secured to government; while the condition of the peasantry and people is being greatly ameliorated, an adequate but not excessive income is being secured to the native rulers; and the class of middlemen who lived by extortion and absorbed a great part of the wealth of the country is being abolished.

The Cairenes, or native citizens, differ from the fellahin in having a much larger mixture of Arab blood, and are at once keener witted and more conservative than the peasantry.

Maize in Lower Egypt and millet (of which there are several varieties) in Upper Egypt are largely grown for home consumption, these grains forming a staple food of the peasantry.

The population is generally divisible into I The fellahin or peasantry and the native townsmen.

Their cupidity is mitigated by generosity; their natural indolence by the necessity, especially among the peasantry, to work hard to gain a livelihood.

Ismails exactions from the Egyptian peasantry reacted on the army, causing discontent; and when he was tottering on the throne he instigated military demonstrations against his own government, and, by thus sapping the foundations of discipline, assisted Arabis revolution; the result was the battle of Tell el-Kebir, the British occupation, and the disbandment of the army, which at that time in Egypt proper consisted of 18,000 men.

This tax, which is popular amongst the peasantry, produced in 1906 E.15o,00o, and over 250,000 in 1908.

Officials, and the higher ones were nearly all Greeks, were legion, but the whole system was so judiciously worked that there was little discontent amongst the patient peasantry.

The Mormon apostles for a considerable time made a special raid upon the Danish peasantry and a few hundreds profess this faith.

Unfortunately, too, for Norway's independence, the native gentry had gradually died out, and were succeeded by immigrant Danish fortune-hunters; native burgesses there were none, and the peasantry were mostly thralls; so that, excepting the clergy, there was no patriotic class to stand up for the national liberties.

Whilst Gustavus Vasa had leaned upon the Swedish peasantry, in other words upon the bulk of the Swedish nation, which was and continued to be an integral part of the Swedish body-politic, Christian III.

Yet the number of peasant-proprietors had diminished, while the obligations of the peasantry generally had increased; and, still worse, their obligations were vexatiously indefinite, varying from year to year and even from month to month.

This increase of villenage morally depressed the peasantry, and widened still further the breach between the yeomanry and the gentry.

While the Swedish peasants were well represented in the Swedish Riksdag, whose proceedings they sometimes dominated, the Danish peasantry had no political rights or privileges whatever.

The price of corn continued 1746/730= to fall; the migration of the peasantry assumed alarming proportions; and at last, " to preserve the land " as well as to increase the defensive capacity of the country, the national militia was re-established by the decree of the 4th of February 1733, which at the same time bound to the soil all peasants between the age of nine and forty.

Reactionary as the measure was it enabled the agricultural interest, on which the prosperity of Denmark mainly depended, to tide over one of the most dangerous crises in its history; but certainly the position of the Danish peasantry was never worse than during the reign of the religious and benevolent Christian VI.

The emancipation of the peasantry was now the burning question of the day, and the whole matter was thoroughly ventilated.

The codification of the laws initiated in 1801 was never carried out during his reign; nothing was done to improve the intolerable status of the Russian peasantry; the constitution drawn up by Speranski, and passed by the emperor, remained unsigned.