Word Finder - peasants

definition

A member of the lowly social class that toils on the land, constituted by small farmers and tenants, sharecroppers, farmhands and other laborers on the land where they form the main labor force in agriculture and horticulture.

definition

A country person.

definition

An uncouth, crude or ill-bred person.

definition

(strategy games) A worker unit.

The peasants feared him more than they did their master.

They rode at a footpace to the barn, where a large crowd of peasants was standing.

The two tall peasants had their say.

In many parts the peasants and townsfolk, enraged by the licence of the French, hung on his flank and rear.

The closing of the French market to Sicilian produce, the devastation wrought by the phylloxera and the decrease of the sulphur trade had combined to produce in Sicily a discontent of which Socialist agitators took advantage to organize the workmen of the towns and the peasants of the country into groups known as fasci.

Le prochain--your Kiev peasants to whom you want to do good.

The crown paid the landlord in obligations representing the capitalized rent, and the peasants had to pay the crown, for forty-nine years, 6% interest on this capital.

A trained midwife was engaged for Bogucharovo at his expense, and a priest was paid to teach reading and writing to the children of the peasants and household serfs.

In a few weeks he collected thousands of so-called Kuruczok (a corruption of Cruciati), consisting for the most part of small yeomen, peasants, wandering students, friars and parish priests, the humblest and most oppressed portion of the community, to whom alone a crusade against the Turk could have the slightest attraction.

Instantly the movement was diverted from its original object, and the peasants and their leaders began a war of extermination against the landlords.

The penalty of flogging, preferred by the peasants to fine or imprisonment, was not unknown.

The peasants are not compelled to go to the volost court.

By "what was due from the Ryazan estate" Prince Vasili meant several thousand rubles quitrent received from Pierre's peasants, which the prince had retained for himself.

Then he vividly pictured to himself Bogucharovo, his occupations in the country, his journey to Ryazan; he remembered the peasants and Dron the village elder, and mentally applying to them the Personal Rights he had divided into paragraphs, he felt astonished that he could have spent so much time on such useless work.

The peasants were ruined; some of them too had gone to Bogucharovo, only a few remained.

They are not, as a rule, supported by workmen or peasants, but rather by small tradespeople, manufacturers and farmers.

Half of them were formerly serfs (10,447,149 males in 1858) - the remainder being " state peasants " (9,194,891 males in 1858, exclusive of the Archangel government) and " domain peasants " (842,740 males the same year).

The effect of this, craftily calculated beforehand, was to compel the peasants to rent pasture lands from the landlord at any price.

The peasants are ruined?

He pointed to the two peasants who kept as close to him as horseflies to a horse.

Within a week the peasants who came with empty carts to carry off plunder were stopped by the authorities and made to cart the corpses out of the town.

Much of the work is done by companies of peasants, who come down from the mountainous districts when required, permanent residence not being possible owing to the malaria.

The rebellion was the more dangerous as the town rabble was on the side of the peasants, and in Buda and other places the cavalry sent against the Kuruczok were unhorsed as they passed through the gates.

The ukaz allowed peasants with the requisite qualifications to vote as landowners.

In 1893 district committees for the management of the peasants' affairs, similar to those in the purely Russian governments, were introduced into this part of the empire.

The peasants, as already stated, form a class apart, untouched by the influence of Western civilization, the principles of which they are quite incapable of understanding or appreci.

This fact was recognized by the legislators of 1864, and beneath the statutory tribunals created in that year the special courts of the peasants were suffered to survive.

The edict of emancipation abolished this jurisdiction, and set up instead in each volost a court particular to the peasants (volostnye sud), of which the judges and jury, themselves peasants, were elected by the assembly of the volost (volostnye skhod) each year.

In these courts the ordinary written law had little to say; the decisions of the volost courts were based on the local customary law, which alone the peasants, and the peasants alone, understand.

In the ordinary tribunals weight is given to the " customs " of the peasants, even when these conflict with the written law.

Other noteworthy sources of revenue are trade licences, direct taxes on lands and forests, stamp duties, posts and telegraphs, indirect taxes on tobacco, sugar and other commodities, the crown forests, and land redemption payable annually by the peasants since 1861.

Protected as they were by the right of self-government, exempted from military service, and endowed with considerable allotments of good land, these colonies are much wealthier than the neighbouring Russian peasants, from whom they have adopted the slowly modified village community.

Thus more than 88 millions of the Russians are peasants.

The peasants proper received their houses and orchards, and allotments of arable land.

For these allotments the peasants had to pay, as before, either by personal labour or by a fixed rent.

The present condition of the peasants - according to official documents - appears to be as follows.

Many peasants took the " gratuitous allotments," whose amount was about one-eighth of the normal allotments.

The average allotment in Kherson is only 0.90 acre, and for allotments from 2.9 to 5.8 acres the peasants pay 5 to 10 roubles of redemption tax.

The state peasants are better off, but still they are emigrating in masses.

In Little Russia, where the allotments were personal (the mir existing only among state peasants), the state of affairs does not differ for the better, on account of the high redemption taxes.

Finally, in the Baltic provinces nearly all the land belongs to the German landlords, who either farm the land themselves, with hired labourers, or let it in small farms. Only one-fourth of the peasants are farmers, the remainder being mere labourers, who are emigrating in great numbers.

The forests have been sold, and only those landlords are prospering who exact rack-rents for the land without which the peasants could not live upon their allotments.

On the other hand, since 1861, and more especially since 1882, when the Peasant Land Bank was founded for making advances to peasants who were desirous of purchasing land, the former serfs, or rather their descendants, have between 1883 and 1904 bought about 19,500,000 acres from their former masters.

They have achieved good results, but do not exhibit, on the whole, the same unity of organization as those which have arisen in a natural way among the peasants and artisans.

The elder took monastic orders under the name of Sergius, and became famous among the peasants around.

The peasants and slaves at the same time amused themselves with dancing in the meadows.

The educated clergy were not always less cruel than the illiterate peasants.

What Pierre did not know was that the place where they presented him with bread and salt and wished to build a chantry in honor of Peter and Paul was a market village where a fair was held on St. Peter's day, and that the richest peasants (who formed the deputation) had begun the chantry long before, but that nine tenths of the peasants in that villages were in a state of the greatest poverty.

The good he has done to everybody here, from his peasants up to the gentry, is incalculable.

And the peasants are asking three rubles for carting--it isn't Christian!