Life, Work, Death and the Peasant: Family Formation
This is the first part of the third part of our series (I, II) discussing the patterns of life of the pre-modern peasants who made up the great majority of all humans who lived in our agrarian past and indeed a majority of all humans who have ever lived. Last week, we looked at death, examining the brutal mortality regime of pre-modern societies, typified by extremely high (c. 50%) infant and child mortality, very high maternal mortality and often high male military mortality, which kept life ex