This is the third piece of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have ever lived. Last time, we started looking at the subsistence of peasant agriculture by considering the productivity of our model farming families under basically ideal conditions: relatively good yields and effectively infinite land.
This week we’re going to start peeling back those assumptions in light of the very small farm-sizes and capital availability our pre-modern peasants had. Last week we found that, assuming effectively infinite land and reasonably high yields, our farmers produced enough to maintain their households fairly securely in relative comfort, with enough surplus over even their respectability needs to potentially support a small population of non-farmers. But of course land isn’t infinite and also isn’t free and on top of that, the societies in which our peasant farmers live are often built to extract as much surplus from the peasantry as possible.
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From the British Museum (2010,7081.4256), “The Rapacious Steward or Unfortunate Tenant,” a print by Haveill Gillbank (1803), showing a tenant farmer, with his family, being taken award by the estate’s steward (on horseback). A little late for our chronology, but so on point for today’s topic it was hard to let it pass.
It is also a useful reminder that tenancy wasn’t just an economic system, but a social one: it gave the Big Man and his agents tremendous power over the lives and livelihoods of the people who lives near the Big Man’s estates. For very Big Men, they might have several such estates and so be absentee landlords, in which case not only the Big Man, but his steward, might be figures of substantial power locally.
Land Holdings
Returning to where we left off last week, we found that our model families could comfortably exceed their subsistence and ‘respectability’ needs with the labor they had assuming they had enough land (and other capital) to employ all of their available farming labor. However, attentive readers will have noticed that the labor of these families could work a lot of land: 30.5 acres for The Smalls, 33.6 acres for The Middles and 56 acres for The Biggs. That may not seem large by the standards of modern commercial farms, but few peasants had anything like such large landholdings; even rich peasants rarely owned so much.
We might compare, for instance, the land allotments of Macedonian and Greek military settlers in the Hellenistic kingdoms (particularly Egypt, where our evidence is good). These settlers were remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings are trying to do is create a new class of Greco-Macedonian rentier-elites as a new ethnically defined military ruling-class which would support their new monarchies. In Egypt, where we can see most clearly, infantrymen generally received 25 or 30 arourai (17 or 20.4 acres), while cavalrymen, socially higher up still, generally received 100 arourai (68 acres). That infantry allotment is still anywhere from two thirds to less than half of what our model families can farm and yet was still large enough, as far as we can tell, to enable Ptolemaic Greco-Macedonian soldiers to live as rentier-elites, subsisting primarily if not entirely off of rents and the labor of others.
Alternately, considering late medieval Europe through the study of Saint-Thibery, out of 189 households in 1460 in the village just fifteen households are in the same neighborhood of landholdings as the Smalls’ 33.6 acres above (so roughly 55 setérée and up) only six as much as The Biggs (about 90 setérée and up). In short our assessment so far has assumed our families are extremely rich peasants. But of course they almost certainly are not!
Instead, as we noted in our first part, the average size of peasant landholdings was extremely small. Typical Roman landholdings were around 5-10 iugera (3.12-6.23 acres), in wheat-farming pre-Han northern China roughly 100 mu (4.764 acres), in Ptolemaic Egypt (for the indigenous, non-elite population) probably 5-10 aroura (3.4-6.8 acres) and so on. In Saint-Thibery in Languedoc, the average (mean) farm size was about 24 setérée (~14.5 acres) but the more useful median farm size was just five setérée (~3 acres); the average is obviously quite distorted by the handful of households with hundreds of setérée of land.
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