Peasants occupied the lower tiers of a society organized in hierarchical levels. In much of Europe, the monarch occupied the summit, celebrated as a semidivine being chosen by God to embody the state. In Catholic countries, the clergy constituted the first order of society, followed by the nobles. Christian prejudices against commerce and money meant that merchants could never lay claim to the highest honors. However, many prosperous mercantile families had bought their way into the nobility through service to the monarchy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and they constituted a second tier of nobles. Those lower on the social scale, the peasants and artisans who formed the vast majority of the population, were expected to show deference to their betters.
In addition to being rigidly hierarchical, European societies were patriarchal. Religious and secular law commanded a man’s wife, children, servants, and apprentices to respect and obey him. Fathers were entitled to use physical violence, imprisonment, and other forceful measures to impose their authority. These powers were balanced by expectations that a good father would care benevolently for his dependents.
In the seventeenth century the vast majority of Europeans lived in the countryside, as was the case in most parts of the world. The hub of the rural world was the small peasant village centered on a church and a manor.
In western Europe a small number of peasants owned enough land to feed themselves and possessed the livestock and plows necessary to work their land. Independent farmers were leaders of the peasant village. Below them were small landowners and tenant farmers who did not have enough land to be self-