Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe

Abstract

Marxist and free-market economists and historians have tended to agree in regarding the peasantry as an obstacle to progress, hence doomed to vanish. Rediscovery of the indirect resistance (as opposed to insurrection) has revised this tendency to underestimate the resourcefulness of peasants. In view of this more favorable estimate of peasant resistance, the article examines peasant revolts from the fourteenth to early-sixteenth centuries. The best-known of these is the German Peasants’ War of 1525, a failure that had permanent effects on the nature of the Lutheran Reform and the internal politics of the Empire. Other revolts were rather more successful. The peasants’ uprising in Catalonia (1462-1486) led to the abolition of serfdom as did the English Rising of 1381 which was put down but which marked the beginning of a precipitous decline of servitude. Such revolts should not be seen as spasmodic manifestations of despair but rather as perceived opportunities that went beyond the everyday means of peasant evasion of the seigneurial system. The ideological context of these insurrections is more sophisticated than normally thought. Peasant were not trapped in a mentality that was closed off from all elite influence. An investigation into the nature and formulation of their grievances shows an ability to appropriate notions of Christian equality and human liberty that were widely shared and argued over by the higher order of society.