peasantry

Noun

peasantry (countable and uncountable, plural peasantries)

1. (historical) Impoverished rural farm workers, either as serfs, small freeholders or hired hands.
   • They distressed her. They were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks. But the older people, Yankees as...1920, Sinclair Lewis, chapter 3, in Main Street
2. Ignorant people of the lowest social status; bumpkins, rustics.
   • Such strange lingering echoes of the old demon worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent listener among the gray-haired peasantry; for the rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity.1861, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter I, in Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC
3. The condition of being a peasant; the position, rank, conduct, or quality of a peasant.
   • How much low pezantry would then be gleaned / From the true ſeede of honor? And how much honor, / Pickt from the chaffe and ruine of the times / To be new verniſh’d?c. 1596–1598 (date written), W[illiam] Shakespeare, The Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice. […] (First Quarto), [London]: […] J[ames] Roberts [for Thomas Heyes], published 1600, →OCLC, [Act...
   • He ſhall be armed at all peeces from the mid-thigh vpward with a faire Sword by his ſide, and his Captaines Colours or Enſigne in his hand, which Colours if they belong to a priuate Captaine ought to bee mixt equally of two ſeuerall colours, that is to ſay (according to the rules of Herauldry) of...1622, Francis Markham, “The Office of the Ensigne”, in Fiue Decades of Epistles of VVarre, London: […] Augustine Matthewes, page 74