356 Ch. 10 • Eighteenth-Century Economic And Social Change

Triumphant merchants at table. Note that one of the merchants is smoking tobacco,

a new fad. Note also the aristocratic wig on the dog on the right.

Peasants

In 1787, the peripatetic Englishman Arthur Young was traveling in Cham­

pagne in northern France when he encountered a peasant woman who

looked to be about sixty or seventy years of age. To his astonishment, she

gave her age as twenty-eight, a mother of seven children who survived by

virtue of “a morsel of land, one cow and a poor little horse.” Each year her

husband owed 42 pounds of wheat to one noble, and 168 pounds of oats,

one chicken, and a cash payment to another noble. He also owed taxes to

the state. The woman, old before her time, stated simply that the “taxes

and seigneurial obligations” were a crushing burden, one that seemed to

be getting worse.

Peasants still formed the vast majority of the population on the continent:

from about 75 percent (Prussia and France) to more than 90 percent (Rus­

sia). Peasants were the source of the wealth that sustained the incomes of

crown, nobility, and church. Peasants stood at the bottom of society, con­

demned as “a hybrid between animal and human” in the words of a Bavarian

official. An upper-class Moldavian called peasants “strangers to any disci­

pline, order, economy or cleanliness... thoroughly lazy, mendacious...

people who are accustomed to do the little work that they do only under

invectives or blows.” Such cruel images were particularly prevalent in