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Peasant life in sixteenth-century France
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The Return of Martin Guerre, written by Natalie Zemon Davis, is the tale of a court case that takes place in sixteenth century France. Martin Guerre is a peasant who deserted his wife and family for many years. While Martin Guerre is gone, a man named Arnaud du Tilh arrives at Martin’s village and claims to be Martin Guerre. Bertrande, who is Guerre’s wife, Guerre’s sisters, and many of the villagers, accepts the imposter. After almost three years of being happily married, Bertrande takes the fraud to court under pressure of Pierre Guerre, her stepfather and Guerre’s brother. Arnaud du Tilh is almost declared innocent, but the real Martin Guerre appears in the courthouse. Throughout this tale, many factors of the peasant life are highlighted. The author gives a very effective and detailed insight to a peasant’s life during the time of Martin Guerre. Davis does a successful job of portraying the peasant lifestyle in sixteenth century France by accentuating the social, cultural, and judicial factors of everyday peasant life. Davis gives various examples of the social norms that peasants lived under during the sixteenth century. When Sanxi, Guerre’s father, and his family decided to leave their village, Davis states that the majority of men who leave their village do so because they “were usually not heir to their family’s property, as was Sanxi Daguerre, but younger brothers who could not or would not remain in the ancestral household” (Davis 6). This highlights the idea that being the heir to the family’s inheritance is a great indicator of how one’s life as a peasant would carry on. It is very likely that if one is the heir, then the individual shall stay at their property and assume the role as head of the household once the “s... ... middle of paper ... ... insight into how the peasant judicial system attempted to benefit the peasants but was mostly filled with inadequacies. Davis addresses various important factors in a peasant’s life. She highlights many components of peasant society, including their social classes and how their society values property in different ways. Davis also includes the peasants’ culture. She elaborates on the importance of children and the consequences of not being able to produce children. She also explains typical marriage procedures and customs. Lastly, Davis talks about some of the laws and common uses of the judicial system by peasants. By incorporating these factors into her book Davis is successful at recreating life for peasants in France during the sixteenth century. Works Cited Davis, Natalie Zemon. The return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.
The Return of Martin Guerre written by Natalie Davis gives the audience a rare glimpse into the world of peasant life in sixteenth century France. It also allows a modern day audience a chance to examine and to compare their own identities and questions of self. What makes the story so interesting to modern day viewers and readers is how relevant the story and the people in it are to our own times. This story is about a history of everyday people rather than royalty and generals, history's usual subjects.
Maintaining feudal conditions through violence and intimidation, the army holds the populace in a constant state of fear. Guaranteeing that the peasants stay ill and in need furthers the necessity that they work to stay alive, but prevents them from doing so. This is the paradox of the poor worker, but one the army does not see. The army blindly kills anyone who tries to help the peasants, murdering all the doctors and priests that enter the villages. They do so to keep the peasants in need and in ignorance, to prevent them from learning another way of life. Lacking knowledge of the outside world ensures that the peasants will remain in the plantations, because fear of the unknown is stronger than fear of the known. Acting as feudal knights, the army forces people into the feudal plantation relationship using fear and intimidation.
In the social arena there is always a central powerful family, or first family that everyone in the community aspires to be, or in more recent term “keeping up with the Jones”, “or the one with swag”. The title, position and authority was so entrenched in their social community, that it came down to even choosing one’s mate through arranged marriages. We see in Moliere’s Tartuffe, that authoritative power was as precious as gold, in the realms or patriarchal power that was prevalent in the 17th Century, political and economic power, and also religious power (in which Oregon) wanted association
The importance and job of each class fail to function optimally. The castles were rooted economically in the countryside which was intimately connected with the villagers. These villagers were the “social and economic units of rural Europe” (147) which illustrates the importance of the various classes in medieval Europe. Undermining the lower social classes will cause political and social upheaval as they collectively dominate the economic force in the feudal system. Few individual commoners mask the
After years of abandonment, an absent man presumed to be Martin Guerre appeared in front of a woman who longed for a strong love and different husband. An “obstinate and honorable” woman could no...
The life of the peasant is a series of ritual occasions, planting and harvesting, being born, coming of age, begetting, dying. . . . All are one family, interrelated if not in this generation, in the last or the next. All give unquestioned obedience to the great mother goddess, the earth mother, who can easily be made to wear a Christian
Through the Middle Ages, society was divided into three social classes: the clergy, the nobles, and the peasants. However, as people entered into the Renaissance, these classes changed. The nobles during these times started to lose a lot of income, however, the members of the older nobility kept their lands and titles. On into the Renaissance, the nobles came back to dominate society and w...
Changes for land holding came about after the Revolution and made a big impact within families. Primogeniture is a term that means the inheritance of real property. This law required for all land to be pa...
The development of social classes in medieval England affected life for the people in many positive ways. It served as a means of organization to base their daily lives off of, and also gave the peasants and trade classes protection from the rulers and the clergy class in return for their labor and allegiance (“Quizlet”). Life in the Middle Ages was based on the framework of social classes so they could flourish socially and economically.
The French Revolution brought about change in the view of family from a political stance. In late medieval Europe to early modern Europe, there had been a social hierarchy based upon family structure; “the king had been the head of a social body held together by bonds of deference; peasants deferred to their landlords…wives to their husbands, and children to their parents. Authority in the state was explicitly modeled on authority in the family” (Hunt, pg. 3).
The upper class men had all the wealth in the world at the tips of their fingers while the lower classes didn’t have two pennies to rub together. “… The rich should share with the poor, especially those rich persons who had acquired their property from trade or had otherwise won it from the poor.” (#8) The favoritism is eye-catching, it says that the nobles had won the land from the peasants but stereotypically upper classes have had the land in their family for generations. The trade among the people was unfair to the farmhands. The farmhands fashioned the land and “they were supposed to be brothers with one another” (#8) they should have the right to property and not have to just work it for the lords. On the contrary the upper class “purchased this right for a considerable sum of money… [if the peasants want to be released from their duties to us, nobles, then] the peasants shall pay us a reasonable amount of money.” (#4) Until the sharecroppers started attacking the nobles they “looked on, unaware that misfortune was creeping up on [the peasants]” (#11) Instead of the peasants adopting and modifying their way of life they challenged the nobles to a war and lost. A total amount of the souls that were consumed by the sinful acts of the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants was 100,000.
Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society Volume 1 – The Growth of Ties and Dependence. Translated by L.A. Manyon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
When the aristocrats had all of the power, they were bloodthirsty. They would "sentence a youth to death" for not kneeling to monks. This was a very bad time and this seems extremely evil. It seems as if the peasants were good, yet when the tables turned they acted the exact same way as the aristocrats. The peasants had "eleven hundred defenseless prisoners killed just because they could."
As discussed in class, Peter’s reforms focused on modernizing the nobility’s habits by forcing them to adopt western ideas, culture, and habits. Peter also sought to reorganize the state’s bureaucracy into specialized colleges. He also sought to staff the bureaucracy with professionals by implementing a table of ranks, which rewarded merit, instead of ancestry (Week 3 PowerPoint, slide 21 and lecture). The majority of Peter’s reforms focused on modernizing the state itself, not society as a whole. As a result, feudalism remained in place until the emancipation of serfs in 1861. This is where Peter’s reforms differed from Alexander’s, which were primarily social. Alexander’s emancipation of the peasantry not only sought to free peasants, it also sought to provide them with services and reforms that have long been denied to them, through the local assemblies or Zemtsvos. The Zemtsvos, according to Orlando Figes in Natasha’s Dance, “founded schools and hospitals; provided veterinary and agronomic services for the peasantry; built new roads and bridges; invested in local trades and industries; financed insurance schemes and rural credit” (Figes, pg 226). The Zemtsvo’s focus on rural development is a clear attempt by the government not only to spread its presence to the countryside, but also to provide the peasants with the public goods and services they lacked.
George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy saga Game of Thrones transcends the traditional boundaries of the fantasy genre, representing the harsh reality of class exploitation in feudalism and its dichotomous social structure: high birth (nobility) and low birth (peasant). Throughout the series, the interpersonal strife of the noble houses dictates the lives of the peasants. Family is the principle institution through which power is acquired, sustained, and imposed on others. The conflict and subterfuge that occurs in the interest of political gain between houses in this feudalistic society sows the seeds of its own destruction; as a result of war, thousands die in battle, countless villages are pillaged and raided, and the aristocracy falls into