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History has never halted for want of peasants. But crucial as they may have been to Europe's agricultural well-being, they weren't exactly well loved by nobility. Barbara Tuchman, in A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous Fourteenth Century, tells us they were considered

aggressive, insolent, greedy, sullen, suspicious, tricky, unshaved, unwashed, ugly, stupid and credulous... in satiric tales it was said the [peasant's] soul would find no place in Paradise or anywhere else because the demons refused to carry [him] due to the foul smell.
Unfortunately for our intrepid subsistence workers, literature of the time is similarly uncharitable. A contemporary author laments

... by what right does a [peasant] eat beef? ...Rather let them eat thistles and briars, thorns and straw and hay on Sunday and peapods on weekdays... they should chew grass on the heath with the horned cattle and go naked on all fours.

The Sacking of Grammont, from the Chronicles
Not a pleasing prospect, but we......

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Approximate Word Count: 1084
Approximate Pages: 5 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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