peasantry

noun

1. (countable, historical, uncountable)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 well as Norwegians, Germans, Finns, Canucks, had settled into submission to poverty. They were peasants, she groaned.”

2. (countable, uncountable)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.”

3. (countable, uncountable)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?”

   “Whoever would appear at the Diet, muſt previouſly become a country-man, or aſſume the peaſantry, and alſo ſue for it with the laudable Land-ſtates and obtain it at the Land-diet.”

   “For certainly Sir I am ſo charitable to believe it was your Paſſion that impoſed upon your Underſtanding; elſe as a Gentleman you could have never deſcended to ſuch peaſantry of Language, eſpecially againſt ſuch a Perſon, to whom (had he never been your Prince) no Law enjoyns (whatſoever his Offences were) the puniſhment of Ribaldry.”

   “Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished ’Scutcheon that hung upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, Blakesmoor! have I in childhood so oft stood poring upon thy mystic characters—thy emblematic supporters, with their prophetic “Resurgam”—till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself Very Gentility?”