SC - Re: Meats/spices in MA

[Jenne Heise]

> So long as we are making assumptions on what the poorest folk did with cash 
> when they had it, it seems to me that a 'proseperous peasant' would be 
> inclined to buy a bit more land or animals, to purchase some practical item 
> like tools, shoes or cloth, to add or improve their buildings, to pay a 
> debt, dower a daughter or benefit a son, or give to the church.  Certainly 
> if near enough a town to be able to buy spice they could by some small 
> amount some year or another. There is always the possibility that the 
> someone among the poorest class of people aquired spice for their own use in 
> some way, but that doesn't mean that, as a rule, peasants had spices.

Um, I think you are assuming that having enough money to buy a pennyworth
of pepper means you ahve enough money to do any of the above things.
 
> I think the difference in opinion comes from this:  At what point does  a 
> dirt grubbing peasant with nothing but a few strips of field and a hut cross 
> the line to small landowner?  Not nobility or even gentry, but part of the 
> beginnings of the middle class, along with merchants and craftsmen. 

Um. I think the difficulty is that people assume that if someone is a
peasant they have 'nothing but a few strips of field and a hut', other
words, peasants are poor by definition. You have completely left out what
became the 'working class'. In many times and places, the land was
primarily worked by tenant farmers, who were neither merchants nor
craftsmen, therefore peasants. However, depending on how well the crops on
your land did, and how much land you managed to rent (and whether you had
rent), you could do enough in a year to be able to buy a few pretties at
the fair after harvest.

Peasant, despite our modern conditioning, doesn't mean 'starving poor
person' or even 'starving serf'. It means, according to the OED, " One who
lives in the country and works on the land, either as a small farmer or as
a labourer; spec. one who relies for his subsistence mainly on the produce
of his own labour and that of his household, and forms part of a larger
culture and society in which he is subject to the political control of
outside groups; also, loosely, a rural labourer."

- -- 
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
"I do my job. I refuse to be responsible for other people's managerial 
hallucinations." -- Lady Jemina Starker