[oxfeed65261]

Bret Devereaux, an historian blogger, has a long, detailed look at the economics of premodern peasant farmers and their households, called Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, starting at https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...

It begins:

“This is the first post in a series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%. Yet when we talk about these periods, we are often focused on aristocrats, priests, knights, warriors, kings and literate bureaucrats, the sort of folks who write to us or on smiths, masons and artists, the sort of folk whose work sometimes survives for us to see. But this series is going to be about what life was like for the great majority of people who lived in small farming households.”

[joha4270]

All of Mr. Devereaux's work is wonderful including the series you linked, but I think that one its overly focused on the household. I think his two part series on "Lonely Cities"[1][2] is a lot better at giving you a feeling for a city. It is both less in depth and in that one he spends half his time complaining about how Hollywood gets it wrong, so of course YMMV.

[1]:https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-pa... [2]:https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-c...

[HPsquared]

"Peasant Simulator" could be a fun type of game.

You could make it as a mod to CK3. Instead of a royal household, you manage a peasant one.

Most of the same mechanics of personnel and resource management, decisions and succession still apply.

[wishfish]

Medieval Dynasty attempts to do that. Despite having the word "dynasty" in its title, it's peasant centered. Early game is about building a house and trying to survive. Later game is building a village, recruiting people, assigning jobs to them, and essentially being the mayor. In many respects, it's a first-person village builder.

The "Dynasty" part comes from being able to have children and pass the village along to them if you play long enough. But everyone in game is a peasant of some sort. Nobility is mentioned but never directly visible.

I wouldn't call the game accurate exactly. But it is fun. I especially enjoyed having a ground-level view instead of the birds-eye view of most city builders.

[otabdeveloper4]

> discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families

I find the idea that every pre-modern peasant in every society had the same basic contours of life extremely silly.

Maybe he means British or French peasants? That's what people usually mean by "peasants".

Even within Europe the very basic ideas on when and how you marry and how you treat land ownership were wildly different.

[gherkinnn]

> What we can do, however is uncover the lives of these peasant households through modeling.

> So the models we’re going to set up are going to be most applicable in that space: towards the end of antiquity in the Mediterranean.

> I’ll try to be clear as we move what elements of the model are which are more broadly universal and which are very context sensitive

The author addresses this in the first paragraphs before getting in to the meat of it.

[curtisblaine]

Sometimes you just need to read the sources that were linked to you:

> So the models we’re going to set up are going to be most applicable in that space: towards the end of antiquity in the Mediterranean. They’ll also be pretty applicable to the European/Mediterranean Middle Ages and some parts – particularly mortality patterns – are going to apply universally to all pre-modern agrarian societies. I’ll try to be clear as we move what elements of the model are which are more broadly universal and which are very context sensitive (meaning they differ place-to-place or period-to-period) and to the degree I can say, how they vary. But our ‘anchor point’ is going to be the Romans, operating in the (broadly defined) iron age, at the tail end of antiquity.

https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...

[nottorp]

> Maybe he means British or French peasants?

He's a professional historian who ... unthinkable i know ... cites his sources in every article.

[caminanteblanco]

He mentions in the post that his focus is on Roman history, and that his discussion on peasants will be most applicable to the late Mediterranean antiquity