There was nothing remotely pleasant about a peasant’s existence

If we are to remember peasants, we need a definition. Here is an imperfect but workable one. A peasant is a person working on the land in return for a bare subsistence. Patrick Joyce’s peasants are smallholders making just enough to feed their families and pay the rent in a normal year. They are people without status, tied to the land even if they are legally free. They occupy the lowest place in society, people with no ambitions and no future, who come into the light of history only when they revolt against their condition, as they frequently do. Historically, there have been peasants who did not fit this mould. There were rich peasants, like the well-fed revellers in a Brueghel painting. But Joyce’s image is a harsher one: the exhausted, calloused men and prematurely aged women painted two centuries later by Jean-François Millet.

From the earliest agricultural settlements, some 8,000 years ago, most of mankind have been peasants. Yet in barely a century they have all but vanished. As recently as 1950, only a fifth of the world’s population lived in cities. Today 60 per cent do. The figures for Europe are even starker. France was once the greatest peasant country on the continent, but today only 3 per cent of the population is employed in agriculture. In the former communist countries of eastern Europe the same transformative changes have been compressed into just three decades. Where have the peasants gone? To the cities, to industry and services.

Curiosity about this dying world is not new. In Ireland, the government-funded Folklore Commission, founded in 1935, spent 35 years collecting information and recording the spoken recollections of the last generations to follow the old way of life.