noun

• Smallholders and agricultural labourers of low social status (chiefly in historical use or with reference to subsistence farming in poorer countries)

  ‘the upper class exploited the peasantry’

  More example sentences

  • ‘What is your program for the improvement of the lot of the peasantry?’
  • ‘The zombies' appearance, dressed in ragged brown robes, suggests a link with medieval peasantry.’
  • ‘Family homes forsaken at gunpoint were promptly occupied by the peasantry, who deny all knowledge of past owners.’
  • ‘Instead of standing up for the landless peasantry, the veterans spent most of the pre-election period frightening the life out of them.’
  • ‘The small peasantry sells or exchanges over ten per cent of their labour expended in agriculture.’
  • ‘Sociologically, the peasantry remained by far its largest class: 45 per cent of the population.’
  • ‘For the peasantry in particular, the periods of English occupation must have been horrific.’
  • ‘The whole leadership was devoted to this war on the peasantry.’
  • ‘His abhorrence for these brands of nationalism can be extrapolated from his attitude toward the peasantry.’
  • ‘Nearly all of the peasantry was stuck in a serfdom that offered few ways out.’