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Anyone not born into an aristocratic noble family was classed as non-noble or peasant. This covers a huge range of people, some of whom were more wealthy than the nobles.

So the wife of a mercer (merchant) would be classed as a peasant woman, but she could be extremely wealthy, rule a large household with servants and wear expensive clothes.

The wife of a freeman would be somewhere in the middle of the peasant class, leading a reasonably comfortable if hard-working life.

The wife of a lowly shepherd, ploughman, cottar or bordar was also a peasant woman, dressed in the cheapest burrell (woollen cloth often dyed brown or grey) with little or no money and no servants. She got up at sunrise and went to bed at sunset, the hours in between filled with endless, backbreaking, hard, manual work.

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13y ago

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