Short answers, pulled from the story.
Eighty-five percent of all people in the Middle Ages were peasants. These agricultural laborers formed the bedrock of pre-industrial society and worked the land that sustained kings, nobles, and clergy alike.
The Black Death reduced the population of medieval Europe and made labor scarce, allowing peasants to demand wages and alternative forms of compensation. This shift in power dynamics led to the development of widespread literacy and the enormous social changes of the Enlightenment.
The monasteries of Bavaria, which controlled 56 percent of the land, were broken up by the government and sold off around 1803. This event occurred while peasants in Germany continued to center their lives in the village well into the 19th century.
Historian Eugen Weber traced the modernization of French villages, arguing that rural France went from backward and isolated to modern and possessing a sense of French nationhood during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He emphasized the roles of railroads, republican schools, and universal military conscription in creating this national identity.
In the 19th century, Japanese intellectuals reinvented the Chinese terms fengjian for feudalism and nongmin for farming people, creating a negative image of Chinese farmers by making a class distinction where one had not previously existed. Anthropologist Myron Cohen considers these terms to be neologisms that represented a cultural and political invention.
While most Campesinos before the 20th century were in equivalent status to peasants, usually not owning land and making payments to landlords under the hacienda system, most Latin American countries saw one or more extensive land reforms in the 20th century. Hence, many Campesinos in Latin America today are closer to smallholders who own their land and do not pay rent to a landlord.