Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Since the end of the Second World War, Europe's peasants have all but disappeared.

In his new book, Remembering Peasants,

the social historian Patrick Joyce examines exactly what peasant life was like in Europe,

especially in Poland, Italy and Ireland, over the last couple of centuries.

Speaking with David Musgrove, in today's episode, Patrick takes us back to this lost world.

So I'm delighted today to be joined by Professor Patrick Joyce, whose new book, Remembering Peasants, A Personal History of a

Vanished World, is published now. There's quite a lot in that title, Patrick. So the first thing

in the title of the book is Pe peasants. Can you help us by

trying to define what you mean by a peasant? Okay, I'll have a go. There's a kind of narrow

definition, I suppose, which would be those who cultivate the land in order to create for themselves a subsistence, namely enough to live on and for

the family to prosper. That kind of subsistence farming is based on the family. So it's a family

economy, a family subsistence economy in the narrow sense of definition.

Now, in actual fact, the range of experiences of peasants in that condition alone is very

complicated. So some own the land, some rent the land, and those who rent the land have such

a credible variety of tenures

that take a book to explain the whole range of ten years and they're subject to different

regulations laws and so on so even within the kind of narrow definition is quite wide but then

you have a broader definition which I kind of go for in the

book really, which is, I guess, peasant society more, a society in which that kind of figure

is pretty much near the centre. We're not talking about what happened in England so much,

which was a society of big landowners, big farmers, and landless labourers.

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