“Nothing can make you feel more like a peasant,” my late wife said one October morning as we trolled for tubers, “than digging potatoes.”

She wasn’t complaining. We both loved gardening, and you can’t beat potatoes that still smell earthy when you scrub them for cooking. But digging, or “picking” as some say, potatoes is hard work, often in mid-autumn when ground and air temperatures are falling.

The word “peasant” is not much used in this country, though the fact of peasantry flows widely down through history. But if you substitute the term “small farmer” for “peasant,” you’re talking pretty much about the same people. And here in Maine, farmers have been in the news lately, especially the falling number of dairy farmers.

According to Spectrum News, the number of commercial dairy farms in Maine has fallen to 145 from 674 in 1990. That’s 78%. But milk production has fallen only 8% in that time. To localize it, in 1992 New Sharon, where I live, had 11 dairy farms. Today we have two, and both have switched to organic production to get a price for their milk high enough to cover expenses.

Part of the fall in milk price is the market. Folks are drinking drink less milk. Another part is production costs rising faster than sales.

The question as dairy farmers “go out,” as we say, is “Where do the farmers go? What do they do now?” The answer is more than simply, “They get jobs in town.”

Let’s get back to the word “peasant.” Patrick Joyce, a retired history professor at the University of Manchester in England, has written “Remembering Peasants,” a social history.

He comes honestly to the study. His forebears were peasants in the west of Ireland, though his family followed hundreds of thousands of other Irish peasants to England before he was born.

Any historian’s job is to find common patterns as well as to make distinctions. Joyce does that. He finds peasants everywhere have much in common but also finds peasants of each nationality unique. Potato-dependent Irish peasants differ greatly from animal-dependent Polish peasants.

Here’s the common pattern Joyce found. Land lies at the core of peasantry — we Americans might say “rural life” — no matter who owns the land the family works. Beyond that, peasantry is a status often born into, and it revolves around the house, which often sits in mid-farm.

The house being in mid-farm may help isolate rural folk. In “Fiddler on the Roof,” you probably noticed that many of the peasants lived in town and walked out to the farm every day. But they were neighbors each evening in the village. Not so those living on the land they farmed.

Joyce also notes that rural folk tend to live and work in silence. Contrarily, he writes, peasants live in an oral, not written, culture. Those who disdain country folks often note that not being readers by nature makes rural people stupid. At the same time, Joyce calls us “philosophers of the earth,” and “wise, instinctive, natural as well as elemental.”

Rural life was harsh, he writes, but peasants knew what was best for them and had “developed appropriate and sophisticated methods to handle want and ensure survival.”

To my surprise, peasant cultures didn’t die out as early in the rest of the world as in the United States, Canada and England. Joyce cites countries in which the small farmer (peasant) still accounted for more than 10% of the population right up to the 21st century.

Here’s where I take it Joyce’s lessons lead us. Rural folks, isolated and silent, lost their link to the land, whether the land was taken from them or the rent (or crop share) became too steep. “Get big or get out,” the federal government’s farm policy, pushed millions off the land.

Even before that, the returns from small farming often dwindled below subsistence, so mom or pop (or both) had to take paying work in town. Up here, we call that “working out.”

With the tie to the land snipped, rural folk took their silent life to the cities or often, studies have shown, directly to the suburbs. But moving to town or suburb didn’t always make a new link. It left many dangling in a louder, busier world that seemed often to ignore them.

The U.S. saw a “great migration” when about 6 million Black folks between 1910 and 1970 moved north after losing their land, often via collusion between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and rich white landowners in the South. A third moved between the world wars.

After World War II, a second migration began as rural white folks headed to the cities and suburbs, many aided by the G.I. Bill that made school and housing affordable for veterans. When we lived in Warren, Ohio, the local gag was that in West Virginia the “Three Rs” were “Readin,’ Writin’ and Route 11,” the road north to the auto plants of Detroit, Toledo, Dayton and Warren.

All this displacement from a culture that moved slowly yet surely to a faster pace had to be both disrupting and further isolating. From a life more or less predictable on the farm, to a life of three or four or five “careers” always at the beck and call of someone else.

And life in the suburbs was no less isolated. We lived in suburbs in Quebec and in Ohio and didn’t know families three lots away.

After generations on the farm, who wouldn’t feel aggrieved when forced to move to town?

Patrick Joyce has helped Bob Neal understand the “cut-off” sense many people feel, especially those from families long settled into a predicable way of life. And he hasn’t finished the book yet. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.

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