xpenses and responsibilities included taxes, tithes to the church, and feeding the family. By the end of the 18th century millions of these people in poverty went searching for a better life, but found themselves in a life of smugglers, highwaymen, pickpockets, and prostitutes (26). Along with poverty came a problem for virtually all peasants: diet. In Merry E. Wiesner’s “A Statistical view of European Rural Life 1600-1800” it shows that the common peasants diet included bread, cheese, and butter. Because of strict laws forbidding hunting, meat was rarely part of their diet, which led them to be malnourished, since they did not meet the daily requirements in all of the food groups needed for a healthy person, which constitutes 2,500 calories to function normally. Also a part of the peasants diets was alcohol, as stated in Jerome Blum’s “The Peasants”, in large amounts of consumption by men, women, and often children (58). According to Document 4 of Wiesner’s study, the salary of the typical agricultural worker would remain fairly consistent, but the problem peasants faced was that food prices kept rising, therefore they could not afford to purchase enough, if any, food (106). Primitive techniques of farming kept the diet below standards by producing a negative grain yield. At a ratio of about five to one farmers could not raise enough grain to feed large numbers of animals, and they did not have enough livestock to produce the manure to fertilize the fields to increase the yield (Darnton 25). The diet of the peasant caused them to be unhealthy and weak, in addition to being more susceptible to disease.With poverty and a malnourished society a large number of mortality rates became abundant. The life expectancy of the common peasant was around forty-five years of age. About forty-five percent of the French born men in the eighteenth century reached death before the age of ten and few ...
