Being a peasant sucks. It sucked then and it sucks now. Trapped, in an infernal machine designed to keep you anchored within 7 kilometers of the room in which you were born.
You live in the same crumbling leaking house that half your extended family has lived in for over a century, marry who you are told to marry, learn only what the local preacher tells you to learn-- and nothing else.
My mother's side of the family was peasants of the dying 50s-60s variety who escaped in the last wave of abandonments. The kind whose ancient family estates are now AirBnBs in the Empty Diagonal of France where tourists can cosplay as grape stompers or characters in a French New Wave film where some tortured artist flees to the countryside and ends up seducing and roughly stealing the virginity of his cousin by reading her poetry on a blanket in the middle of a field before an art thief swindler shoots him on the veranda for double-crossing him in a counterfeiting job gone wrong.
They lived long enough to tell me what it was really like.