The period from 1590 to 1720 witnessed significant reshufflings of the social order. Peasants experienced these changes most brutally, an important fact given that they constituted the vast majority of seventeenth-century Europe's population, fewer than two-thirds of the total only in the Dutch Republic, at least three-fourths in most other regions. This group experienced a dramatic change in its relations to the most basic means of production, the land itself, essentially amounting to a process of expropriation. The process varied significantly from one region to another because medieval landowning patterns themselves varied. In England, most land belonged to nobles and gentry, but peasants enjoyed relatively secure long-term leases; in France and Germany peasants had direct owner ship of most land, subject to loose feudal overlordship. Whatever the initial arrangements, large landowners everywhere took much more direct control of the land during the early modern period, with the crucial change coming at its outset, between about 1570 and 1630. Other changes accompanied and magnified these changes in ownership. Real wages diminished, partly as a result of sixteenth-century population growth, and agricultural leases became more expensive; in central and eastern Europe working conditions deteriorated, with landowners exercising increasing control over peasants' movements and requiring of them several days of unpaid labor each week. The mid-sixteenth-century countryside had been dominated by nearly independent peasants, able more or less to survive from the produce of their own land. By 1650 most regions were dominated instead by large landowners and their economic allies, the large-scale tenant farmers who managed the actual business of farming and marketing. Most peasants had become essentially wage laborers, owning cottages and small amounts of land, but needing to work for others in order to survive.

Both the well-to-do farm managers and the agricultural laborers had been forcibly inserted into a market economy, with enormous attendant insecurities. The laborers now had to purchase their food on the open market and sell their labor, while the large tenant farmers had to market their produce and assemble the cash needed to pay rents and taxes. Indeed, the expropriation of the peasantry tended to advance fastest in regions that were especially open to commercial currents. These facts produced a seeming paradox in some regions of Europe. Precisely where capitalist and modernizing influences were strongest, around cities and in areas (such as east-Elbian Germany) especially open to international trade, peasants were most vulnerable to the era's extraeconomic shocks, notably to its harvest failures. During the seventeenth century starvation was more common in the most advanced regions of France, those nearest Paris, than in regions of poorer land and more backward agricultural technique. . .

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